We know many changes to the mythos are in store with Batman: Caped Crusader, which will be set in the 1940s, and yet is still going to have greater diversity in its cast of characters.
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However, the series may go further than anyone initially thought as executive producer Bruce Timm recently explained. In an interview with Empire, he primed readers and viewers for the twists they can expect.
For one thing, his relationship with Alfred won’t be as familial, fraternal, or balanced as we’ve seen before. “He weaponises Alfred,” Timm says of Bruce Wayne via ComicBookMovie.
“He’s not Batman’s surrogate father anymore. He’s a guy that’s going to enable him to fight crime. That’s how focused [Bruce] is. It’s a weird take on him. But it’s something I don’t think we’ve seen before,” Timm continued.
He went on at length to describe how weird Bruce is this time: “I wanted to make him kind of weird, and spooky. If you’re stuck in a room with Batman, whether you’re Commissioner Gordon or Barbara Gordon or Renee Montoya, you don’t feel comfortable.”
“You’re kind of like, ‘What is this guy? What’s this all about?'” Timm added. What it might be is inexperience as Caped Crusader encounters the Dark Knight very early in his career – earlier than Year One.
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“Batman is so early in his career that in the first episode, he’s still an urban myth,” Timm clarified. “It’s not ‘Year One.’ It’s more like ‘Week Two.'”
Whether we can take that quote literally or not, Bruce will be set on his agenda, which Timm hinted at. In the series, he wants to fight crime from a young age, but that means tweaking his origin story a tad.
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“The slightly different take that we’re doing on it is that at night, when he’s lying in bed reliving the murders of his parents again and again in his head, it’s so upsetting and so horrifying that the way he copes with it is he decides, right then and there, I’m going to declare war on crime,” Timm explains to Empire.
“And so literally from that point on, even though he’s eight, he’s kind of Batman already…” he adds.
[Boy, that escalated quickly. Anyway…] Batman: Caped Crusader debuts on Amazon Prime Video on August 1st.