Collect ‘spherical your loved ones hi fi and maintain on tight to your cereal, as a result of the time has come for a return to the macabre tales of life and demise in Gotham Metropolis. It was one yr in the past that HBO Max and Blue Ribbon Content material took us again to the Golden Age of house leisure, earlier than anybody even knew what a tv set or online game was, with Batman: The Audio Adventures. The star-studded audio collection follows the custom of 1937’s The Shadow, or maybe extra aptly 1940’s The Adventures of Superman, the place households would coalesce across the dial to listen to the perils and triumphs of their favourite heroes.
Eighty years later, Batman: The Audio Adventures brings basic superheroes again to one in every of their first mediums…with a contemporary replace. The manufacturing high quality, the all-star forged and the whip-smart writing which turns from hilarious to terrifying on a dime is sufficient to hold anybody from altering that dial.
Now, Batman: The Audio Adventures’ much more formidable second season is accessible to stream on HBO Max, and it’s 2021 debut season is now freely out there on all podcast platforms. Should you’re new to this all-audio tackle Gotham, right here’s what you’ve been lacking…
The Comedy
Have you ever ever performed the Batman: Arkham video video games and lingered some time within the shadows earlier than taking down some super-villain’s employed assist? If not, you’ve been lacking out on what may need been the very best dialogue within the video games: the idle banter between henchmen that reveals a complete lot about what it’s wish to be only a common joe in Gotham. Which bosses have the very best perks? How do you keep away from ticking the incorrect individuals off? What’s this Batman man actually like? These little vignettes are humorous, intelligent and do some heavy lifting to make Gotham really feel like an actual, lived-in place.
Why will we carry this up? As a result of Batman: The Audio Adventures typically looks like a present written completely by the henchman banter guys. In between the adventures of a Darkish Knight caught midway between Adam West and Frank Miller, listeners are handled to disclaimer-laden commercials for Gotham tourism, newly made Joker goons getting tips about easy methods to survive their first encounter with the boss, a pitch for gasoline lamps in the summertime now that Mr. Freeze has made parole, the GCPD bomb squad buying and selling tales of their strangest circumstances, and the tragic comedy of Blabbo the Birthday Clown, who regardless of a rash of city-wide coulrophobia introduced on by the Joker, actually is only a birthday clown.
What you get in Batman: The Audio Adventures is a Gotham which delights in its personal absurdity, with out ever making the town itself a joke. The comedy, as written by Saturday Night time Reside author Dennis McNicholas, is the type which laughs alongside Batman followers as a substitute of creating enjoyable of them. These aren’t jokes about Batman; they’re the type of jokes that Gothamites would make about themselves.
The Drama
Season one in every of Batman: The Audio Adventures takes place over two weeks in February, because the Joker prepares for a Valentine’s Day scheme he dubs the “Darkish Purple Daybreak”: a chemical concoction designed to drive your entire metropolis wild with a romantic ardour that can tear the streets asunder. However Batman is a little bit preoccupied along with his personal determined scheme to reclaim the sanity of his closest buddy, Harvey Dent—whilst Harvey falls in league with the legal Penguin for an alliance which is able to carry Gotham’s underworld completely beneath their management.
Though Batman is never seen (heard?) with out Robin in The Audio Adventures, you’ll notice that Gotham’s actual dynamic duo is the unlikely pair of Catwoman and Gotham Gazette journalist Vicki Vale, uncovering the true story behind the Joker’s schemes—a conspiracy and cover-up which might shake Gotham to its core, as the reality behind what actually was taking place at Ace Chemical compounds the evening that Joker was born involves the sunshine. The premise of Joker’s transformation, and the Darkish Purple Daybreak concoction, is a pharmaceutical drug known as “JoyCure,” designed as an antidepressant to evoke euphoria in sufferers. It’s a scheme that goes all the best way as much as Mayor Hamilton Hill himself, and it’s Vicki and Catwoman who should save the town’s future whereas Batman and Robin watch over its harmful nights.
