How Batman: The Animated Series Inspired Me

I feel pretty comfortable saying that everyone on the planet Earth knows who Batman is and the basics of his life story. Rich kid, parents killed in front of him in an alley, grows up training all his life to be the ultimate badass, dons a suit of high-tech armored pajamas, and punches out his issues in the face every night. Mostly does good for the world as a whole. I was (and still am, to an arguably lesser degree) obsessed with this show and all its follow up iterations. It inspired my life I think in many ways, but for this essay I’ll cover the top three. My sense of rightness and justice, my love of science, and my spirit of adventure.

My sense of rightness and justice, doing the right thing, being a hero, all that stuff; for as long as I can remember, that’s all I wanted to be. I dunno if it was altruistic, doing the right thing because it’s right, or selfish in that it makes you feel good to do good, or selfish in that it gets you praise and positive attention. Maybe it was a combination of all three. As a lonely, bullied kid, it would make a lot of sense to be all three. Anyway, over the years that sense of stringent morality waned some, and as I got older, I fell into the morally grey area most teenagers>adults do. Then I became a father and that moved me more towards the light, wanting to be good to set a good example, so that my daughter would want to be good also. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” the man said.

Batman is a scientist, bar none, he’s one of the smartest people in comics/cartoons and amongst the best scientists in all the mediums. As such many (maybe most?) of the episodes of his show had to do with mad science gone wrong. And naturally I’d be in the library or on the burgeoning dial-up internet learning as much as I could about the science behind whatever this week’s monster was. Batman’s interactions with Kirk Langstrom (The Man-Bat) and Anthony Romulus and Professor Milo (the werewolf and his creator from the episode Moon of the Wolf, respectively) were two of my many inspirations to become a biologist for example.

I think chiefly, especially if you allow for its broadest definitions, the term “adventure show” is applicable to Batman: TAS. It is an adventure show and everything the caped crusader does IS an adventure. It doesn’t all get the adrenaline pumping all the time, or even imply those feelings, but it builds tension to at least try to have those moments in every episode. “Monkey see, monkey do” didn’t really apply to me as a child, but as a teen I had quite the, ahem, amateur career in death defiance. My lust for adventure and adrenaline wasn’t solely inspired by Batman, but thinking back, there were many things my friends and I had done that were very reminiscent of things from this show. It makes me laugh out loud to think about it now, especially as they’ve carried over into my puckish nature as a man approaching middle age.

In all the many ways Batman: The Animated Series has inspired me and my life, these were definitely the top three; it helped me to be a better citizen, man, and parent. It helped guide me on my career path and lifelong passion, and it helped develop a spark in me that I hope I will never lose or grow tired of.