NC: Top 11 BtAS episodes

I can't remember the name of the episode, but there was one where a guy is driving home and gets into a pseudo-road rage mentality about others on the road and their habits. Along comes this car and the guy has had enough so he basically cuts him off and then realizes, to his horror, it's the Joker.

The Joker chases him down and states he owes him a favor down the road.

Well the end of the episode has the little guy threatening Joker with his own bomb while the perverbial trickster is howling for Batman to come save him. I won't ruin the final punchline, but it was one I will never forget.

I can't view the original list right now (I'm on my cell) but I'm glad to hear Almost Got 'im made it to #1, it's a great episode. Tyger, Tyger is also one of my favorites. I had forgotten about See No Evil, that was also outstanding.

I think my absolute favorite episode is (IIRC) Girls Night Out - Joker kicks Harley out and she's determined not to crawl back. While robbing a museum, Harley is tripped up when Poison Ivy, robbing the same museum, trips the alarm! The two decide to team up and caus havoc in the city as mavens of mayhem!!

My favorite line in the episode:
*Harley & Ivy are stopped at a traffic light in Ivy's convertible when a car full of "spunky young men" pull up in the adjacent lane. They hoot and howl and make rude, suggestive gestures at the costumed villainesses*
Ivy: Didn't your mother ever teach you manners?
One lad: What are ya gonna do, spank us?
Harley: Yeah pigs, and here's the paddle!
*Harley pulls out a bazooka and blows up the fools' car as they scramble out of it*
KABOOM! haha!

I liked it when Harley Quinn and Bats were working together and in an attic she's going "sneak sneak sneak" and he has to shush her.

My favorites:

1. "Almost Got 'Im." I'm with the reviewer: the interplay between the characters is at its absolute best here.

2. "It's Never Too Late." I still think that Batman is at his best when he goes back to his roots, battling organized crime, corrupt CEOs, and corrupt politicians; this story, in the Rupert Thorn arc, is probably the best organized crime story in the whole series. (Honorable mention: "Appointment in Crime Alley.")

3. "Zatana." I'm a sucker for Batman backstory, and Zatana is, legendarily, one of the best looking women in the DC universe. But the icing on the cake, for me, comes when you realize that not only was Batman trained in escapology by Zatarra the Great, but that Zatarra the Great offered to make him his apprentice -- could Batman have been the Sorcerer Supreme instead of the Great Detective? Now that's an Elseworlds I want to see, some day: a Batman/Hellblazer crossover, in a timeline where Batman is America's John Constantine, where Zatana takes the place of Robin.

4. "Legends of the Dark Knight." It actually works as a story, but the stylistic callbacks to other portrayals of Batman are pure fan gold.

5. "Harley and Ivy." The episode that generated a gazillion fan homages (and briefly spun off its own DCAU comic book); the two of them, as written in the DCAU, aren't just a cute couple, they're actually make a terrifyingly effective duo, and by the end of it, you can almost imagine watch the race: will they make each other even crazier, or by calling each other in their BS will they make each other more sane?

6. "Shriek." "How did you know you weren't really crazy?" "The voices in my head don't call me Bruce Wayne." Bonus points: "Batman: The Musical!" Now excuse me while I go try to purge the inevitable song-virus of "Superstitious Cowardly Lot" yet again.

7. "The Demon's Quest." It's not even vaguely easy to make me give a rat's hindquarters about Ra's al'Ghul -- but an enemy who effortlessly penetrates Batman's disguise, but who respects him too much to use that information against him? Priceless.

8. "Read My Lips." This episode works, for me, the way a lot of other people react to "Two Face" only even more so -- here is a guy who doesn't even know, himself, how much potential he has as a villain. As popular as Harley Quinn is, Scarface and the Ventriloquist is actually my favorite villain that was created for the DCAU.

9. "Harley's Holiday." Not only the funniest episode of BtAS, I'd put it somewhere on the list of top ten funniest things ever shown on TV.

10. "Sideshow." Made me actually care about Killer Croc, made me, like the people who took him in, actually think that he could be reformed, that he could come to terms with what he is. Nice job of taking what is, basically, a comic relief character in BtAS and taking him seriously for a moment.

I hate, hate, hate Batman-the-character, but I love this series. I'd rate it among my top five favorite TV shows of all time. It's that good. The art direction and building design is particularly impressive. I love Art Deco, partly because of this series. I particularly enjoyed episodes featuring unusual locations, like the zoo in "On Leather Wings," or rarely-seen characters, like Maxie Zeus, just to see how they would be interpreted for the look of the series.

I didn't much care for the less streamlined, angular "new look" episodes, for the most part, even if they did feature some strong or entertaining stories, notably the demon Etrigan and his magic rhyme. I felt the character designs in particular lost a lot of what made them special when they were no longer "revised" to be all deco-y. Exception: "new look" Scarecrow, who has one of the most impressive villain costumes of all time. (Art team, take note, if you are reading this.) The shadowed, skull-like face, the jimswinger coat, and the noose are all great, but that mysterious stick he carries all the time is the thing that really makes you feel like this guy might not be a man in a scarecrow costume at all, but something much scarier.

