Spoilers

I finished up the remaining five episodes of the new animated Amazon Prime series, Batman: Caped Crusader, and don’t listen to the angry mob of online haters, this was great.

You get a few race and gender swaps and people get angry. That is sad. These 10 episodes are still really great no matter how ‘woke’ you claim it is.

We get several villains that we do not usually get in the first stretch of Batman. There was no Riddler. No Joker (until the very final scene). No Killer Croc. No Bane. No Scarecrow.

Instead, we got Gentleman Ghost and a couple of characters who I did not recognize. One was Onomatopoeia and the other was Wednesday Adams. Um… actually, it was a character named Nocturne, who I had never heard of before, but she sure looked like Wednesday Adams.

Then the season long running storyline with Harvey Dent led to the acid-in-the-face origin of Two-Face, but the end of the two episode season finale led to a surprising and tragic end for Harvey Dent. I liked the way that storyline wrapped up. It was more than just what we usually expect from a Two-Face story.

Marc Bernardin wrote the Gentleman Ghost episode. Bernardin who co-hosts the podcast Fatman Beyond with Kevin Smith has done a lot of television writing over the years, including animation. The Gentleman Ghost episode was excellent and one of the better ones of the season.

While this does not reach the level of Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: Caped Crusader was a lot of fun and seemed to get better with each episode. I look forward to seeing the next season.

Spoilers

I jumped into the new season of Batman: Caped Crusader after starting with episode one last night. This morning I went through the first half of the new season on Amazon Prime. So far, I have liked this more with every episode.

Batman is well done. He feels as if he is new to the world of crime fighting and the responses to him from the Gotham PD and the people of the city reflect that. The only nitpick I have on the character of the Batman is when he calls Alfred, “Pennyworth.” I know that is his last name, but it feels too distant for Batman to call his longtime butler and mentor by his surname. That’s a minor gripe, but I do notice it every time he has said it so far.

The show has taken its own takes on Batman’s rogue’s gallery so far, making some interesting changes. Of course, the female Penguin must have shaken some tailfeathers of the internet, as did the changing of skin color for Jim and Barbara Gordon). Neither of those changes meant anything to me as none of those changes made any real differences to the characters.

Other villains used in episodes two-five included:

Clayface. He was a top notch actor whose face prevented him from getting the roles he wanted and he underwent a experimental treatment which turned his skin into the malleable skin we know. I will admit not knowing as much about Clayface as some of the other Bat-villains, but I did like the use of the actor in the role. It made sense to me.

Catwoman. Selina Kyle felt as if she were the least adjusted villain of the series so far. She was a down-on-her-luck high society woman who took to crime to make her money. Her father had been convicted of some kind of tax evasion leaving her penniless. The Batman-Catwoman chemistry was still there and Selina’s outfit was very comic accurate.

Firebug. Another character that I do not know as well as some other Bat-villains, and he was used as bait by Bullock and Flass, both crooked cops, to try and capture the Batman. Bullock shooting Firebug who then fell to his death out the window to keep Firebug from talking really set the crooked cop up as one of the big bads of the series.

Harley Quinn. Harley was really adjusted quite a bit, taking her origin with the Joker out of the picture and playing her as a therapist who was brainwashing her patients into doing her bidding. Her bidding all had a positive outcome, like having people donate to charity or so on. She was not the crazy Harley that we have been used to over the years. She id definitely different than the Harley Quinn on the HBO Max series or in the DC movies. That is not a bad thing. I liked the new look at this character, but she did do the old “falling to her death” trope that we have seen in so many Disney movies. No way Harley is dead.

One of my favorite scenes was in the Harley Quinn episode as we saw one of her patients in the road dressed up like King Tut. King Tut was a villain on the Batman TV show from the sixties played by Victor Buono. This animated version was not a villain, but a victim of Harley Quinn but it was still cool to see him.

Interestingly enough, there has been no sign of the Joker so far in the series. I am curious to see if that will continue as the show focuses in on other Bat-villains. Batman certainly has the number of villains to make this work.