Batman: The Animated Series turns 20 this week, so "AFOS Prime" celebrates its Knightly brand of stylish action and dashing score music

I got so busy producing a weekly vlog that nobody watches and has become a little less fun to work on that I almost forgot that 20 years ago this week, Batman: The Animated Series debuted on Fox on September 5, 1992 with an episode about Catwoman ("The Cat and the Claw, Part I") to whet the appetites of viewers who had seen Batman tussle with a much kinkier version of Selina Kyle in Tim Burton's controversial Batman Returns over the summer.

The B:TAS crew was more subtle and clever than Burton about sneaking adult content into their version of Batman. Without attracting the attention of parents' groups and conservatives--the wet blankets of America--like Burton did in Batman Returns, the B:TAS crew got away with sneaking in elements like a giant vagina attacking Batman, which producer Bruce Timm claimed was unintentional, and a lesbian couple: Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy (maybe B:TAS got away with so much also because it was kind of under-the-radar compared to Burton's movies, which were exposed to a larger international audience).

B:TAS is a show I dug so much as a high-schooler and is one of the few shows I tried to collect DVD box sets of (and never finished doing so) back when I was employed, I could afford to buy DVD box sets and people actually bought DVDs. Because of its 20th anniversary, A Fistful of Soundtracks' "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" blocks will begin streaming several selections from La-La Land Records' recent second volume of B:TAS' well-crafted score cues next week.

I think I've spoken enough about the original music on the show ("Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack: A Walker to remember" from December 2008 and "A little Knight music: The second Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack from La-La Land is even better than the first" from a couple of months ago), so I want to say a few words about the show itself. Both B:TAS and another animated Fox show, The Simpsons, ignited my love for smartly written animation and made me want to write for animation or comics someday. On-screen, Doctor Who star David Tennant once memorably told '80s Doctor Who star Peter Davison--both in character and as a fan of the Davison era of the show--that "You were my Doctor." In a similar fashion, a certain generation of viewers considers Adam West to be their Batman. Though West was a great comedic Batman, Kevin Conroy's take on the Dark Knight remains my favorite on-screen incarnation of the character.

And as us admirers of B:TAS celebrate the show's 20th anniversary, we're not just celebrating two decades of terrific animated TV by the likes of Timm, Eric Radomski, Alan Burnett and Paul Dini and staffers who passed on after the show's run like composers Shirley Walker (whose B:TAS work Bear McCreary frequently cites as a major influence on his TV scoring career) and Harvey R. Cohen and director Boyd Kirkland. We're also celebrating two decades of Conroy's voice work as Batman. I never expected the Julliard-trained Conroy to continue to voice Batman about a decade and a half after B:TAS stopped production, but there he still is, pretending to rough up motherfuckers as the Dark Knight in DC Animated Universe feature films and video games.

Kevin Conroy (Photo source: Esquire)

Though West underplayed his Batman quite well, and Michael Keaton managed to bring an interesting stamp to both the Bruce Wayne and Batman halves of the character despite the massive constraints of his difficult-to-walk-around-and-act-in costume, Conroy, who was far from a comics fan, outdid both West and Keaton by rethinking how the character spoke on-screen.

"As soon as [the producers] described his schizophrenic lifestyle, it bugged me," recalled Conroy to Esquire recently. "I thought, Wait a minute, he is the Bill Gates of Gotham. He is the most eligible bachelor. Everyone knows who he is. And he puts on a cape, and no one recognizes him? Come on."

Conroy, one of 75 actors who auditioned for the part, decided to give Batman two slightly different voices, "fundamentally altering the legacy of a comic book he had only passing knowledge of," as Ali Taylor Lange wrote in the Esquire piece on Conroy. As Batman, Conroy opted for raspy, mysterious and dashing--because of that badass voice, guys like me wanted to be like him, while many of the show's female viewers ended up wanting to do him--while in businessman/philanthropist mode as Bruce, he came up with a more relaxed voice, but without sounding too foppish or cartoony.

There's more to that dual-voiced reading than raspy-vs.-relaxed though. The psychological homework that Conroy did to distinguish his take on the character was as well-thought-out as all the other aspects of B:TAS that elevated it from standard Saturday morning superhero fare to an unconventional and sophisticated superhero cartoon that appealed to adults.

"If he sounds that different, where does the voice come from? It has to come from the pain," said Conroy to Esquire. "I decided that the Bruce Wayne persona, the public persona, is the performance, and the Batman character is who he is when he is most natural. When he's putting on the cape, he is becoming himself."

