A little Knight music: The second Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack from La-La Land is even better than the first

As Christopher Nolan wraps up his immensely popular live-action version of Batman with next week's release of The Dark Knight Rises, La-La Land Records is revisiting the "dark swashbuckler" sound of the Nolan movies' small-screen predecessor, Batman: The Animated Series, with the label's second collection of the landmark show's score cues by the late Shirley Walker and her staff of skilled composers.

In 2008, when La-La Land released the first B:TAS soundtrack (highlights from this two-CD set can be heard during A Fistful of Soundtracks' "AFOS Prime" block), I wrote, "Though this release is loaded with over two hours of music, it's missing Walker's memorable Catwoman theme from 'The Cat and the Claw, Part I,' the first B:TAS ep that ever aired, Carl Johnson's lively score from the excellent 'Beware the Gray Ghost' ep with special guest voice Adam West, and [Michael] McCuistion's Lawrence of Arabia-style epic score from the 'Demon's Quest' two-parter, which gives me hope about a Volume 2 from La-La Land."

Volume 2 is finally here--the first few copies are being sold at La-La Land's booth at this weekend's San Diego Comic-Con before the four-CD set becomes available on Thursday--and cues from "The Cat and the Claw," "Beware the Gray Ghost" and "The Demon's Quest" are indeed on the album. After taking a look at the abbreviated Volume 2 track listing that the World's Finest fansite posted on its blog, the batch of B:TAS eps that are represented on Volume 2 is more impressive to me than the first volume's, even though one of those eps is the abysmally animated and extremely kid-friendly "I've Got Batman in My Basement," widely regarded as the series' worst ep and derided by lead B:TAS showrunner Bruce Timm, who told Cinefantastique magazine in 1994 that "I can't even watch ['I've Got Batman.'] It's the epitome of what we don't want to do with Batman."

"The Cat and the Claw," "Beware the Gray Ghost" and "The Demon's Quest" are joined on Volume 2 by series high points like the Emmy-winning Mr. Freeze revamp "Heart of Ice," "Feat of Clay," "Almost Got 'Im" and "Harley and Ivy," an ep that's even more popular than "Heart of Ice." Penned by "Heart of Ice" writer Paul Dini, the sharply written first-time pairing of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, who are referred to in Dini and Chip Kidd's 1998 coffee table book Batman: Animated as "the Thelma & Louise of the supervillain set," was so popular it spawned a 2004 DC miniseries from the trio of Dini, Timm and their fellow New Batman Adventures and Superman: The Animated Series staffer Shane Glines and tons of steamy Harley and Ivy fan art by Glines and many others.

Glines recently posted his character designs from a Harley and Ivy animated series that failed to get off the ground in the early '00s. You'd have to be either really, really stupid or brain-dead to say no to a Harley and Ivy animated series.

Maybe the person who said no to the Harley and Ivy spinoff is the same network executive who rejected "Harley and Ivy" as the first ep to air during B:TAS' brief run on Fox's nighttime lineup in the middle of its first season.

"We wanted ['Harley and Ivy'] as our first prime time show, and Fox was going to run it. Then a Fox executive saw it and said, 'What the hell is this? Batman's not in this episode. He's only in it at the end? The whole episode is two girls running around in their underwear. There's no boy appeal here,'" recalled Dini to Cinefantastique in 1994. "I said, 'Well maybe not any boys you know.'"

Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn in a scene from B:TAS' "Harley and Ivy" episode that's too unappealing for boys (Photo source: World's Finest Online)

The largely comical and nicely crafted score for "Harley and Ivy" was provided by Walker, McCuistion, future Justice League main title theme composer Lolita Ritmanis and Peter Davison, a different Peter Davison from the British actor who starred as The Fifth Doctor on Doctor Who. The late Boyd Kirkland, who directed "Harley and Ivy" and came up with the fan-favorite scene where the duo responds to a car full of douchey catcallers in classic Gotham Girl fashion, was proud of the layout work on "Poison Oakey" and her new sidekick (and possibly lover) that was done by the Japanese studio TMS, one of many foreign studios that Timm's creative staff farmed out the animation work to.