Though Two-Face’s redemption evades Batman’s grasp, the Darkish Knight does handle to avoid wasting the town from Joker’s Darkish Purple Daybreak with one exception: the newly arrived psychiatrist Dr. Harleen Quinzel, who takes a shower within the lavender concoction. What might presumably be the fallout from a psychiatrist chemically altered to be obsessive about the Joker? And what of the mysterious Scarecrow, whose personal pharmaceutical endeavors have the youth of Gotham experimenting with worry medicine to develop their psyches? Will Bruce Wayne’s dearest buddy ever discover concord inside his fractured psyche? And can Blabbo the Birthday Clown ever discover work once more, or was his father proper about him in spite of everything? These tales and extra await you in season two of Batman: The Audio Adventures.
The Stars
Possibly it’s as a result of the present is written by an SNL alum, however Batman: The Audio Adventures options among the greatest names in comedy and tv to fill out Gotham Metropolis’s skyline. Batman himself is portrayed by The Batman’s personal Jeffrey Wright. Enjoying Gordon in The Audio Adventures is the mayor of SNL himself, Keenan Thompson, in a dynamic which delectably mirrors Wright’s within the Matt Reeves movie. Different standouts embody Rosario Dawson, who feels extra at house than ever in her portrayal of Catwoman; Bobby Moynihan, who flips forwards and backwards from hilarious to horrifying as leisure magnate and crime boss the Penguin; John “Johnny Legs” Leguizamo because the frenetic Riddler; and the usually stoic Brent Spiner who performs frighteningly towards sort as a spine-chilling Joker. Additionally, a particular shout-out to Heidi Gardner, who virtually steals the entire thing because the Riddler’s hilariously unimpressed assistant, Miss Tuesday.
Becoming a member of the forged in season two is Group’s Gillian Jacobs clowning it up as an endearingly manic Harley Quinn and Bradley Whitford as Jonathan Crane, bringing a robust Hannibal Lecter presence to his Scarecrow. There’s a number of extra surprises ready for you within the forged too, however we don’t wish to give all the pieces away.
The Comedian
Oh, and did we point out there’s a comic book ebook too? Batman: The Audio Adventures is a restricted collection written by McNicholas and drawn by Anthony Marques that picks up proper the place season one leaves off, providing a trendy little bridge to the occasions of the present season and an opportunity to expertise the audio collection’ world in a visible medium—one which, appropriately, would have additionally been out there in the course of the age of radio serials.
With how a lot Batman: The Audio Adventures leans into the quirks and qualities of its medium, it might have been difficult to adapt it to the web page—a medium that’s completely devoid of audio. Happily, McNicholas and Marques embrace comics’ personal quirks and qualities, changing The Audio Adventures’ acquainted narration with textual content packing containers and rendering a Gotham that looks like a visible illustration of the old-fashioned-but-modern world we’ve solely heard till now. This Batman doesn’t put on physique armor, this Robin nonetheless wears shorts and high-tech devices, whereas they’re used, are stored to a minimal. It looks like a throwback to a extra harmless age, albeit one the place that innocence hides an undercurrent of hazard, very like the audio collection.
However what’s really fascinating is how, with the comedian collection and its second season, Batman: The Audio Adventures has grow to be as totally developed a Bat-universe because the Arkham recreation collection or the Batman Animated Universe. Sure, these heroes and villains might not be precisely like those you comply with within the DC Universe correct, however there’s now sufficient story on the market that their world feels alive. The relationships have impression. The concepts carry actual weight.
So enable your self to float again to an earlier age. Let the sounds (and sights in the event you’re studying the comics) of Gotham Metropolis envelop you. You could be stunned by how unusually contemporary all of it feels, how massive the laughs and the way horrifying the chills, and simply how a lot you’re trying ahead to that subsequent story of life and demise…
Batman: The Audio Adventures Season Two is now streaming on HBO Max. Have to get caught up? Season One is accessible on all main podcast platforms.
Alex Jaffe is the creator of our month-to-month “Ask…the Query” column and writes about TV, motion pictures, comics and superhero historical past for DC.com. Observe him on Twitter at @AlexJaffe and discover him within the DC Group as HubCityQuestion.
