The Grace of Gilda, Part 4: Grace Lamont of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES

[about_faces]

Note: This is the fourth part of my retrospective of Gilda, a complete history of the oft-overlooked woman who loved and lost Harvey Dent. New installments will be posted weekly! Previous installments: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Comments

[akselavshalom]

Lord, this one... Again, I might have to only touch upon stuff here, but it can easily be carried over to the next one. But I'll begin with this and come back tomorrow:
While people might forget sometimes forget it these days, Batman:TAS might just be the bedrock of which all modern-day cartoons sprung from. Having said that, watching it again in more recent times, you see that it's brights are as bright as people say it is, but man, it's not quite as bountiful and consistent with its brights as people made/make it up to be. The cracks reaaaally start to show now, especially with stuff like this when the cartoon would just suddenly decide to start throwing its own continuity under the bus and just could not be pressed to give enough of a damn to even give a proper explanation why. They did it with Ivy, they did it with Freeze, and Two-Face just as unfairly, even after they went to lengths to establish him and Bruce to being tight friends. I'm disregarding all of the tie-ins, which are valid, sure, but that's not the show show. What the series did, and what the comic by Dini up above sements to me, is that they didn't really muster the attention span or care to tell more human stories with their main cast. Even Dini fell short in that, but I wonder if that might've been because of shortcomings in his own personal life that made such stories hard to tell sometimes. I refer to his biographical comic Dark Knight: A true Batman story with Eduardo Risso on art duty. Big missed opportunity that plagued the entire series regardless, I think, hindsight or not being a varying factor as it did pave a lot of way.

[ext_5799348]

B:tAS definitely has its weaknesses, all right. It didn't handle any of its characters badly, per se, but there are a few that just didn't land with the impact they were probably supposed to. I think the classic example would be Catwoman - her whole 'animal rights activism' thing is not exactly wrong for the character, but it wound up taking her over to such an extent that every one of her episodes wound up being about that to some degree. This was changed to a degree in her later TNBA appearances, true - we got a bit of the classic cat burglar Selina then - but that was too little, too late.

[lego_joker]

Weirdly enough, Selina probably had the most continuity out of all the original TAS rogues* - which is, IMO, only proof that continuity isn't in itself a good thing. Her debut had Batman finding and arresting her, leading to several episodes where she had to be a damsel-in-distress civilian who only put on the costume in Extreme Circumstances, until Dini finally gave her some actual teeth back in "Catwalk".

* Discounting "Almost Got 'im", where she just shows up to fight the Joker with zero explanation. It's almost like Dini wrote the script thinking the show had already introduced Batgirl.

[ext_5799348]

Yeah, it's a shame. They capture the actual dynamic between the two well enough, all right - if nothing else, the 'Chase Me' short (which was, I believe, the last Bat/Cat interaction in the DCAU) is pitch-perfect, and I actually really like their interactions in 'The Cat and the Claw' - but they just don't quite capture who Selina Kyle is. That whole business with her being one of Bruce Wayne's wealthy, activist peers - that's just not her. That has never been her.

Sure, Catwoman has, at various times, been quite well-off, but it's always been her ill-gotten gains that got her there, and never for long. The modern version of her, of course, is very street-level, but even back in the Golden Age, she had kind of a 'scrappy underdog' feel to her at times. While the Joker and the Penguin and such were wealthy gentlemen of crime, she was more of a working woman (I have, in fact, a story in my collection where her plot involves the use of a beauty salon, and instead of hiring other women to do the work for her, she actually goes to work in a beauty salon, just as if she wasn't the Feline Fatale of Gotham at all). The B:tAS version comes off more like an heiress, and that doesn't feel right to me.

And yeah, I've never liked her 'Almost Got 'Im' role. Sure, it gives the episode a good closing line, but in terms of her role in the story, that really should have been Robin. I can buy Catwoman as being someone who'll do a good deed when it suits her, but she is not a sidekick, nor a regular partner. She and Batman team up in her stories, not for Joker Takedown #511.