(Photo source: World's Finest Online)

But sometimes, there were episodes that didn't meet the B:TAS staff's expectations like "Harley and Ivy" did. When "The Laughing Fish," which is also part of the second album, came back to Timm's crew with animation by the Korean studio Dong Yang that Timm found to be underwhelming, he turned to Walker and asked her to do with her score what Dong Yang failed to accomplish with the kind of animation Timm wanted for his more-menacing-than-usual vision of the Joker in "The Laughing Fish."

(Photo source: World's Finest Online)

"I asked her to make ['The Laughing Fish'] sound like a horror film. Not a forties Boris Karloff film, but like Aliens or The Exorcist, with really dissonant, nonmelodic music," said Timm in the Batman: Animated book. "At the time I had just read a piece about Psycho and it never dawned on me before, but there are no woodwinds or brass in that film. The entire score is done with strings. And I started thinking that might be kind of a neat thing to do with this show, just play everything stripped down and haunting.

"There's a full symphonic orchestra in there, but a lot of the earlier cues are just moaning violas," continued Timm. "From the first moment the Joker shows up, even though he's acting funny and wacky, Shirley has the strings doing something really strange. They're not playing his silliness, they're playing the underlying threat of what he's doing. It kicks the scene up a notch in terms of tension. It's one of our most unusual scores and it works really well."

Timm's simpatico working relationship with Walker and her composing team was a reason why the music on B:TAS was so effective, even when it wasn't present in several scenes.

"In animation, it's real typical to want the music to be there to sort of cover up the holes and make you feel like there's no air and no space," said Walker to Cinefantastique in 1994. "I think part of the visceral success of the Batman show is the fact that we put you on edge by making you uncomfortable with silence occasionally. It sets the show apart from a lot of the cartoon music that's being done."

Shirley Walker

Even though through my copies of Warner Bros.' B:TAS DVDs, I can easily check out the B:TAS scoring team's work on "Harley and Ivy," "The Laughing Fish" and the other Fox-era eps that are represented on the La-La Land compilations, it's much nicer to be able to hear the cues in their purest form, sans sound effects. Volume 2 also comes with eight different versions of the opening and closing title themes for B:TAS, which was the first of WB Animation's various Batman series (the next series will be the CG-animated Beware the Batman, which I, a Pinoy viewer, am especially looking forward to because the Dark Knight is being voiced by Pinoy actor Anthony Ruivivar from Third Watch). As a fan of Timm's "Dark Deco" take on Batman, I can't wait to get my slightly dark but not-quite-Deco mitts on Volume 2, another musical memento of a classic show that raised the bar for both small-screen American animation and small-screen animation scoring.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/22/2012): Green Lantern, Young Justice, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Motorcity

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I review five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone and are aired on kids' networks where I have to sit through many of the most obnoxious commercials known to man because my DVR remote control is broken and will never be fixed. I think some of those kids' TV commercials have been used to extract information from Gitmo inmates.

I recently saw someone compare the sleek and nicely lit CG visuals on Bruce Timm's Green Lantern: The Animated Series to The Incredibles, so since then, I've thought, "Hal does look a little Mr. Incredible-ish when he runs," which isn't a bad thing. If you're going to crib a thing or two from an animated feature film, crib from one of the best. And like Brad Bird's movie, GL:TAS isn't afraid to make its main character lose badly once in a while.

In "Invasion," the last GL:TAS episode before the season finale, Hal (Josh Keaton), Kilowog (Kevin Michael Richardson), Razer (Jason Spisak) and Aya (Grey DeLisle), the Interceptor's AI, attempt to complete their mission to destroy the ancient Lighthouse, an automated space station that allows ships to travel through the asteroid belt separating the Forgotten Zone from the sector of space where Oa, the homeworld of the Guardians, the Green Lantern Corps' superiors, is located. If evil Red Lantern leader Atrocitus (Jonathan Adams) gets his hands on the Lighthouse before the Green Lanterns do, he'll use the station to teleport more of his Red Lantern fleet from the Forgotten Zone into Oan space to attack the Guardians.

