“My one overriding desire was…”: Bruce Timm’s Only Rule for Batman Beyond May Have Saved Two DCAU Shows from Becoming Irrelevant

On the heels of Batman: The Animated Series, a new Dark Knight saga was born out of the pure desperation of a Warner Bros. studio executive. Now, Batman Beyond has become a classic in its own right, forfeiting not only the iconic origin story but also evolving beyond the limitations of what was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane in the technologically inept era of 1939.

However, creator Bruce Timm quickly realized the burden of undertaking such a task that entailed coming up with an irrefutable version of the legendary DC IP. He needed to be respectable enough to the Batman lore while also inventing a completely original story that didn’t sink his reputation and career for daring to do something that no one wanted, i.e. debut a futuristic cyberpunk Batman.

Out of this unwarranted and widely protested idea was born an initial draft modeled on the classic teenage superhero, Spider-Man. A story balancing school, crime fighting, and managing a love life then became the epicenter of the new Batman arc. And soon after, Terry McGinnis was born.

Batman Beyond Saves the Day for DC Animated Universe

In the latter half of the 1990s, Warner Bros. pulled the cord on Bruce Timm’s developing story, The New Batman Adventures. The studio’s demand for a teenage Dark Knight (most probably fueled by the popularity of Buffy and Dawson’s Creek) pushed Timm to the brink of desperation. He not only intended to save his work from being slashed but also wanted it to find a place in pop culture rather than be discarded in favor of a newer, flashier model.

In response to WB’s unsympathetic demands, Bruce Timm presented a skeletal idea for a teenage Dark Knight that would preserve the continuity of his already-existing DCAU shows and Batman lore while also delivering the studio’s needs. In an oral retelling of the day Batman Beyond was conceived, Timm revealed in an interview with IGN Inside Stories:

“My one overriding desire was I didn’t want to just throw all that [continuity] away. I didn’t want to throw that and Superman [The Animated Series] and BTAS out the window, so I said, “So if there was some way that we could come up with a teenage Batman show that was still in continuity, that’s still built off of the shows that we had already done, the only way really to do that is to go forward into the future and introduce a new character, a new Batman.”

The idea of a Batman set in the future would preserve the legacy of Bruce Wayne and it was quickly deemed as “the new generation of samurai passing his sword onto his protégé” and the fantasy of Terry McGinnis quickly became a reality.

After Timm’s embryonic idea for Batman Beyond was met with vehement approval, his gang of middle-aged comic writers and artists, led by Timm himself, joined heads in coming up with the best approach to establishing the new arc of a Batman set in 2039 guided by an aged Bruce Wayne himself. The story that was crafted from Bruce Timm’s act of utter desperation then not only saved the original lore of Batman but by preserving the continuity of DC Animated Universe helped keep Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series from becoming irrelevant.

Batman Beyond Birthed a New Dark Knight Legacy for DC

With mere months to fully form the idea of Terry McGinnis, develop the visuals, design a stylish Gotham, invent completely new villains, whip up a story worth telling, and finally get the production on track, Bruce Timm and the gang delivered on all aspects and then some. This darker, more violent version of the Dark Knight shut down the naysayers who protested the new model for daring to disrupt the original Batman mythology. As iterated by Glen Murakami, the art director for the new DCAU show, “We wanted Batman Beyond to feel a little bit more oppressive.”

The DCAU series ran for 3 seasons from 1999 to 2001.