MAD HATTER BATMAN SERIES

If you need more BTAS commentary now, we have every episode of the series ranked from the worst to the best!įun Jug Media, LLC (operating ) has affiliate partnerships with various companies. Next week, Batman: The Animated Series brings us another powerful encounter between Scarecrow and Batman that was likely inspired by a pair of Batman stories and may have laid the groundwork for Batman Begins and the Batman: Arkham Asylum game. The show is able to play in surprisingly mature spaces while looking downright silly and never stepping into the outright macabre. The Mad Hatter is a great Batman villain in general, but his Whimsicreepy nature makes him a perfect fit for Batman: The Animated Series. With how he feels the world has slighted him, it’s unlikely he would’ve stayed happy with that arrangement for long. Tetch’s response to even minor provocation, though, reminds us that, indeed, he would not have stopped with Alice. I can even see the defense attorney arguing in court that Batman essentially created the Mad Hatter and his future exploits by humiliating Tetch when he was crying out for help. At this stage, it literally doesn’t go any further than that. He feels what he thinks is love and wants the opportunity to express it. He’s a lonely man seeking connections in the world. Part of what sets Tetch apart from so many of Batman’s other villains is that what he wants in this moment is very personal. It’s easy to punch someone in the head, but hard to punch someone in the mind. While Bats ends up on top as usual, the Hatter’s particular skillset seems to directly target Batman’s fear of hurting innocents. The way Tetch’s mind-controlled minions look in their Alice-themed costumes is downright spooky, with their little human faces poking out of these hilariously oversized costumes.Īnd then there’s Tetch’s boss, who’d threatened him with occupational decapitation earlier, threatening Batman with actual decapitation. I’m going to coin a term for it: Whimsicreepy. As Batman starts pursuing Tetch, the story fixation starts to really take shape.Īs Batman enters Gotham’s Wonderland park – because of course, it has a Wonderland park – the show could’ve gotten cartoonish, but it doesn’t. This is a psychological sci-fi story about a guy with a pair of fixations on a person and a story. Here, we start to really see how the limitations of the show’s timeslot and audience pushed the team behind Batman: The Animated Series to be more creative. Of course, the look on his face when he finds out that her boyfriend, Billy, has hurt her, tells us that his understanding of right and wrong is on deeply unstable ground. He says that it would be “better to withdraw like a gentleman.” It occurs to him, of course, that his mind-control technology could make her behave however he likes, but he doesn’t want to reduce her to a “soulless shell.” Tetch, voiced by Roddy McDowall, carries a forest-sized flame for his assistant Alice, and finds out that she has a boyfriend. One thing that sets Tetch apart from most of Batman’s other villains is that he knows what he’s doing is wrong right from the start and says as much.

His assistant Alice has the misfortune of a certain name and golden blonde hair Tetch fixates on her. Tetch is obsessed with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and views his whole world through that lens. Things start going downhill quickly, though. Tetch’s boss, on the other hand, threatens decapitation if Tetch underperforms again. When Bruce steps in to see him, the billionaire is warm, congenial, and generous. Jervis Tetch is an employee of Wayne Enterprises working on neural microchip technology. The first interaction between Bruce Wayne and Jervis Tetch doesn’t look at all like their final interaction.

Mad hatter batman