Batman: TAS, episode #27: The Underdwellers

This episode is one of those moments where one wonders if the writers were tasked with taking some liberties to try to expand a weak and very clichéd pitch into something workable. That concern emerges in the opening moments, where The Batman takes time to rescue a couple kids from the top of a moving train. Shall we say that the idea of two kids leaping safely from the back of an elevated train in full flight is less than realistic? But this is an action opening and it carries the theme of The Batman saving children!, you could say. Yeah. That still doesn't make it a better story. They could've just set the story in the winter and had him save a couple kids from shagging buses and it still would've carried the theme effectively. But this episode carries on like that throughout. We have a lead villain, the Sewer King, who talks like Yoda ("Ready I am, yes.") and whose army of child thieves (not an uncommon concept in the adventure story world) are kept in line by a collection of pet alligators. In the sewers. You have to work hard to put this many tired concepts into one story. And that carries over to the execution. Despite them living in the sewers, when The Batman investigates the seeming disappearance of one of the Underdwellers, the answer isn't that the small, lithe, and probably malnourished (hence, thin) child slipped down a storm drain, but instead that there's a secret door built into the wall of a building that our hero discovers with infrared goggles. The Sewer(!) King is living beneath the streets with pet alligators, yet somehow has the technical expertise and wherewithal to install a secret door? Or thinks it's even necessary when his young charges use those sewers as a highway?

This episode hearkens back to a much earlier style of cartoon presentation, where leaps of reason from one moment to the next are simply ignored for the sake of being along for the ride. Unlike much of the rest of BTAS, this episode is Saturday morning cartoon stuff, which is an awfully low reach for a series that, despite the challenge of trying to serve two audiences, has largely done just that to this point in our review. And now suddenly we're presented with Hanna-Barbera level material. It's disappointing. But even if you can accept the abandonment of logic and story structure, it's obvious that said story was thin from the beginning. At one point in the episode, we go through the animation equivalent of about 10 seconds of flavor text: the Batmobile hurtles down roads, bats fly by, it enters the Batcave. None of this is needed for atmosphere unless you're just trying to pad out your production with stock material that would be on hand for any episode of the series. You can shrug your shoulders at just 10 seconds of that, but it doesn't stop there and all of those flavor text seconds can be huge in the context of an episode that only runs 22 minutes. Much of it makes you wonder how closed the production team was, such that outside opinions may not have had enough access to get people back on track. It's like the quote from the villain: "Destroy that costumed freak!", says the guy calling himself the Sewer King, with pet alligators with matching studded collars, wearing 16th-century finery, and who tortures children. Hm.

Technically, you get the Hanna-Barbera vibes from several other aspects. Despite the better overall visual trappings, you see both the villain and The Batman doing "the pose" to little story effect; you see the children all moving and marching in lockstep during crowd scenes, with one exception when the meeting bell is first rung, so we can know that Frog will somehow be the outsider who breaks the mold of their condition. I found it interesting, as well, that the Sewer King resembled no one so much as Callisto, the original leader of the Morlocks in Marvel's X-Men. I don't recall that being a period when subterranean warlords all had to have eye patches and straw-like black hair, but maybe I missed something. Appropriately enough, the voice of the Sewer King was Michael Pataki, who also played Amenophis Tewfik, one of the henchmen of the awful King Tut villain from the Batman TV series in the 60s. To their credit, we're not subject to another "normal guy somehow defeats the combat master" moment, with The Batman engaging in most of his physical exertions against the resident reptiles. There's also one glimpse of sharp dialogue between Alfred and our hero when debating the existence of little green men: "You think I'm crazy, don't you?" "In what sense, Master Bruce?" That is, unfortunately, the high point of our Alfred experience, as he spends a good chunk of the episode trying to corral a wayward child, which doesn't do much for our story other than to waste (more) time. There is also one really excellent visual moment, though, when we see the image of The Batman's chest symbol reflected in the eyes of the cop who's about to run him over in an alley.

But those brief moments can't rescue the overall low quality of this entry, which has become a frequent occurrence in the last few that we've looked at. I don't want to look askance at what follows before even seeing it (after all, I expected little from Perchance to Dream and it turned out OK), but the next episode is entitled "Night of the Ninja". I was just talking about tired concepts, right? Trying to be positive.