There are a lot of restrictions when it comes to children’s media. Not only are networks very strict about what they allow to be put in their projects, but parents take it upon themselves to make sure the content their children are consuming is age-appropriate. Balancing so many rules and regulations can be quite tedious when one is trying to create something successful.
Showrunners and writers are forced to obsessively think through every scene they add, and even then, getting no feedback from angry parents is rare. Such limitations can be especially challenging when creating a superhero series, a genre that is well known for pushing the boundaries of what is appropriate for kids to watch.
On top of the different types of crimes, violence is almost mandatory in shows like these, which makes creating shows like Batman: The Animated Series very difficult.
Batman: The Animated Series and Its Taboos
Henry Gilroy, who famously wrote the iconic episode, Nothing to Fear, from Batman: The Animated Series, talked about how, when he was working on it, there were specific things that he was strictly told not to put into the Bruce Timm show. Although he was able to push on some things, there were some that they did not budge on.
Over time, he created a list of the same, which was full of nine things the animators and writers were never allowed to add to the series. However, they did manage to find some loopholes.
During an interview with /Film, Gilroy revealed that nine things could not make their way into the show, and they all had specific reasons behind them. Starting with the obvious ones; nudity, drugs, alcohol, and smoking were not allowed to make it into the animated show. These were followed by child endangerment and religion, which parents would naturally not be happy with their children seeing at that age.
Limitations and Long-Term Effects
It was the last three taboos that especially posed difficulty for an action show like Batman: The Animated Series: strangulation, guns, and breaking glass. The reason behind these was to make sure that children did not learn the wrong things from their favorite shows and try to implement them in their real lives, hurting someone. Breaking glass seemed to be one that the executives did not stray away from, not wanting children to try to fly out of a glass window just because Batman does it, a lot.
“Batman will hit a guy with such force, his face will go through a brick wall,” Gilroy told us. “They’ll go, ‘That’s fine, that’s okay.’ You can’t really replicate that. It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s brain damage because he put his face through a brick wall.'”
Instead, some common ground was found, and the settlements were almost as odd as the original demands. It would seem that the executives did not care how hard a character was thrown against what surface, as long as it was not glass. This meant that Batman could chuck a criminal at a brick wall with all of his force, and the episode would be greenlit for television.
“My most recent projects that I’ve done over the last few years, I’ve made a conscious decision not to use actual firearms in them,” Gilroy said. “I’ll use energy swords, or some kind of laser, or plasma beam weapons. We have so much gun violence, and it’s become this weird disease on our culture, I’m avoiding it.”
While Gilroy agreed that these requirements were quite bizarre, it was the gun rule that had a lasting effect on him. The loophole found around this rule was to make the guns look as unrealistic as possible and to not give children any ideas. This was a regulation that he ended up carrying for the rest of his career, not wanting to add another addition of gun violence in a world that had enough of it in real life.
