HBO Max planning to revive Batman: The Animated Series?

Kevin Smith can barely contain his excitement as he shares reports of a revival of Batman: The Animated Series on HBO Max.

There have been so, so many versions of Batman over the years, from Adam West’s goofy crime-buster to Michael Keaton’s gothic dark knight to Christian Bale’s grounded vigilante to Ben Affleck’s barrel-chested tough guy, and now whatever Robert Pattinson will give us in the new movie.

But even after all these years, one of the most beloved versions of the character was the one we met in Batman: The Animated Series, which produced 85 episodes while running on Fox Kids back in the ’90s. The version of the character created by showrunner Bruce Timm is so popular that it’s stayed with us for decades, with Kevin Conroy returning to voice Batman in several subsequent movies, TV shows and video games. Mark Hamill’s voice work as the Joker might be even more iconic, and oh yeah: the series invented the character of Harley Quinn, who became a superhero icon onto herself. She’s even holding down her own show on HBO Max, where she’s voiced by Big Bang Theory veteran Kaley Cuoco:

And now, the rumor is that HBO Max also wants to revive the show that started it all. How reliable is this, rumor, you ask? It comes from industry veteran and Batman superfan Kevin Smith, who’s currently working on a He-Man revival for Netflix, and he seemed pretty sure.

“I’m not involved, but I too have heard this and I’ve heard this from very reliable people. When I heard it I freaked out, and I heard this…I would say a month before you just said it,” Smith told co-host Marc Bernardin on the Fatman Beyond podcast. “I think that’s real, I don’t think that’s a rumor, I wouldn’t say ‘Set your watch to it,’ but it’s an idea whose time is not only coming, I think it came, and it’s smoking a cigarette. I think that’s gonna happen. How f***ing amazing would that be because you can just literally pick up and keep going. It’s not like, oh we gotta explain why everyone’s older, it’s f***ing animation man so you can go right back to those amazing f***ing stories.”

"That to me is no brainer, you’ve got HBO Max, you’re already doing that amazing Harley Quinn show, you’re printing money if you go back and do Batman: The Animated Series. You can’t f**k up the legacy, that’s for damn sure. You can’t f**k it up, there’s no reason not to do it, as long as you’ve got the key creative components, as long as Bruce Timm is involved, wants to be there. F***ing go for it for heaven’s sakes."

So that’s a yes vote from Smith.

It seems like a no-brainer to me, too. Everybody’s reviving everything nowadays, and Warner Bros. is sitting on this beloved property that it can bring back without having to worry if the actors look older, because it’s animation. That said, they might have trouble getting the likes of Conroy, Hamill and original Harley Quinn voice actor Arleen Sorkin to return, since all of them are getting on in years, but in animation, that’s not a deal-breaker.

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h/t ComicBook.com