There's only one reasonable explanation.

Ariana Eylül 26, 2022

If you've read any of my past posts in which I excitedly blogged my way through certain episodes of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold cartoon, then you know I'm a pretty big fan of the series.

In addition to being a really fun, really funny, really well voice-acted cartoon seemingly aimed at both little kids and the most obsessive adult DC Comics fans, the show consistently marries the particular design skills of many of the great artists to work for DC over the decades (particularly Dick Sprang and Jack Kirby) into a seamless, consistent whole while retaining the individual artists' personal aesthetics. It also seeks out the weirdest and most obscure DC-owned characters available as guest stars, demonstrating how contrary to popular fan opinion even the wackiest characters have modern resonance and potential kid-friendly commercial appeal. It presents a Batman we haven't really seen in any non-comics media since the seventies or so, a life-loving, wise-cracking Bob Haney-style Batman who is nevertheless the ultimate bad-ass, know-it-all detective and obsessed crime fighter we've come to know and love since the mid-eighties or so.

There was a point during the first episode I saw—in which Batman teamed up with Plastic Man to fight Gentleman Ghost, and then crash-landed on Dinosaur Island where Batman got turned into a gorilla, that I wondered if maybe they weren't just making the show just for me. How else to explain the disproportionately large roles given to Plastic Man and Aquaman, two of my favorite superheroes, who aren't exactly at the top of many fans' Favorite Superheroes lists?

That suspicion eventually passed, when I realized how many other folks out there love the show just as much—if not more—than I do.

I haven't been watching it too regularly, as I lack cable and I'm not much of a TV person—90210 and Dancing With The Stars excepted—and I just recently caught up with the second season.

Now I know they weren't making this show for me. Instead, I apparently found a magic lamp at some point during the past few years, and accidentally rubbed it, unbeknowest to me releasing a wish-granting genie. Since I released it unawares and thus didn't actually make a wish, the genie must have read my mind, and then went off to Hollywood, got a job in animation and helped developed Batman: The Brave and The Bold's second season in an effort to duplicate my un-asked for, unconscious desires.

How else to explain a run of episodes that included

Plastic Man's pal Woozy Winks,

Captain Marvel fighting a Dr. Sivana that looks like he leapt right out of a C.C. Beck comic (oh, and the Sivana kids and Black Adam, too),

Aquaman packing Mera and a sullen Arthur Jr. (wearing his dad's 1986 miniseries costume!) going on an RV vacation of the surface world,

The Teen Titans as little kids,

Batman flying the killer skies with Enemy Ace,

The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh (!!!),

Batman wearing Plastic Man as a giant boot...in order to kick a Bigfoot in the face...in the middle of a fight scene against an entire gang of Bigfoots,

Batman wearing the Metal Men as a Batman costume...

...allowing him to use their fantastic metallic powers to do battle with their foes,

and Doc Magnus undercover as a space pimp (wearing his Metal Man Gold as false gold teeth)

And that's before we even get into in what is perhaps the greatest episode of anything on TV ever, "Death Race to Oblivion," in which someone—probably that genie I was talking about—had the great idea to splice DC super-comics with Wacky Races and Death Race 2000, resulting in an episode in which Mongul eschews the whole forced gladiatorial combat thing for an every person-for-themself road race between various superheroes and supervillans in their various super-vehicles.

So you've got Batman and Joker in the Batmobile and Jokermobile (respectively), Green Arrow in his Arrow Car, Gentleman Ghost in a souped-up hearse, Steppenwolf in a monstrous polluting tank thing, The Huntress on a purple motorcycle, Black Manta in a big War of the Worlds-looking manta crab walker thing, Green Lantern Guy Gardner in a ring-generated muscle car,

Woozy Winks driving Plastic Man in the form of a race car,

and Catwoman in her Catmobile, with cat-scratching action!

Who wins? Who loses? And how do the heroes defeat Mongul? Well, it involves Batman transforming the Batmobile into a giant robot battle suit and, oh my God,