b.t. said:
basically, yeah...
when BB was originally coming to a close, kids wb asked us if we had any ideas on how to do a more "kid-friendly" batman show...alan burnett and hilary bader worked up a (i kid you not) "batman on mars" pitch, which was basically just a continuation of BB...terry moves to a colony on a terraformed mars and has kid-friendly adventures there...i was really relieved when kwb showed no interest in it, as i just HATED the concept....
so glen and i were mulling it over and took it as a challenge: was there a way to give kwb EXACTLY the kind of show they wanted, but still make it something that was freaky enough to be fun in its own right? we thought, "okay, rather than doing something that's just a 'baby-step' away from our previous shows, still tied to our direct continuity, etc, what if we do something that's REALLY whacked, that takes place SO far in the future, it's barely related to what we've done before"....("plausible deniability" played a factor here too)...
"pokemon" was still super-hot at kwb, so we tried to combine elements of it and other "collect 'em all" anime shows ("cardcaptors", "digimon", etc) with traditional batman elements....we brought adam warren in to help develop it with us (he ended up doing most of the art for the pitch, too)...it took place hundreds of years from now, and revolved around the adventures of an all-new batman, robin and batgirl, all in their early teens....there was some kind of nano-disaster that re-wrote reality, re-creating the old bat-villain archetypes as nano-based monsters....the kids had a butler a.i. named "alpha-red" (that one was just so tacky, we HAD to do it) who also powered all their vehicles...kenner had been urging us for years to put a talking vehicle a la "knight rider" in one of our shows (they originally wanted us to put a "jor-el" voice chip in clark kent's sportscar in STAS, so he could converse with clark, brando-style), so the talking "alpha-red/batmobile" was a no-brainer....do i have to go on?
anyhow, kenner LOVED the whole pitch, wanted to get started on the toy-line "yesterday!", but kwb thought it was still too "traditional", it wasn't "out of the box" enough..."batman's still too re-active...does he have to fight crime?" i pointed out that he would be fighting MONSTERS, not criminals.... "what if, instead of three kids who fight monsters, what if the three kids COMPETE about who gets to BE batman?" after a long moment of stunned silence i pointed out that if batman's not protecting the weak from the bad guys, be they monsters or criminals or aliens or what-have-you, then fundamentally, it just isn't "batman" AT ALL.....they allowed that there was probably some truth to that, asked us to give the whole thing some more thought, and invited us to come back and re-pitch it then.....the next day, i called mike lazzo at cn, pitched jl, he said "hell yeah!" and that was the end of BATMANIME...
