The angst is gone from this Batman, replaced by a dry sense of humor and irony. Tucker decided the Caped Crusader couldn't be brooding and unapproachable if he were to team up with fellow crime fighters.

Bader describes the show's humor as "a kind of high-wire act. It has to maintain the action and suspense that Batman naturally has and inject that with a sense of humor at the same time. I just to try to steer that ship when we're all together -- I make sure I'm in all the recording sessions so the guest stars can hear what the tone of the show is; it's difficult to get just from the script."

Set to a jazzy, Jonny Quest/Lalo Schifrin-style music score, Tucker's show is an equally fast-moving affair. The show's structure is definitely unconventional. It starts with a completely standalone teaser that likely as not begins with Batman smack dab in the middle of a villain's death trap. Tucker describes it as "a mini-cartoon with Batman plus a guest star that runs three minutes tops." After the title, the main story -- which is totally different from the teaser -- teams Batman up with a different hero. "It's actually two adventures in one episode of the show. I always had a love of the old Space Ghost shows with three six-minute shorts put together -- Space Ghost, Dino Boy, Space Ghost. I wanted this show to have that feel. It's cramming a lot into a standard 22-minute cartoon, so far it's worked great."

While it might strike adults used to more linear narratives as extremely arbitrary storytelling, "in this show, arbitrary's okay. A kid will figure it out -- they make up their own connections to things. If you give them basic story points, they piece it together, or they don't care. The plot isn't something they fixate on as much as 'what's he doing now?' We kind of go at it in spirit like Teen Titans did. That show didn't weigh itself down with too much elaboration, it wasn't high drama. It's the opposite of Justice League, where everything was very labyrinthian -- you had to watch 10 years of cartoons to get what was going on."

Will the real Batman please stand up? Tucker feels it's unlikely that the plethora of Caped Crusaders will confuse audiences. For one, "the demo[graphic] we're shooting for with this version hopefully hasn't seen The Dark Knight. I would really be worried about any kid who saw that movie because it disturbed me and I'm well past that demographic.

"This Batman hopefully works for a young audience. It's hard to get kids involved in comics now; there definitely needs to be entry-level stuff for them. The markets have been divvied up and [the superhero genre] is very inbred. You go to a comic book store now and everyone's my age. That's fine, but when I started [reading comics] you could buy them in a grocery store or the 7-11. Now for the most part you can only get them in a comic book store. Other genres are sapping away entry-level kids -- video games are doing what comics used to do, and the comic book stores are pretty much geared to people who've already read a million comics. The companies are aware of this and it is a problem."

The question of whether those adult fans will object to a kid-friendly Batman series leads to a tangent on the subject of the fans themselves. "They're very spoiled. This is a great time to be a fan -- superhero movies have never been more popular, they've made it into the mainstream, but the message boards are filled with people complaining.

"You can never really please these people, which isn't our objective anyway, but obviously the fans now had to have some entry point and it wasn't a hardcore film like The Dark Knight. It was probably something goofy like He-Man or Transformers -- for me it was the Adam West Batman. People complain about doing a lighter take on Batman, but things they love nostalgically were all light.

Tucker posits that there is a Batman for everyone and his can serve as an introduction to the idea of superheroes for kids.

"There should be a Batman for everyone," Tucker continues. "He's part of American culture. He's Paul Bunyan or John Henry, a mythical character. Kevin Conroy [who voiced Batman for The Animated Series through Batman Beyond] equated him to Hamlet -- he's one of those characters that can withstand adaptation. He's malleable -- you can do a kinder, gentler Batman or a really hardcore, practically R-rated Batman. His origin is something you can mold. You can make it an optimistic story about a man who had a horrible childhood, but is overcoming it, or you can take it more the Dark Knight way, where it's messed him up and even though he's trying to fight the good fight, he still doesn't win.

"The Brave and the Bold is the kind of show that can introduce kids to the idea of superheroes. The minute they've saturated themselves on this show, they can go up to The Batman, Justice League or The Animated Series. But I don't think I'm doing a show that an adult of a certain age can't get something out of. Everyone knows I have a love for this stuff. I don't go into these things to be puerile or idiotic -- there's a lot of entertainment value across the board. The bottom line is it's got to appeal to a six-year-old who wants the toy. I'm thinking back to when I was kid wanting a toy that looked like the cartoon Batman and never getting it; the best we had were those little Mego dolls that had oven mitts for hands.

"I'm one of the luckiest guys in the world," Tucker concludes. "This is my dream job -- going from a four-year-old watching Batman on TV and doodling pictures of him, to actually getting to do it. I can die happy after this, because I've done what I've wanted to do."

Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.