Batman: he does not use guns. This is practically the whole point of him — a man so committed to a single rule that he built an entire personality, a cave, and a frankly concerning number of themed vehicles around it. So when Batman Beyond opens its very first episode with an aging Bruce Wayne pulling a gun, under a content warning slapped over the face of Bugs Bunny, you understand exactly why mainstream mom Mandy Kaplan pressed play and immediately thought: what, precisely, am I getting into?What she got into — with the help of voiceover actor and lifelong nerd Jason Yeung — is the 1999 series that aged Bruce Wayne out of the cowl and handed it to a teenager named Terry McGinnis, set in a grimy neon 2039, scored like a Nine Inch Nails B-side, and casually staffed with George Takei and Stockard Channing. It's darker than the Adam West you remember (Mandy has some feelings about a young Burt Ward that we will not be getting into here), weirder than you'd expect (one villain is essentially sentient ink; another is a sword-wielding assassin who never says a single word), and built on an idea that is genuinely, ambush-you-on-a-Saturday-morning moving: you can't do the thing you love forever, and one day you have to hand it to someone else.It snuck real grief, real ethics, and real "wait, why IS he a bat?" questions into a kids' time slot, and then got canceled before most of the world noticed. Mandy noticed. Press play.
Guest SpotlightJason Yeung is a voiceover actor who met Mandy in the voiceover world, where the two have had the pleasure of working together. A self-described huge nerd who "grew up in the space" — and who got his start working the counter at Hollywood Video and Blockbuster, hand-selling underrated gems to anyone who'd listen — Jason can, by his own admission, talk nerd stuff for forever. On this episode he makes the passionate, deeply-felt case for Batman Beyond as one of the most criminally underrated entries in the entire Batman canon.
Links & Notes

• Batman Beyond (TV series)
• Terry McGinnis / Batman
• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker — the follow-up film referenced
• Batman: The Animated Series

Cast & Crew

• Will Friedle — voice of Terry McGinnis
• Kevin Conroy — voice of Bruce Wayne
• George Takei — voice of Mr. Fixx
• Stockard Channing — voice of Commissioner Barbara Gordon
• Lauren Tom — voice of Dana Tan
• Melissa Disney — voice of Curaré (Mandy's friend)
• Kristopher Carter — Emmy-winning composer of the main theme

Batman on Screen (other adaptations referenced)

• Batman (1966 TV series) — the Adam West version
• Adam West
• Burt Ward — the original Robin
• Chris O'Donnell — the other Robin
• Joel Schumacher
• Tim Burton
• Batman & Robin (1997) — the "bat nipples" apology movie
• Batman Begins (2005)
• Christopher Nolan
• Christian Bale
• The Lego Batman Movie (2017) — Will Arnett's Batman
• Will Arnett
• Arnold Schwarzenegger — the live-action Mr. Freeze

Also Mentioned

• Firefly
• Big Hero 6 (2014)
• Boy Meets World
• Animaniacs
• Power Rangers
• Beverly Hills, 90210
• Nine Inch Nails / Trent Reznor — the theme's sonic cousin

Music

• Theme: "Wonderstruck" by Jane and the Boy
• Batman Beyond Main Theme — Kristopher Carter

Watch/Hear the Moment

• Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin apology

In the TruStory FM Universe

• Watch Me Fly… Serenity with Krissy Lenz — the episode that recruited Mandy as a Browncoat
• Sensual Creatures: Vampires, Frilly Shirts, and Interview with a Vampire with Jonny Lee Jr. — Mandy's recent vampire deep-dive (the 1994 film + the AMC series)
• Superhero Ethics with Matthew Fox — the deeper-ethics show Mandy recommends (they covered Batman Beyond)

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