Movies - TV
How Alfred Hitchcock Greatly Influenced Batman: The Animated Series
By JOE ROBERTS
Many things set "Batman: The Animated Series" apart from other cartoons, and that was by design. Co-creator Bruce Timm has spoken about wanting to make the show appeal to adults as well as kids, distinguishing it from popular shows at the time such as "Transformers" or "G.I. Joe," and fellow writer Paul Dini helped to evolve that vision.
To steer clear of typical Saturday morning fare, Dini set about infusing the scripts with the now-famous film noir aspects. However, he also drew from the master himself, Alfred Hitchcock: "When I saw where Alan [Burnett] was going with it, I started writing more toward that sensibility, looking at a lot of Hitchcock and film noir, and ways to play it like little mini-movies."
The Hitchcock influence became very apparent as the show went on — both subtly and directly. In Season 1, the episode "Vendetta" saw Batman thumbing through files only to flip past a folder marked "N. Bate" — a clear reference to the disturbed main character of Hitchcock's "Psycho" — and the entire episode "Off Balance" took obvious cues from "Vertigo."
Elsewhere the series borrowed from Hitch in innumerable other ways. Not just in terms of the danger, suspense, and mystery aesthetics on which it so heavily relied, but in terms of the music, which often veered into territory that recalled the great composer and frequent Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Hermann. That's especially obvious in the aforementioned "Off Balance."