Meanwhile, "Invasion" catches up with Saint Walker (Phil Morris, a.k.a. Jackie Chiles from Seinfeld), an idealistic hermit on the sentient planet Mogo (also Richardson) whom viewers first met in GL:TAS' "Lost Planet" episode when he declined the green power ring that Mogo accepted to become the only Green Lantern Corps member that's an actual planet. Before "Lost Planet," the Red Lanterns destroyed Walker's homeworld, and Walker found refuge on Mogo. "Invasion" gets very Ten Commandments-ish as Walker, who's turned to Mogo as if he were God and asked him for help in figuring out his destiny during the Red Lantern invasion, scales a mountain that Mogo repeatedly tells him to climb to get his answer.

After a few complications, the Interceptor crew succeeds in destroying the Lighthouse, but their triumph becomes a short-lived one when Hal, Kilowog and Razer board Atrocitus' suddenly immobile ship to arrest him and his cohorts, and the trio walks into a trap. The Red Lanterns have evacuated their ship and rigged it to self-destruct with the Green Lanterns inside. Atrocitus seizes the Interceptor, has Aya reprogrammed to do his bidding and tears open a wormhole in space that's big enough to allow more of his forces to pass through to invade Oa.

Razer, who gets the episode's best line earlier when he uses one of those fake curse words so many of these sci-fi shows are fond of ("I hate to be the glurg in the punch bowl, but it seems we weren't the only ones to make it through"), uses his red power ring to shield Hal, Kilowog and himself from the blast. Hal is up glurg's creek without a paddle and in a rare moment, is unsure what his next move should be. He doesn't know that hope lies elsewhere on a mountaintop on Mogo, where a blue lantern materializes in front of Walker and presents the alien with a blue power ring.

"Invasion" is fun if you like seeing the heroes experience one setback after another but is otherwise kind of dull, mostly due to the scenes between Walker and Mogo, which feel like they're straight out of a Christian sci-fi flick. However, that willingness to make the Green Lanterns sometimes fail at the end of an episode illuminates a major difference between this current era of DC Animation and the godawful limited-animation days of Superfriends, when the heroes triumphed over evil every single time, which is fine for kids and the conservative audience that makes all those interchangeable CBS procedurals such ratings hits and is afraid of change, but it's yawnsville for those of us viewers who prefer a tad more variety in the storytelling.

***

In spite of how much DC Animation productions have raised the bar for kids' animation, these shows are still kind of skittish in the way they handle some of their edgier storylines. Several weeks ago--or rather, late last season--the TV-PG-rated Young Justice did what was basically a drug addiction arc when Superboy got addicted to "shields," steroid-like patches that suppress his human DNA and amplify his Kryptonian powers and were supplied to him by one of his two daddies, Lex Luthor. So when the recently rebranded Young Justice: Invasion does another addiction storyline with the mental and physical decline of the clone known as Red Arrow (Crispin Freeman), whose comics counterpart was once addicted to smack, and the storyline contains all the elements of an addiction arc, from the intervention staged by the Roy Harper clone's friends to his unkempt and emaciated state (or rather, what passes for emaciated in the non-Timm DC Animated Universe), why does the show chicken out and explain that his decline isn't due to heroin addiction and is merely exhaustion from his intense search for the original Roy?

And then when it's later revealed in this week's Greg Weisman-scripted "Salvage" episode that Roy and Cheshire (Kelly Hu), the assassin sister of Artemis (Stephanie Lemelin), became a couple during the five-year interim between seasons and Cheshire had Roy's baby, why does the show chicken out again and sneak in the rather unconvincing detail that Roy and Cheshire were married before she got pregnant? Are Cartoon Network censors really that uptight about characters on their shows having kids out of wedlock?

These censors also have terrible eyesight because a couple of minutes before the revelation about Roy and Cheshire, "Salvage" shows the retired Artemis--who's still dating another fellow retired superhero, Wally "Kid Flash" West (Jason Spisak)--prancing around in just a Stanford University T-shirt, which hints that Artemis banged Wally before he went off to Roy's intervention. I like seeing how amazed and shocked some Young Justice viewers are about the sight of pantsless and post-coital Artemis on a Saturday morning cartoon. This actually isn't the first time a DC Animation project has featured a scene with pantsless female characters to hint that they just got laid.

Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn--sans clown makeup and pants--in Batman: The Animated Series' classic "Harley and Ivy" episode (Photo source: World's Finest Online)

Post-coital Bruce Wayne and Andrea Beaumont in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

I love DC Animation.