Conflict Among the Staff of Batman Beyond?

[Karkull]

It has been previously established that the development of Batman Beyond was chaotic, as the creative team had to create a new show from scratch in a limited window of time while, at the same time, wrapping up production of Superman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures. However, one comment from freelance writer Evan Dorkin, co-writer of "Splicers," from a 2006 World's Finest interview caught my attention at the time:

Working on Batman Beyond was more of an eye-opener than working on Superman, because we got to see what it was like to work on a show that wasn't firing on all cylinders. We learned about how budgeting affects a script or episode, what it's like to work on a show without a complete [Series Bible], and how writers and board artists can extensively alter your script. We didn't experience many of those things -- at least not to that degree -- on Superman.

Other than that, the biggest surprise was that the WB unit had a rift of sorts between the writers and the artists, more or less two camps that didn't always get along and didn't always communicate well enough. It affected at least one script of ours, the Batman Beyond one ["Splicers"]. Very weird. But we were able to avoid office politics because we were far away, low-level freelancers, and no threat to anyone.

I was curious about that alleged rift for a while, and then, recently, I stumbled upon this passage from Stan Berkowitz's new memoir Beyond the Bat: Secrets of a Superhero Scribe:

At a traditional animation studio, the lead animators are usually considered the auteurs, but [then-head of Kids' WB! and Warner Bros. Animation Jean MacCurdy] clearly favored the writers. She'd meet with her two dozen or so writers one morning a week, but there'd be no similar meeting with the artists. We'd all get together in a conference room where there was a big marble table shaped like the Warner Bros. logo. The stated purpose was for each of us to give her a progress report on whatever we were writing, but it was really more like semi-improvised entertainment for her. A few of us had actually been standup comedians, so the meetings were often just plain comedy -- two dozen court jesters performing for a benevolent monarch who needed a weekly laugh or two.

Considering the easy access to the boss, it sounds like the writers wielded a considerable bit of power ... power that the artists may not have had comparative access to.

However, Jean was not the only people with power, such as how WB President Jamie Kellner greenlit Batman Beyond around January 1998, and she eventually was replaced as head of Kids' WB! in early 1999. And, according to the 2021 IGN retrospective on Batman Beyond, it was apparent that the artists sort of took center stage, designing the characters and world first, and then the writers had to kind of build on what the artists created. In addition, according to Bruce Timm, the writers had to deal with wrapping their head around a new Batman series that was not about Bruce Wayne:

Literally all [the writers’] pitches were about Bruce Wayne. And you know what? I love old man Bruce Wayne. I think he’s fascinating and fun, because he’s ancient, and he’s cranky, and he’s more of a bastard than he ever was, but he’s not the star of our show. Terry is the star of our show. And nobody could relate to him. They were like, “Oh, but we’re all 50-year-old men. We don’t know how to write for a teenage boy.” And I was like, “You’re a writer. Use your ******* imagination. If you can’t write this show, then maybe you ought to find another show.”

I’m overselling it. Bruce was an equal partner. But he was not the main character. And it was just really hard to get everybody to think outside of the standard Batman box. All of our freelance writers, nobody understood it. So, we literally had to write all of the stories in-house. And again, we didn’t have the time. All of this stuff was just happening instantaneously. It was insane. I had never experienced anything like it.

Maybe it's nothing, but I wonder if this is the friction between the writers and artists during Batman Beyond that Evan Dorkin spoke of. Consider: with BTAS, STAS, and TNBA, there were established worlds that they were adapting, allowing the writers to do their thing and the artists to create material for them. But with Batman Beyond, a show that they had to create whole cloth in a short span of time, they kind of just let the artists go nuts and thought about the backstories later. Think about it: you're a writer who's working on a show where there's no Series Bible, the characters are coming out as the visuals are invented, and the only character you're sure of personality-wise is Bruce Wayne. No wonder there was tension.

Am I seeing things that aren't there, or does anybody have any additional information to add?

 

[Yojimbo]

I remember something about them not doing a bible but I forget why and Tucker and Murakami going to town on just near random designs. I think the former did at least 30 villain concepts. I'm sure they delve into this on a commentary track or one of the special features but I don't think it was office politics. They were juggling 3 shows at once and had to motor it to make BB on time.

AnimeFantastique #4, Winter 1999

• Who: Bruce Timm
• Quote: For the villains, we didn't want to just use Joker 2000 or Two Face 2000 or Clayface 2000. We wanted to come up with all new villains that somehow echoed the old villains and at the same time were new, and made sense in this more science fictiony type world. James Tucker did about 30 drawings of all these villain types. I saw one drawing and said, 'Wow! What’s that?!'

