When word first came down that Warner Bros. executive producer Jean MacCurdy had proposed an animated Batman series, artist Bruce Timm jumped at the chance. "I was like on fire and I ran back to my cubicle after the meeting and drew a page of Batman drawings in a theoretically animation style. I brought them to show Jean and she loved them," said Timm. "She put me and Eric Radomski in charge of doing a little two-minute pilot film, so we banged the thing together in a couple of weeks. It kind of impressed everybody, and on the basis of that she asked us to produce the show." Radomski had painted brooding views of Gotham City on black backgrounds, an unusual approach that proved especially effective. Against these film-noir settings, Bruce Timm placed characters seemingly inspired by comics creators like Kane, Robinson, and Sprang, with a more modern touch of Frank Miller thrown in. Timm, however, reduced these influences to their essence. "One of the things I learned over the years working in animation is that every time we were doing an adventure cartoon, there was always the drive to make the cartoons look more like comic books, and it really worked against what animation does best. The more lines you have on a character, the harder it is to draw over and over. I knew that simplicity would be better," Timm said, especially since the animation would be farmed out to different studios overseas where control would be difficult.
Shortly after the series went into production, Alan Burnett was brought in to serve as senior story editor and co-producer. His judgement about what would work for the show proved invaluable, and he also wrote superb scripts that included the television debut of Two-Face in (naturally) two parts, climaxing with Two-Face's breakdown when the coin he flips to determine his actions is lost in a hail of similar silver pieces. One of Burnett's best decisions was hiring Paul Dini, a writer and story editor who provided outstanding scripts like the Mr. Freeze episode "Hearts of Ice"; Dini eventually became so important to the show that he was promoted to co-producer. A unique contribution of the writing staff was to set the show in a mixture of different eras that mirrored the stylistic synthesis of Timm's character drawings. "If it had been up to me I would have set it literally in 1939," said Bruce Timm. "but writers find it really hard to write stories without falling back on computer screens and things like that." So in the series modern technology coexisted with 1940s roadsters and guys in trench coats. These unique choices by writers and artists gave the show a strong personality, and Timm adds that "a relatively high budget" made fuller animation feasible. Other assets included Shirley Walker's atmospheric music and an impressive cast of celebrity voices supervised by Andrea Romano. Batman: The Animated Series was so good that the Fox network also ran it for months in prime time to attract an adult audience, and the show went on to win multiple Emmy awards.
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a feature film based on the cartoon series, was shown in theaters in 1993, but didn't really find its audience until it was released on video as originally intended. Directed by Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm from a story by Alan Burnett, it seems to have been conceived as an animated answer to Citizen Kane, with specific shots inspired by the Orson Welles classic and a story about loss and the passage of time presented in a complex flashback structure. Yet it was perhaps the lighter moments that worked best, particularly a twist on the time-tested use of giant props that showed Batman battling the Joker throughout a miniature city designed as an old World's Fair exhibit.