Alternate Posterama 2: Electric Boogaloo

Inglourious Basterds by David Choe.


Basterds by photographer Estevan Oriol (the Choe and Oriol posters were part of a Basterds-inspired art show that raised money for Haiti earthquake relief at L.A.'s Upper Playground Art Gallery).


Arrested Development/Star Wars mash-up. [Via The Live Feed]


Mythbusters/007 mash-up. [Via The Live Feed]


Antichrist/Fantastic Mr. Fox mash-up by SamsMyth.


Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans by Alan Hynes. [Via Super Punch]

Trailers from hell (yeah)

A Tumblrer recommends listening to A Fistful of Soundtracks if you need to get your screenwriting mojo back. His favorite part of my channel is the movie trailer clips I've inserted into the "Assorted Fistful" block:

The coolest thing is that every now and then it plays a random old movie trailer. I just heard one for an old kung-fu flick. It sounds like the ones you’d hear on an old VHS tape before the feature presentation.

There's a reason why I included trailer clips during "Assorted Fistful." Four years ago, the names of the tracks during "Assorted Fistful" weren't being posted on iTunes Radio's ticker for some inexplicable reason, which made the block a difficult listening experience for iTunes listeners who wanted to know the track names. So to help those folks out, I started attaching audio clips of trailers or radio/TV spots to tracks from the movies that were promoted in those trailers or spots because I didn't want to go through the trouble of switching on both my mic and GoldWave and recording a back-announcement for every single track.

First, I experimented with attaching the vintage radio spots for Black Caesar and Foxy Brown to the themes from those movies and liked how the old ads sounded as intros (any old ad or trailer that features the voice of either the late, great Adolph Caesar or the equally late and great Percy Rodrigues is always fun to listen to). Then shortly thereafter, the Batman Begins soundtrack came out, and I was looking for an effective and ominous way to announce "This next track is from the Batman Begins score" without having to say those words. I found it in an audio clip of the Batman Begins TV spot that consisted solely of the bat swarm graphics from the film's opening titles and thought that was an even niftier intro than the blaxploitation radio ads, so from then on, I attached trailer or promo clips to almost every single "Assorted Fistful" track (in another example, each score cue from Battlestar Galactica seasons two, three and four that's in rotation during "Assorted Fistful" opens with the TV spot for the Galactica episode from which the cue was taken from).

Here are two trailers that can be heard during "Assorted Fistful"--the trailers for two of my favorite flicks, the original Assault on Precinct 13...



... and Heat. I like the Hugh Morgan-voiceovered Heat trailer so much that I didn't shorten it for broadcast (unlike other trailers I've shortened because either they don't translate well to radio or they're too lengthy), so the trailer airs in its entirety before the Kronos Quartet's Heat suite begins. The trailer includes a couple of deleted scenes, which are a bit of a treat for Heat fans like myself (footage of De Niro's crew at what appears to be a dinner celebration and additional dialogue between De Niro and Jeremy Piven):



In June 2007, iTunes finally got its act together and started posting my channel's track names in the ticker, so I was thinking of getting rid of the trailer clips, but because listeners have told me they always enjoy hearing those clips, I haven't removed them. (I'm surprised AFOS listeners enjoy the trailer clips because people on the Film Score Monthly boards always complain about the movie dialogue clips that XM's Cinemagic channel intersperses between tracks.)

However, one listener once wanted me to get rid of the Black Caesar radio spot because he was offended by the clip of Fred Williamson referring to himself as a "jungle bunny"--and this listener was clearly a white guy. Listena please. I'm not going to censor or remove something from my channel just because one listener can't stomach it. That's such a stupid request. I hate censorship in any form.

"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 2

My compilation of tweets from my Twitter page that have been replied to (or retweeted) the most continues.

Previously on A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog: Part 1.

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I've posted my five favorite closing lines from movies on @LivingSocial. I'll post them in my next several tweets.
4:26 AM Apr 21st from web

Favorite closing lines from movies: 5. "God damn you all to hell!" (Planet of the Apes)
4:28 AM Apr 21st from web

Favorite closing lines from movies: 4. "Why don't we just wait here for a little while... see what happens..." (The Thing)
4:30 AM Apr 21st from web

Favorite closing lines from movies: 3. "Maybe it was Utah." (Raising Arizona)
4:32 AM Apr 21st from web

Fave ending lines: 2. "You bastard!" "Yes, sir. In my case, an accident of birth. But you, sir, you're a self-made man." (The Professionals)
4:35 AM Apr 21st from web