I suppose this counts as conflict but there some tiffs during "Rats!"

• Batman Beyond The Complete Third Season Inside Batman Beyond Season 3, 1:41-2:21
• Who: Bruce Timm
• Quote: "Anyhow, so Glen pitched the idea to Alan, and Alan tried to make it work as a story. Glen and I were in Japan and Alan faxed the outline to the story to the hotel, and I'm reading it and I'm going, "Oh, Glen's not gonna like this." And I get to the end and not only does Terry not make the date with Dana, Dana gets so mad at him, she dumps him, and then Terry goes to Max, and, you know, he's pouring his heart out to Max and they end up making out. And I was just, like--I got furious. Not only was Glen gonna be mad but I was furious. Like...I immediately called Alan back in the States from Japan, and I'm yelling and screaming at him, "You can't do this. If you're not gonna do the story the way Glen was originally gonna write it, then don't even do it!""
• Source: Batman Beyond The Complete Third Season Inside Batman Beyond Season 3, 2:27-2:35
• Who: Paul Dini
• Quote: "You came in dragging the paper next to you and going, "Jeez! What does he want out of this? What does he want? I mean, I'm trying to work with it. But I don't know. It's like...""
• Source: Batman Beyond The Complete Third Season Inside Batman Beyond Season 3, 3:02-3:09
• Who: Alan Burnett
• Quote: "The whole series, the whole life, you know with one girlfriend, one steady. And I just wanted to break that up."

 

[j.r.]

it's always interesting hearing the behind-the-scenes happenings for beyond because it seems like there were a lot of hurdles to overcome. it was a brand new take on the character, so there were bound to be rifts somewhere down the line. thankfully none of it affected the show's quality in any major way.

 

[Karkull]

I remember something about them not doing a bible but I forget why and Tucker and Murakami going to town on just near random designs. I think the former did at least 30 villain concepts. I'm sure they delve into this on a commentary track or one of the special features but I don't think it was office politics. They were juggling 3 shows at once and had to motor it to make BB on time.

I'm just speculating that the writers appearing to take a backseat to the artists for Batman Beyond may have added to the tension of juggling three shows at once on a changing, more restrictive Kids' WB!

 

[Yojimbo]

I'm just speculating that the writers appearing to take a backseat to the artists for Batman Beyond may have added to the tension of juggling three shows at once on a changing, more restrictive Kids' WB!

I don't know. I think by the Kids WB! era, things were run different than the Fox/BTAS era. That was 1 show. Now it's 3 shows at once, soon to be 4 then 5. By Batman Beyond they were in a time crunch to get it done. To make it happen, perhaps they threw out the rule book and were improvising, and the writers didn't like that lack of structure. Off the top of my head, Rich Fogel and Stan Berkowitz kept working with them heading into JL and JLU. But others like Steve Gerber, Dorkin & Dyer didn't. Was that because of a rift or they moved onto other projects (I think they worked on anime projects in the 2000s)? Idk, I'm skeptical there were any big rifts.

 

[Karkull]

Evan Dorkin said rifts; I said tension. Based on my research, I think the first year or two at Kids' WB! were actually pretty lenient (Dini went on record saying how they got away with a lot on Superman prior to TNBA), what with them being who they were, the show they were doing, and the fact that their bosses were busy setting up a new network. However, a few years in after things settled they began to change, and the network execs became more draconian, as Boyd Kirkland discussed in a 2000 CC interview.

Maybe Dorkin was mistaken, but the scenario is certainly possible, given the dynamics going on at the time.

 

[Yojimbo]

Evan Dorkin said rifts; I said tension. Based on my research, I think the first year or two at Kids' WB! were actually pretty lenient (Dini went on record saying how they got away with a lot on Superman prior to TNBA), what with them being who they were, the show they were doing, and the fact that their bosses were busy setting up a new network. However, a few years in after things settled they began to change, and the network execs became more draconian, as Boyd Kirkland discussed in a 2000 CC interview.

Maybe Dorkin was mistaken, but the scenario is certainly possible, given the dynamics going on at the time.

Robert Goodman has been on record many times on Watchtower Database that working with the network when he was running The Zeta Project was pretty terrible to the point they wanted the threat of the week to be weather (which you can see in a few episodes).

• Watchtower Database, 49:30-49:50, 51:30-51:45, 52:03-52:05
• Posted: October 30, 2020 (originally September 2020)
• Quote: The real reason the Zeta Project ended was I quit. And I quit because the network made it impossible to do the show I wanted to do. They were continually pushing over the course of the show and you can see it hurting the show more and more over time. To keep it kid friendly, their version of kid friendly was no fighting, no bad guys, they had it in their heads that kids were scared by fighting on television and didn't want to see it. That kids didn't like bad guys...It had reached a point on Zeta Project between basically by the end of season 2 where I couldn't get any stories through the network except where the bad guy is weather. That's why hurricane. Flood...And the network had gotten to the point where they were dictating.
• What Kids WB! wanted for Season 3
• Link: Watchtower Database, 52:17-52:43, 52:52-53:12
• Posted: October 30, 2020 (originally September 2020)
• Quote: The network hated the whole Dr. Selig story from the beginning. They hated the Z--they hated that point, the serialized plot they originally bought. They had basically told us we were doing season three, it was going to be 'resolve all that.' It's why the network wanted me to kill Dr. Selig. And I wanted to leave a cliffhanger he was still alive. They actually forced me to have it seemed to...Their pitch was: we come back, Dr. Selig is dead, that's over and basically turn the show into Scooby-Doo in that Ro and Zee are understood to be good guys solving crimes. And I-I-I said you are welcome to keep doing that. I'm not their guy anymore.

Joseph Kuhr noted they wanted "Taffy Time" to be in a more 'kid friendly environment'.

 

[Karkull]

Wow. That tracks with Alan Burnett's comments about Static Shock and Kirkland's aforementioned comments. It makes you wonder if, historically, Fox Kids was better for the DCAU over Kids' WB! overall, or whether Tim Burton's '89 Batman film was right place, right time for BTAS to get special dispensation (compared to Fox's other animated lineup at the time). And the early STAS episodes got by on BTAS' reputation and the fact that the WB network had not yet gotten their crap together to effectively micromanage.

 

[Revelator]

Jean MacCurdy's departure as president of Kids’ WB! programming in 1999 might have something to do with the network's change for the worse. We know that she was an enlightened executive, who in her time at WB Animation and Kids' WB gave the DCAU staff a good deal of creative freedom. The link Karkull included in his first post mentions that MacCurdy's departure was "part of a larger reorganization that will transform Kids’ WB! (formerly operated under the auspices of Warner Bros. TV Animation) into an in-house operation." Warner Bros. TV Animation had been MacCurdy's realm as well, so it's not surprising that that WBA products like the DCAU had her protection. But when Kids’ WB! moved out of her control and directly into that of the WB network, this might have accounted for the increasing lack of freedom for the DCAU and its eventual departure from Kids' WB.

 

[Cartoonfan13]

Jean MacCurdy's departure as president of Kids’ WB! programming in 1999 might have something to do with the network's change for the worse. We know that she was an enlightened executive, who in her time at WB Animation and Kids' WB gave the DCAU staff a good deal of creative freedom. The link Karkull included in his first post mentions that MacCurdy's departure was "part of a larger reorganization that will transform Kids’ WB! (formerly operated under the auspices of Warner Bros. TV Animation) into an in-house operation." Warner Bros. TV Animation had been MacCurdy's realm as well, so it's not surprising that that WBA products like the DCAU had her protection. But when Kids’ WB! moved out of her control and directly into that of the WB network, this might have accounted for the increasing lack of freedom for the DCAU and its eventual departure from Kids' WB.

It's a great thing Justice League and Justice League Unlimited was rejected by Kids WB. And went to Cartoon Network. Because CN had enlightened executives unlike the WB Network.

 

[Revelator]

If memory serves, the Cartoon Network executive who greenlit Justice League was Mike Lazzo, who programmed the network during its first decade, when it started producing its own content, and also created and ran Adult Swim. So CN definitely had more adventurous executives at the time. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of BTAS at Fox in the early 1990s--the network was young and had executives who wanted to show what it could do by pouring resources into quality productions. The danger period comes afterward, when the network has fully established itself, different executives have taken power, and less risks are taken.

 

[Yojimbo]

If memory serves, the Cartoon Network executive who greenlit Justice League was Mike Lazzo, who programmed the network during its first decade, when it started producing its own content, and also created and ran Adult Swim. So CN definitely had more adventurous executives at the time. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of BTAS at Fox in the early 1990s--the network was young and had executives who wanted to show what it could do by pouring resources into quality productions. The danger period comes afterward, when the network has fully established itself, different executives have taken power, and less risks are taken.

Yes, that is correct. He called up Mike Lazzo and he immediately agreed to do it over the phone to Timm's surprise. He mentioned it at this forum at least once.

 

[Karkull]

I love the fact that Mike Lazzo greenlit Justice League without even watching the sizzle reel that they created. He was so gung ho about the project that he literally needed no arm twisting.