BATMAN AND HARLEY QUINN Trailer Offers A Most Unlikely BTAS Team-Up

I’m a big ol’ dork for the 1997 rejiggering of Batman: The Animated Series. That year The New Batman Adventures re-invented and streamlined Bruce Timm’s Bat-verse and its characters into designs that have yet to be topped in simplicity, iconography and elegance.

So needless to say, this trailer for Batman and Harley Quinn has me excited.

Harley seems to have borrowed a bit from her grittier comic book (and live-action) counterpart, and Nightwing’s horrible mullet is gone, but otherwise this is a return to the TNBA designs I loved so much. That latter-day animation still looks a little cheap compared to the old series, but you can’t ever really go home again, kids.

Another reason to be excited about this trailer: DCU third-stringer Jason Woodrue (aka The Floronic Man) makes his debut in the Timm style here. Woodrue was perhaps best utilized in Alan Moore’s classic run on Swamp Thing, and this version looks to be tapping into that incarnation. Makes sense, as the plot involves Poison Ivy and Woodrue using Alec Holland’s formula - the one that turned Holland into the Swamp Thing – to bring about no less than the end of the human race. 

WB’s press materials for the DTV summer release gently point out that this return to Timm’s classic style is a bit of an about-face from recent excursions like The Killing Joke, as if to distance themselves from that effort. Speaking anecdotally: this tactic is working like gangbusters.

Batman and Harley Quinn hits digital HD, 4K and Blu-ray this summer. If you're into this sort of thing, here's a featurette about the making of the film.