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SDCC 2019: Batman Beyond Getting HD Remaster

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batman beyond: the complete series

Did you buy Batman: The Animated Series when it finally came to Blu-Ray? You’re a good consumer, because it resulted in a remaster of Batman Beyond getting approved. How soon can we get out hands on it?

In 1998 a WB executive came to Bruce Timm with a request: he felt Batman: The Animated Series skewed too old in demographics, and he wanted a more youth-oriented spinoff with a “teenage Batman.” It could have gone badly, but Timm took a terribly off-key whim from his boss and spun gold out of it, creating Batman Beyond, a follow-up series that stands up to the original. Its characters endure to this day in their own DC Comics adaption.

It’s the future, and crime and corruption are once again rampant in Gotham. Bruce Wayne sits and sulks in his mansion, now a bitter old man. When young Terry McGinnis stumbles upon the Batcave, he has a means of getting revenge for the murder of his father, and takes up the mantle of Batman under the guidance of Wayne. 52 episodes would appear over the next three years, without any real ending — a resolution aired as an episode of Justice League Unlimited years later.

There is, unfortunately, an asterisk on this release: while most of the episodes were able to be fully restored from their 35mm negatives, eleven of them wound up damaged and could not be remastered properly. Those episodes are “Eyewitness,” “Final Cut,” “The Last Resort,” “Armory,” “Sneak Peek,” “The Eggbaby,” “Zeta,” “Plague,” “April Moon,” “Sentries of the Lost Cosmos,” and “Speak No Evil.” (Rats, there are some good ones in there.) In these cases, uprezzed standard-def versions had to be used instead, from as good a copy as they could find.

Batman Beyond: The Complete Series will be out October 15 digitally, October 29 on Blu-Ray.