Favorite closing lines from movies: 1. "Hey everybody, we're all gonna get laid!" (Caddyshack)
4:37 AM Apr 21st from web

Favorite closing lines I didn't post on my @LivingSocial list: "Shut up and deal." (The Apartment)
4:40 AM Apr 21st from web

Other fave ending lines: "Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." (Sunset Blvd.) Another great last line from a Billy Wilder film.
4:42 AM Apr 21st from web

Other favorite closing lines: "...a warning: that all glory is fleeting." (Patton)
4:44 AM Apr 21st from web

Other favorite last lines: "Hey Blond! You know what you are? Just a dirty son of a..." (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)
4:46 AM Apr 21st from web

Other favorite closing lines: "I think I'll have a drink." (The Untouchables)
4:48 AM Apr 21st from web

Other favorite closing lines: "I never said, 'Thank you.'" "And you'll never have to." (Batman Begins)
4:50 AM Apr 21st from web

Other favorite closing lines: "I was cured alright." (A Clockwork Orange)
4:52 AM Apr 21st from web

Other favorite closing lines: "This life came so close to never happening." (25th Hour)
4:54 AM Apr 21st from web

Last favorite closing line before I go to bed (yeah, I sleep so late): "I'm here to talk to you about the Avenger Initiative." (Iron Man)
>4:57 AM Apr 21st from web

I know nothing about Twilight. I don't know the characters' names, like the lead guy, whom I assume is Hemo the Emo Vampire.
4:28 PM Apr 22nd from web

From Nov.: A FISTFUL OF SOUNDTRACKS: THE BLOG: Film version of '70s cartoon show #StarTrek doesn't look promising: http://tinyurl.com/63eon5
11:55 AM Apr 24th from web

To be continued.

AFOS: "A Better Class of Criminal" playlist

1. Hans Zimmer, "Why So Serious?," The Dark Knight, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
2. Danny Elfman, "First Confrontation," Batman: Original Motion Picture Score, Warner Bros.
3. Danny Elfman, "Waltz to the Death," Batman: Original Motion Picture Score, Warner Bros.
4. Shirley Walker, "Phantasm and Joker Fight," Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Reprise
5. Nelson Riddle, "Emergency Operation," Batman, Film Score Monthly
6. Danny Elfman, "Selina Transforms," Batman Returns, Warner Bros.
7. Shirley Walker, "Ski Mask Vigilante," Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, Reprise
8. Hans Zimmer, "Tadarida," Batman Begins, Warner Sunset/Warner Home Video
9. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, "Blood on My Hands," The Dark Knight, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
10. Hans Zimmer, "Introduce a Little Anarchy," The Dark Knight, Warner Sunset/Warner Bros.
11. Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Face to Face," Batman Returns, Warner Bros.

The Dark Knight: Never mind the bollocks, here's the Joker

I waited until after the opening weekend lines died down and finally saw The Dark Knight. Maybe Christopher Nolan--who hasn't yet decided if he's going to make a third Batman film--should just quit while he's ahead. I don't know how he can surpass what he's achieved with the morally ambiguous and politically charged yet electrifying Dark Knight.

Third installments often mark the nadir of a film series (Return of the Jedi, The Godfather Part III, X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3, which transformed Tobey Maguire into an emo lesbian Dancing with the Stars contestant, and fifthly, the little-known Debbie Does Benji). Perhaps Nolan's uncertainty about agreeing to write and direct a third movie stems from being burned as a moviegoer by so many franchises that have succumbed to the Law of Diminishing Returns--including once upon a time, Batman itself, before Nolan revitalized the series.

Of all the summer 2008 blockbusters, I looked forward to The Dark Knight the most because I'm a longtime Batman fan. The character always appealed to me more than Superman because he's a hero who looks like a villain, and sometimes he finds himself becoming the villain, like in The Dark Knight. I've read the Batman comics on and off, I liked the Tim Burton films when I was a kid (these days, I don't think parts of Burton's Batman films have aged very well, particularly elements of the 1989 Batman) and I'm a huge fan of both Batman: The Animated Series and the Nolan version of the franchise. I found Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever to be so juvenile--especially in its portrayal of Two-Face, who's an even more complicated enemy than the Joker because he teeters back and forth between good and evil, something that Batman Forever got wrong--that I refused to see Batman & Robin, and I still refuse to watch a single minute of that 1997 piece of Batguano.

