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Alex Toth had a major gripe with Batman: The Animated Series, and Bruce Timm reveals he listened to it for Caped Crusader
Bruce Timm changed his Batman style after an Alex Toth critique - and once you see it, you'll never miss it.
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The '90s cartoon Batman: The Animated Series is considered a seminal part of the Dark Knight's ouvre, but one complaint by a legendary comic/cartoon artist stuck with co-creator Bruce Timm so much that now, 30 years later, he is fixing it.
As DC's new Batman: Caped Crusader series is streaming on Amazon's Prime Video, Timm (who also co-created this show) has revealed that the late Alex Toth has a biting criticism of Batman: TAS that hit on a signature part of the show - and the opening (as seen above).
"'Oh God, stop giving us those big closeups … I’m tired of you guys cutting to his face,'" Toth said about BTAS, according to Timm in an interview with Keyframe Magazine.
According to Keyframe, Toth explained that in his development work of an unproduced '70s animated series based on the Shadow, Toth always kept the title character at a distance from the audience. This insight - and critique - by Toth in the '90s stuck with Timm - so much so that he made it an actual rule the animators of Batman: Caped Crusader had to follow.
“So that became kind of an unwritten rule,” said Timm. “Actually, it wasn’t an unwritten rule, it was a rule. We told our board artists: don’t give us closeups of Batman.”
Batman: Caped Crusader is streaming now on Amazon's Prime Video.
Batman is the most well-known superhero in the world — surprisingly, given how much he loves hanging out in the dark. But between his comics, TV shows, movies, games, and more, DC's Dark Knight is the hero this city/country/world/universe needs, and we have all you need to enjoy him even more:
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