Sunday, November 21, 2010

The Brave and the Bold

I have been wanting to write about this for a few days now, but due to the constant stress of college, I have had to put it on hold. So for the few of you who have been wondering why I only update about once a month, there you go.

Let me first start things off with a wonderful discovery of mine:

This is from the newest Batman cartoon Batman: The Brave and the Bold. I have ignored the show since I wasn't too impressed with the little that I had seen. I personally felt it was too childish since it was based off of the Silver-age, Adam West Batman. This changed after fate forced me to purchase the latest DC animated DVD, Superman/Shazam! - The Return of Black Adam. I especially enjoyed this purchase because I have been missing out on most of the DC shorts since I have only been buying the regular DVD's of their great movies.

On just about all of the DC animated movies that I have purchased, Bruce Timm selects a few episodes from his cartoons that relate to one of the characters in the movie(s). Now this one was different because it contained an episode from Batman: The Brave and the Bold (which I had never seen) and involved the Spectre who I was first introduced to in Crisis on Infinite Earths (a definite must-read). I know very little about the Spectre, and I was curious to see what kind of adversaries he would team up with Batman to fight. Unfortunately, that didn't happen in the episode. What did happen though was my greatest surprise in quite a while. Batman was tempted by the Spectre to take revenge upon Joe Chill, the man who murdered Bruce Wayne's parents.

Seeing this whole episode actually made me like Batman Begins less because the way they handle Joe Chill in this cartoon is WAY more awesome than how he is handled in the aforementioned movie. In the movie, Bruce Wayne gets "cheated" out of murdering Joe Chill instead of being able to make a choice about how to avenge his parents. Being robbed of this choice has made me change my top five movie list:
1. The Matrix
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Boondock Saints
4. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
5. Batman Begins

Now I still love Batman Begins, but after seeing the above Joe Chill scene, I just don't really care for all of Batman Begins any more. With that said though, I have to repeat that I still love the movie, and if you have seen the Dark Knight and not Batman Begins, then shame on you.