Does this mean that more Batman animated features can be expected? Batwoman’s creators, at a publicity panel at the Comic-Con and in interviews since, just grin and say, “Who knows? Not us!”

Curt Geda, Batwoman’s producer/director, says that because the Batman animated features are “movies,” the public tends to assume that they are made in the manner of theatrical animated features which are usually publicized as being in production for three or four years, carefully crafted over a long period by a team of several writers and hundreds of animators collaborating closely together, and so forth. “Actually,” says Geda, “a straight-to-video production like the Batman movies is more similar to a TV production. Warner Bros. Animation today is primarily a TV production studio, and its straight-to-video features are considered an offshoot of its TV productions. They are often done in down time, to keep a crew together between TV series.”

The Penguin, Bane, Rupert Thorne and Carleton Duquesne all team up against Batman in Mystery of Batwoman.

The ultimate creators of a straight-to-video feature are less the writers and animators than the management of Warner Bros. Animation and Warner Home Video. “Warner Home Video is part of the TV production,” Geda continues. “WHV tries to involve itself with all WB animation properties, which includes Hanna-Barbera characters these days. There have also been Scooby-Doo and Tweety direct-to-videos. This production could have been one of those as much as a Batman movie. Presumably it was Sander Schwartz’s idea to do a new Batman movie. We are not working on any Batman TV series currently, so Alan Burnett who was very involved with the previous series but is working on Static Shock and Ozzy & Drix today was probably the first Batman holdover who was available.”

Supervising producer Burnett told the audience at the Comic-Con, “My boss, [WBA president] Sander Schwartz, walked into my office and said we’re going to do a Batman home video.” Burnett expanded on this for Animation World Magazine. “When I say I’m the last to know, the management people here at Warners Animation are the ones who continuously ascertain home video’s needs and try to figure out what we can sell them. We try to keep ahead of the game, though. My boss, Sander Schwartz, wanted two Batman scripts, to give home video a choice. Batwoman was the one they preferred at the time. Once Warners Home Video and Warners Animation approved the concept, we were off and running. Our one enemy was the deadline. We had to have a script finished in five weeks (and that included coming up with the concept.)”

Supervising producer Alan Burnett’s long standing professional relationship with writer Michael Reaves helped streamline the writing process for this project.

The Batman TV animation creators are familiar with the 60-year-old comic-book canon, but do not consider themselves bound to follow tradition. Burnett says, “I wanted to do a Batwoman, but a more mysterious Batwoman than what Kathy Kane of the ‘60s offered. The costume was also going to be completely revamped. (Do you remember Kathy Kane’s original outfit? Oy.) This was going to be a Batwoman for now, not then. Even so, I have an affection for the old Kathy Kane, and managed to get her name in the show, sort of.”

Burnett has been with WBA since Batman started in 1992. To write Batwoman, he called in Michael Reaves, the story editor of the first animated series. “The Batwoman project came as a surprise,” Reaves says. “I had left WB Animation after working on the 85 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. My contract expired, and I left just as they had their screening of the first cut of the Mask of the Phantasm feature. I went to Disney to work on Gargoyles [as producer and story editor], and then to DreamWorks [he was producer of the Invasion America animated TV series]. Alan and I kept in touch, and one day he phoned out of the blue and asked me to write this new Batman direct-to-video feature. I said ‘yes’ — actually, I jumped at it. I was happy to get back to Gotham City and hang out there again for awhile.”

The Batwoman plot had already been approved by the time Burnett called Reaves. “The obvious reason for using Batwoman,” Reaves says, “is that instant interest in the movie is generated with the name. It’s a no-brainer — we wanted to use a character from the ‘Batman family,’ and, since Batgirl had already been done and we already had a Robin, there weren’t a whole lot of characters left. Batwoman had the added advantage of some ‘legitimacy’ in that there had been a Batwoman character in the comic’s earlier years. But there was no pressure to use the original Kathy Kane version. (We did use a version of the name.) We wanted to re-invent her just as we’d re-invented Batman 10 years ago.”