When Batman The Animated Series made its debut in 1991, it was viewed as innovative, ground-breaking and unlike any other animated show to have been aired in the television medium’s history. Not surprisingly, the show spawned a number of spin-offs (among them The Adventures of Batman and Robin and Gotham Knights, and its success paved the way for Superman The Animated Series and Batman Beyond, which took place 50 years in the future and chronicled the efforts of an elderly Bruce Wayne to train his successor. All told, an impressive track record for everyone involved, among them executive producer Bruce Timm. Ironically, though, it was precisely his previous success in animating DC Comics superheroes that prevented him from initially embracing the notion of a series based on the adventures of the Justice League. “I kind of dodged the Justice League bullet for years, because I knew how difficult it would be,” he admits. “Just in terms of its scope and the fact that you had seven major players in it. Truthfully, we’d never done a show with that many superheroes in it. All the shows we’d done prior to that were one-character shows that would occasionally have guest stars or sidekicks. But even those shows were a hint of things to come in that every time we had an episode with Batman and Robin or Batgirl, just in staging the action scenes, it was difficult to do.” That difficulty, he explains, came from the idea of keeping the characters in motion at the same time. In other words, if too much time is spent on Batgirl fighting someone, the audience is asking, “What’s Batman doing?”, so there is a need to then cut to Batman. Naturally at that point the audience is then asking, “What’s Batgirl doing?” “It’s as simple as that,” Timm says. “It’s an extra problem that makes the storytelling a little more difficult. Suddenly you have to keep seven characters in motion and they all have fantastic powers. Just trying, for example, to come up with a way of staging the Flash so he doesn’t come off looking like a total moron is really difficult, because he can be everywhere at once. We know that really doesn’t work in any kind of filmic medium. Nobody should ever be able to get the drop on the Flash; his reflexes should be so fast that nobody should be able to land a punch on him or shoot him with a ray gun.” Although interest in the concept of a Justice League series was mounting, Timm resisted – until about the time that production on Batman Beyond was winding down and there was a sense of determination to keep the production team together on a new project. According to Justice League co-producer James Tucker, at that time the Kids WB expressed interest in a new series that would skew to a young audience. “Development was done on a Batman Anime show that kind of reflects on what Teen Titans is now,” he reflects. “And we developed a more youth-oriented version of Justice League. Thank God both of those projects never happened, although there’s a tape out there of a very kiddified Justice League that included Robin and a teenage female version of Cyborg. It was our attempt to try and do something that wasn’t as edgy or as dark as we would normally want to go. At the time, Kids WB totally passed on the Batman Anime idea and we actually did test animation for the Justice League idea.” As Tucker explains it, the thing that convinced them that Justice League was a possibility was an episode of Batman Beyond titled “The Call,” which dealt with a future version of the team. “Prior to that,” he says, “Bruce was very public in saying he didn’t think we could do a Justice League show. Then, after ‘The Call,’ it kind of clicked something in his head that made him think we could. So we did the promotional footage, we looked at it and said, ‘This is good, but it’s a little too compromised from what we would really want to do.’ So on a whim he called Cartoon Network and asked if they wanted a Justice League show, and the response was, ‘Sure.’ It was as simple as that.” A CALL TO ACTION Once the greenlight was given, Timm and his team – including Tucker, producer Rich Fogel and story editors Stan Berkowitz and Dwayne McDuffie – set about trying to come up with a team dynamic, attempting to choose who would be appropriate for the series and how they would relate to each other. Timm notes that several years earlier, this problem was initially addressed as they first started to develop Superman The Animated Series, when a great deal of time was spent determining what that show would be. “We didn’t quite know what to do with Superman the way we did with Batman,” he admits. “Even though, again, we were dealing with a big iconic hero. We all kind of got Superman, we knew what made him tick, but he didn’t have the psychological underpinnings that Batman did, which is what made Batman instantly interesting to us. One of the things we toyed with at the time was doing a Superman show that was half Superman and half the Justice League, where it was almost a Superman team-up show. At that point, when we talked about doing a back door Justice League show, some of the lineup we picked for that pitch were not the standard Justice League characters. I don’t think Flash was in it, John Stewart was. Wonder Woman wasn’t in it. So it was much more the kind of Justice League that was going on in the comics world at that time. You have to remember that the classic lineup of the Justice League wasn’t really in existence in the early ‘90s. That’s one thing I’ll give Grant Morrison a lot of credit for. He was the one who went to DC and said, ‘You know, if you want to revitalize Justice League, you’ve got to go back to the original seven, that core iconic group,’ and he was right. By the time we got around to doing the actual Justice League show, Grant Morrison’s idea had already implemented in the comics and we looked at that and said, ‘Yeah, that’s a really smart idea.’ And we also learned from Marvel’s mistake. “When Marvel did their Avengers show in the ‘90s,” he continues, “they made a radical mistake by not having the Avengers be Captain America, Thor and Iron Man, plus the other guys. They made it just the other guys, and anybody who’s a comic book fan, when they hear there’s an Avengers show, you want to see the big three and you feel a little bit cheated when you don’t see them. All of these things were going through our minds when we decided on the lineup for Justice League. Really, the only ones that were even somewhat controversial among ourselves was which Green Lantern to choose. Hawkman or Hawkgirl? I instantly voted for Hawkgirl. It was purely an aesthetic thing; I have just always loved the Hawkgirl costume and the design of her helmet. I also thought we could afford to have an extra girl on the team, joining Wonder Woman.” In the end, and despite the fact that a number of heroes were considered for the lineup, the final members of the Justice League were Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, J’onn J’onzz, Green Lantern (John Stewart), the Flash and Hawkgirl. “There wasn’t a whole lot of arguing going on,” explains Timm. “We all decided very quickly and easily on the line up and from that point on it was just a matter of sitting down, talking about the characters and saying, ‘These are who we’re going to use. What do they do? What about their characters inform the way they act?’ Basically we wanted to keep the show to the core seven the first two seasons. We wanted to keep it limited, because the majority of the episodes didn’t have all seven of them in it. There were just too many damn characters. They won’t get enough screen time to make an impact if there’s seven of them every single episode. Somebody would have to be Chekov. Somebody would be saying, ‘Hailing frequencies open, Captain.’ So we always had to pare it down.” He admits that he was surprised to hear at conventions just how badly the fans wanted to see a modern day animated version of the Justice League, especially as the whole concept, to his way of thinking, shouldn’t work at all. “There is something cool about seeing these heroes team up,” he says. “God knows why, because it doesn’t really make sense. It doesn’t even work dramatically in a lot of ways, but going back to the Golden Age and the Justice Society, they somehow struck gold when they started teaming those characters up. As cool as it is to see Batman and Superman by themselves, you get them together with Green Lantern or Hawkman, and suddenly it’s cooler. I don’t know why we have this desire to see these guys team up, but it’s cool and there’s no denying it.” To read the full behind the scenes story on the making of Justice League, order a copy of Voices From Krypton magazine by clicking below. NOW AVAILABLE:
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