Movies - TV
The New Batman Adventures Series Used Scarecrow To Pull One Over On The Censors
By JOE ROBERTS
While much changed between Bruce Timm’s original “Batman: The Animated Series” and its follow-up “The New Batman Adventures,” including more focus on other members of the Bat family, many processes stayed the same. The team famously had numerous run-ins with the Standards and Practices department, but they had developed tricks like deploying “decoys” to get around censors.
Timm’s team used these tactics in the new series, perhaps most notably in Episode 11, “Over the Edge,” where Batgirl is seemingly killed after being knocked off a building by the Scarecrow. Voice actor Kevin Conroy explained, “In animation, you can’t actually kill anybody” — but Timm revealed a workaround where he “really pulled one over on the Broadcast Standards and Practice people.”
The end of the episode reveals that Batgirl hallucinated all the events due to being exposed to Scarecrow’s fear toxin. In addition to the “it was all a dream” excuse, Timm needed to change the camera angle from the wide shot of Batgirl falling and hitting the car carrying Commissioner Gordon to his perspective inside the impacted vehicle, an arguably more disturbing scene.