Nolan's refusal to approach the likes of Two-Face and the Joker as cartoonish a la Schumacher--he restored the menacing qualities that these villains had in the post-'60s comics and the '90s animated series--may be one of the reasons why The Dark Knight had a record-shattering opening weekend. The film is quite lengthy for a summer blockbuster, but nobody in the afternoon audience I saw it with ever got restless or bored. I don't go to movie theaters as often as I used to anymore because I'm frustrated with other moviegoers' exceedingly stupid behavior--talking on cell phones, running up and down the aisles like a chimp on speed, bringing their babies with them--but except for one occasionally testy infant, everyone in this more polite-than-usual afternoon audience kept their mouths shut during the entire film. They were completely captivated by this differently toned Batman and the remarkable performances of the ensemble (particularly by Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, an uncredited Nicky Katt in a great small part, the late Heath Ledger in his penultimate performance and Christian Bale, whose often derided Batrasp sounds more like Richard Moll's B:TAS voice for Two-Face than the less gravelly voice that we're accustomed to hearing come out of Batman's mouth). It's the same kind of captivation I feel when I watch a really good Michael Mann flick.

Speaking of Mann, his work influenced Nolan during this Batman installment. (I wonder if Nolan also took some cues from Gotham Central. The Joker's killing spree and the interrogation room scenes are reminiscent of Gotham Central's "Soft Targets" arc, which had the Joker terrorizing Gotham City with sniper attacks.) Before he made Batman Begins, Nolan reportedly screened Blade Runner for his crew and told them, "This is how we're going to make Batman." In The Dark Knight, Nolan turned to Heat as his cinematic model, and it's evident in the forensics sequences (it's awesome to see Batman act more like a detective again) and the major set pieces, particularly the opening bank heist, which even includes a cameo by Heat supporting player William Fichtner, and the thrilling truck/SWAT van/Tumbler-turned-Batpod chase. The elegantly staged action sequences are an improvement over the ones in Batman Begins, which were criticized for being poorly shot and choppily edited, although I think Nolan was trying to capture the disorientation a criminal must feel when his ass is being handed to him by a swiftly moving figure he can barely see in the dark--just not quite as well as Nolan intended. Even though I didn't see The Dark Knight in IMAX, I was awed by cinematographer Wally Pfister's opening aerial footage of the Joker's accomplices proceeding with their heist. It looks spectacular even in standard 35mm.

The bank heist marks one of the few times we see sunlight in a Batman film, one of several touches that place Gotham in a more grounded reality and distinguish Nolan's Batman incarnation from previous screen incarnations. (Burton refused to have the sun appear during his rather backlotty and stagebound version of Batman. When he did shoot a scene in daylight, Burton chose to do it during a cloudy day.)

Another intriguing Nolan touch is the jettisoning of the more fantastical elements of Batman's adversaries, Scarecrow fear gas aside. I doubt the very sci-fi Poison Ivy would exist in Nolan's universe. (I'm not sure which villains should appear in the threequel, but I'd like to see Bale face off against Peter Sarsgaard--who happens to be married to Bale's Dark Knight co-star Maggie Gyllenhaal--or Parker Posey, not because of her performance in Superman Returns but her performances in Dazed and Confused, Henry Fool and Fay Grim.) A chick who can control plants with her mind just isn't as disturbing or formidable as Nolan and Ledger's interpretation of the Joker, who's portrayed here as less of a clown and fame whore a la Jack Nicholson and more of a terrorist who's attracted to anarchy like a dog is attracted to car windows it can stick its head through--to reference a key Dark Knight image of this creepy criminal without a code.

It's been reported that Ledger wasn't familiar with the Batman comics and graphic novels before he signed on to The Dark Knight. He based his Joker on the Droogs and Sid Vicious and downplayed the character's clownish persona. Those were interesting choices for his standout performance, which is heightened by some of the most intense and atonal music Hans Zimmer has ever written (as soon as I receive the Dark Knight score CD by Zimmer and James Newton Howard, I'll add some of its tracks to "Assorted Fistful" rotation on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel). It's the cleverest combo of star performance and original film score that I've seen on the big screen in a while: Ledger went punk for the Joker, as did Zimmer, whose punk-influenced Joker themes have been described by the L.A. Times as "an orchestral interpretation of a something created by Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails."

The Dark Knight is the first great summer movie since Do the Right Thing that's made me angry. How often can you say that about a piece of summertime entertainment? Nolan's film left me feeling pissed off about two things: the fact that there are no easy answers in this post-9/11 world--not since Justice League Unlimited's great Justice Lords and Cadmus storylines has a post-9/11 superhero show or film dared to bring its protagonists' tactics into question--and the fact that we won't be able to see any more mesmerizing performances from Ledger.