And you may not have heard of Harley Quinn at all (worse luck you). Save her for later, when we revisit Kill Bill and pair her up with either Lucy Liu or Darryl Hannah (I haven’t decided which yet). If you’re not familiar with the series, you probably know Poison Ivy as Uma Thurman from 1997’s Batman & Robin. Imagine a cartoon series with a male protagonist that has most of the plot of Thelma & Louise carefully threaded throughout an 85-episode arc, and you’ve landed on the reason that hearing this music still gives me chills. And it had one of the best depictions of female friendship I’ve ever seen. It was cinematic without being pretentious, grounded in rich mythology, witty, tragic, complicated it payed homage to previous incarnations of Batman while developing its own unique interpretation of major characters. It resurrected Mark Hamill’s career, and I will still (loudly, without being asked) explain why his version of the Joker was so much better than Heath Ledger’s with very little prompting at dinner parties. It was a little violent and a little stylized (a lot of the background scenes were painted on black paper the producers called the design Dark Deco) and awash in brilliantly-rendered, nuanced characterization for villains and heroes and even bystanders. I’m going to try very hard to make sure this doesn’t just turn into a bullet-point list of reasons you should watch (or rewatch) Batman: The Animated Series, so I will confine my remarks about the series as a whole to this opening paragraph: it was the greatest animated series in the entire 1990s, a decade bursting and tumefying with great animated series (see also: Gargoyles).
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