If you are a fan of this series, you owe it to yourself to find a copy of Chip Kidd's Batman Animated, which will tell you all kinds of interesting things. (Kidd came to the project in an interesting way, too. He's primarily a book design guy and is very, very prominent in his industry, but he was always a big fan of Batman, so he basically got into doing the book for fun.) Now I'm annoyed that my copy is sitting at my parents' house several states away ...

Some of my favorite episodes, for a variety of reasons:

1) "Heart of Ice," a.k.a. the one that introduced Mr. Freeze. I've always found Freeze a much more sympathetic character than Batman himself, and this episode is the reason why. It's hard to generate pathos in a twenty-minute story, but they did for this one.

2) "Deep Freeze," a.k.a. the other one with Mr. Freeze. This one, on the other hand, is entertaining because it shows that you can turn one writer saying to another, "Hey, Walt Disney had his corpse frozen" into an entertaining and action-packed story.

3) "On Leather Wings," featuring the Man-Bat, also the first episode to be completed. This one has everything- a visually arresting villain, Batman sneaking around and analyzing things, neat building designs, an impressive finale, a cameo by Harvey Dent (my favorite supporting character), and an airship. I have a cel from this episode, I like it so much.

4) "Appointment in Crime Alley." Aside from being a pretty good "street crime" story, the pacing of this adventure is fantastic. It's one of the best examples of pulp "obstacle piling" that I've seen. At the same time, it maintains a simple, straightforward emotional core.

5) "The Laughing Fish." For those who aren't aware, this is actually based on a fairly early story from the comics. It was an excellent choice. The Joker is both threatening and hilarious in this episode. To this day, I can't see a yellow rain slicker without thinking of his commercial.

6) "Almost Got 'im." For all the reasons that have already been mentioned. I consider this the best "anthology" episode of a TV series of all time.

7) I can't remember the name, but the episode in which Batman is committed to Arkham after being sprayed with the Scarecrow's fear toxin. As implied above, the Scarecrow is another of my favorite villains, striking right at the heart of what the Batman character is. This episode has the added bonuses of cameos by plenty of other villains, some interesting locations, and glimpses of just how paranoid the Batman really is.

8) "Mudslide." I almost put "Feat of Clay" instead, but I feel "Mudslide" is a tighter story. Anything with Clayface, really. He's just a fun character, visually, incident-wise (with such an array of powers), and even personality-wise. I'd even include "Growing Pains" here, though the focus is less on Clayface; it does have one of the more powerful endings I've seen, one that perfectly sums up the gloominess of the Batman world-view.

9) "Harley's Day Out." I find it interesting that so many people like this one. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of Harley Quinn, but this episode will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first one I ever saw. This series ran while I was in high school and college. I'd loathed the "everything is black" design of the Tim Burton Batman movies, so I'd studiously ignored this series. Then, one Saturday morning, I happened to turn this on, and said to myself, stunned, "Batman takes place in the '30's?" From then on, I was hooked. My favorite visual thing of all in this episode is Veronica Vreeland's hair. A few years later, my first girlfriend turned out to have hair just like that.

10) "His Silicon Soul." This features two interesting supporting characters, Carl Rossum and the (otherwise forgotten '50's imp) Bat-Mite. It's got the beautifully done location of It's got one of those semi-sympathetic antagonists this series did so well. But the thing I like best about it is what it suggests about the depth of Batman's terror of death.

11) Mask of the Phantasm. Okay, I consider it cheating a bit to include a movie among "episodes," but it is one of the high points of the original series. I consider it the most entertaining screen rendering of Batman that we've seen. The plot has some depth without being overly complex, the characters are interesting, the humor is pretty amusing ("It ain't the Bat. This guy looks more like the Ghost of Christmas Future."), and the set-pieces are truly spectacular. Its use of what is essentially the 1939 World's Fair is one of the best sequences in superhero fiction, bar none. (By the way, to learn more about what this was based on, go out and find a copy of David Gelernter's 1939: the Lost World of the Fair, which is not only one of the best books ever written about the 1930's, but also, in my opinion, the best book ever written about American culture. And I wouldn't have thought to read it ... if not for Batman: the Animated Series.)

Ahhhh, so many great episodes. *grins* I actually Tweeted this list to Kevin Conroy after TGWTG posted the link. (He will ALWAYS be Batman to me... never mind those other guys.)

And I was glad to see "Almost Got 'Im" made #1 (was also glad "Heart of Ice" and "Mad Love" made it on there, two of my favorite episodes). "I threw a rock at 'im!" *beat* "It was a big rock" has almost become a catchphrase among my gaming group.

Loved MASK OF THE PHANTASM... though it took me AGES to realize that the weasly councilman Arthur Reeves is voiced by the same actor who played Ellis, the coke-snuffing selfservering exec in DIE HARD.

I really need to get this box set... and BATMAN BEYOND... and JLU... *sigh*

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite