General DC Animated Universe Timeline Controversy and Speculation Thread (Spoilers)

[Ed Nygma]

@Ed Nygma I don't think anyone is suggesting that time doesn't go by in the DCAU and characters never age, like in The Simpsons. That would be silly, we see Bruce in different stages of his life, Dick as a kid, as Robin in his early adult years, later Nightwing, etc.

The point is that the creators of the DCAU didn't make the shows with a fixed timeline in mind, so when people want to argue that Tim Drake has to be either 9 or 10 when he started off as Robin, and 18 or 19 when ROTJ Flashback happens, I find that totally pointless. Yes, there's evidence that that amount of time goes by, which leads to that assumption, but Tim always looks 14/15 as Robin and never younger or older. The creators didn't do that on purpose. Much less so if you think that Batman Beyond was made BEFORE Justice League and JLU. That just messed up everything a bit haha.

Honestly... they're closer to that than you might think. Bruce might as well be the same age from BTAS to JLU. And in watching a single week of BTAS back in 1992-93, you could see an episode taking place in the summer, another one where it was snowing, and then another one in the summer. They just did whatever worked best for the current episode, not for any timeline considerations.

^ That's sort of the answer to batmat's query. In Simpsons they have future episodes too where everyone aged. Of course Bruce goes from a 30 year old to 78... but do we really want to insist he was 30 from BTAS all the way to JLU? I sure don't.

Disregarding how Tim is drawn in the RotJ flashback, and all the comments made by showrunners that are not part of the material itself, there's zero fuss with everyone roughly fitting into a 'real world chronology' timeline. I don't get why this is seen as a 'stretch' or unreasonable, but okay. The impulse to want everything to be reset into Simpsons time every episode so Bruce is always 30 is a strange one to me, and seems dictated by the fact that the DCAU happens to be animated instead of at times reaching dramatic heights above that, but to each his own.

I don't think everything needs to go back to square one every time just to avoid possible confusion (kids seemed to get along fine with Superman's "I've worked hard to regain your trust" line in Secret Origins), it's just a small thing that elevates the whole enterprise with basically zero contradiction on-screen. Put even simpler, it's even said in the individual shows that people or villains are meeting Batman months after their last confrontation, so we know the time indeed passes and it's an argument over "eh, it all happened in 5 years vs 10," I guess. But the motivations are affected too by the passage of time, such as Batman growing darker and darker with his subsequent losses over years. I always thought BTAS was a character study of what loss and trauma does to people, and that informs my viewing of the whole DCAU being slightly more in our real world.

 

[Yojimbo]

I was never too bothered by Batman being in his 40s during the majority of JL/JLU because he's at his physical peak - constantly training and fighting - it would be no surprise he staves off any visible aging.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Ah, always nice to see another thinks BTAS and STAS occurred around the same time briefly. My take is a bit crazier that Superman starts out '92 around the time Batman is dealing with HARDAC and thus avoided meeting each other for a good 7-8 years.

You were probably the one who got me thinking along those lines, then. I couldn't really justify backing Superman's debut as far back as you did, but putting STAS: "Last Son of Krypton" back a couple of years to shortly before BTAS: "Time Out of Joint"? Yeah, I can make that fit in my headcanon.

True, there's no real signs of Bruce's aging from BTAS to JL, but circumstances around him do change. Robin graduates, moves on, becomes Nightwing. Tim shows up, Barbara becomes Batgirl on her own, then joins the team, he meets Superman, joins the JL, etc, etc.

Yes. I don't think I was ever arguing that none of that stuff happened. Obviously time passes in the DCAU.

Of course Bruce goes from a 30 year old to 78... but do we really want to insist he was 30 from BTAS all the way to JLU? I sure don't.

The impulse to want everything to be reset into Simpsons time every episode so Bruce is always 30 is a strange one to me

You're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying that Bruce Wayne is literally 30 throughout BTAS to JLU and I'm not arguing for the DCAU to "reset" with every episode. I'm saying that because Bruce is an animated character whose appearance/age never really changes, he is in essence the same age through all of those shows.

Kyle Baker had a great gag in his Plastic Man run where Plas looked at pictures of Batman and Robin/Nightwing through the years. Robin was aging up into adulthood, and Batman was always in his twenties.

It's the Matthew McConaughey thing. Robin gets older, but Batman stays the same age.

 

[-batmat-]

@Ed Nygma Again, I'm not saying that time doesn't go by or that Bruce is constantly 30 from BTAS to JL. Time indeed goes by, but the point is that if you try to make sense of it in a timeline, its never gonna line up perfectly, because it wasn't done with that in mind, like something like YJ was. So obsessing about it can be futile and its best to just not think about it that hard and just sit back and relax!

True, but again it doesn't bother me personally because, I've had friends and family who went unchanged from 9-16. Then once the college years came, a big change in their appearance.

The question is, they did they look 16 since they were 9, or did they look 9 until they were 16?
That's insane btw. I can't imagine someone going though something like that.

 

[Yojimbo]

The question is, they did they look 16 since they were 9, or did they look 9 until they were 16?
That's insane btw. I can't imagine someone going though something like that.

The changes were subtle each year I guess sort of like Tim in his Static and Mystery of the Batwoman appearances, lol.

 

[BigFatHairyDeal]

I never felt like BTAS was particularly continuity-heavy other than stuff like Harvey Dent's or Ra's al Ghul's character arcs. Typically, villains get busted and supposedly go to prison, but they are just roaming free in the next episode with no care given to explain how they got out. With the Joker, it was far worse because they often implied he had to have died.

I thought it was a relative strength of the show that almost every episode felt independent, like watching a Looney Tunes cartoon. Furthermore, I originally wasn't convinced that Mask of the Phantasm was in continuity with BTAS, and if there had been another episode focusing on a younger Bruce Wayne that contradicted the movie, I'd have been quite OK with it. In fact, one of the things that I disliked the most about "Epilogue" is that it tried to tie everything together.

So I like to think that there are a lot of stories within BTAS that run in parallel with one another with only a few that have beginning/middle/end paths.

 

[-batmat-]

The only thing I dislike about Mask of the Phantasm is how Bullock was so cooperative in trying to take down Batman.

He and Batman never liked each other very much, but they were always on the same side, and the fact that he trusted some new shady politician over Gordon, who himself always believed Batman was innocent, was very weird, given how highly Bullock thinks of Gordon.

Heck, Bullock even shot Batman to kill at one point.

 

[Yojimbo]

Didn't he just get drawn into Arthur Reeves' Batbashing rhetoric and really believe Batman crossed the line and started killing mobsters? Then as a result his old prejudices against Batman took over. Granted it took several years for Bullock to mellow out to I guess "frenemy" status, he still objected to Batman taking evidence like in World's Finest. Much like Waller I suppose but on a bigger scale.

 

[-batmat-]

Didn't he just get drawn into Arthur Reeves' Batbashing rhetoric and really believe Batman crossed the line and started killing mobsters? Then as a result his old prejudices against Batman took over. Granted it took several years for Bullock to mellow out to I guess "frenemy" status, he still objected to Batman taking evidence like in World's Finest. Much like Waller I suppose but on a bigger scale.

Yeah, but with Gordon not buying it, that should have sent a signal to Harvey. We had seen great moments between them before: "Just give him one for me, will you?" , or in "Vendetta" when Batman helped prove his innocence. It just seems to much of a 180 too suddenly.

He still thinks Batman's a bit of a freak and doesn't like him that much, but suddenly shooting to kill is a bit too much for me.

 

[Ed Nygma]

Didn't he just get drawn into Arthur Reeves' Batbashing rhetoric and really believe Batman crossed the line and started killing mobsters? Then as a result his old prejudices against Batman took over. Granted it took several years for Bullock to mellow out to I guess "frenemy" status, he still objected to Batman taking evidence like in World's Finest. Much like Waller I suppose but on a bigger scale.

I feel that Bullock mellowed out for good and started to trust him in The Laughing Fish, and by the time of A Bullet For... they were finally reluctant allies, recognizing each other as fellow agents of the law. Bats accepted that Bullock wasn't dirty and Harv accepted he maybe wasn't a vigilante menace. So there is subtle continuity between them. I personally think MotP takes place after the original run of BTAS and maybe before Batman & Robin, but it doesn't really matter.

Just on the subject, I really do disagree with the notion that there's no continuity or timeline to the show. There's a vague one, which is of course demonstrable in the flashbacks to Year One, Dick ages from boy to Nightwing, TNBA is two years after AoB&R, Joker was 'born' seven years ago, etc etc. So I think it's a fallacy that anyone who subscribes to this notion is an obsessive fanboy with Watchtower Database-esque mappings of where each episode fits. That's not the case, I don't really care where the flashback in The Clock King takes place in relation to the one in If You're So Smart, etc. But we know from in-show evidence they roughly move chronologically, heck Pretty Poison has to be before Two Face which is before Second Chance, so the show spells it out for us. It's not Animaniacs where the whole idea is pointless or every episode contradicts the others.

There just seems to be so much resistance about 'taking it seriously' when for myself all I really care about is that every episode and Justice League are not all jammed into one year of the characters' lives when Batman is 29, because that's silly. Let them breathe, imagine there's a weight of time on their actions instead of 'don't think about it so seriously, there's no continuity!' It is timeless with stand alone episodes, and it does move through a pretty strict timeline, both can be true at once.