This is a little unusual - I thought the Superman episode was pretty good and all, but now that it's aired, the response has been pretty dizzying. It got some nice write-ups at Wired, io9, Topless Robot, Newsarama and even the Onion's A.V. Club (although they listed Dana Delany as the voice of Lois (it's Sirena Irwin) and misspelled Mxyzptlk - how can you misspell Mxyzptlk?), as well as an overwhelmingly positive response in the usual places. Still, it's weird how they all seem to make grim note of the fact that the show's in its last season - let's focus on the positive, people!
If we knew how much everyone liked Superman, we would have... well, we would have done what we did, since we didn't have permission to use him until now. Anyways, there are a couple of folks working up some annotations - check 'em out! And yes, Michael Jelenic does know about a certain website, which did provide some inspiration for the story.
So I'm glad the show went over so well... I hope the rest of the season goes over half as well! And oh yeah, I guess Season One Part Two has been out on DVD for a couple weeks now, so go buy that if you haven't yet. And watch Bat-Mite this Friday at 6:30!
Tomorrow night at 6:30 on Cartoon Network - this guy!
Sometimes we dig pretty deep into the deeper recesses of DC's library for some obscure heroes to team up with Batman, but this time we outdid ourselves... we went all the way back to 1939 to dig out a hero named... lemme check my notes here... Superman! Anyways, he'll be on the show tomorrow, so check it out.
Cartoon Network has announced airdates for a couple of new B:TBatB episodes, starting with Battle of the Superheroes!, which is actually the fifth episode of Season 3, airing March 25th. That's the one with Superman, but I can't say anything much about that until Warner Bros. decides to let some stuff leak out, so instead, I'll use this post to gab on at further length about Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases!, which also had its airdate announced. And that airdate is...
April the First!
That's pretty much the perfect airdate for Bat-Mite. Well played, Cartoon Network!
But now that an airdate has been announced, I feel hesitant about posting any more B-MP:B'sSC spoilers. So that spoiler-filled Batboy post I was planning will have to wait, but I wanted to post something more than the news about the airdates, so here's the compromise - I'll post stuff from the Bat-Mite episode that never actually made it to the air. No spoilers in footage that isn't actually in the show, right?
Normally we don't have much in the way of deleted footage, but Bat-Mite has a knack for messing up our normal schedule one way or the other. This time around, when we finished the storyboard, we found that it was a couple minutes short of a full show, so we had to scramble to make some stuff up to patch up those gaps. We put back some of the gags that had initially been cut from the Batboy and Rubin section, James wrote the bit where Bat-Mite magically adds fight scenes to the Scooby section, I wrote a shark safety PSA, and James came up with one last thing - a commercial parody that we would have squeezed into the act break during the manga section.
First, a little history - for those who didn't live in Canada in 1987, you might have missed these department store commercials (although they were being rediscovered on the internet around the time we were working on B-MP:B'sSC).
They were directed by the amazing Greg Duffel in Toronto at his Lightbox Studio, with designs by the great Ty Templeton.
That's also Greg as the voice of Robin, by the way.
As a side note, these commercials eventually led to Greg's studio being hired to do some test animation that was used to sell a little show you may have heard of called Batman: The Animated Series.
So along with all of the other stuff, James wrote a script for our own fake commercial, and we whipped this little number up (pardon the crudeness of the drawings, I had to bang it out pretty quick)-
But then, a funny thing happened - when we added all the new stuff into the show, we were actually a minute OVER. So we cut the commercial, since it was easiest to lift out and also, it saved us from doing a bunch of new designs in an episode that already had to be completely re-designed three times over already.
That's it for now - the show will finally be on the air in a month, so everyone will be able to enjoy all the stuff's that's actually in the show, and I'll be more comfortable posting some more spoiler-heavy Bat-Mite stuff again. Superman news before that, hopefully!
