Batman: Under the Red Hood
Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010)
Directed by Brandon Vietti. Featuring the Voices of Bruce Greenwood, Jensen Ackles, Neil Patrick Harris, John DiMaggio, Jason Isaacs, Wade Williams.
Warner Bros. Animation’s series of straight-to-video PG-13 releases set in the DC Comics universe has been a great success. Starting in 2007 with Superman: Doomsday (which completely embarrassed the previous year’s live-action Superman Returns) the team at Warner Bros. that originally kicked off the DC Animated Universe with Batman: The Animated Series has turned out high quality, adult-slanted fare that has even excited me about characters that I don’t usually care much about, like Wonder Woman and the Green Lantern.
But, no surprise, much of the new DVD series has featured Batman, the hottest property in Warner Brothers’ DC catalog because of the huge success of the Christopher Nolan-directed movies. Batman got his own compilation disc with Batman: Gotham Knight (set in the Nolan-verse and featuring a round-robin of top anime-directing talents), co-starred with Superman in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (an adaptation of the Jeph Loeb-written arc in the popular Superman/Batman ongoing comic), and played a major part in Justice League: The New Frontier and Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths.
Now Batman has his second solo-starring release in the series. Based on a recent popular storyline in Batman’s eponymous comic book that tied into the mega-crossover event “Infinite Crisis,” Batman: Under the Red Hood brings PG-13 to the small screen in a big way. In fact, the film flirts with a “soft R” rating, and it’s definitely not for children—unless you don’t mind your children watching not one but two brutal beatings with a crowbar.
This is the fourth in a series of posts investigating the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy (you can find the first part 
This is the third in a series of posts looking at the question of who wrote the first otherworld fantasy: that is, the first fantasy to be set entirely in its own fictional world, with no connection to conventional reality at all. It’s an innovation traditionally ascribed to William Morris, but I think I’ve found an earlier writer who deserves that honor.
Many of my contemporaries believed that one of the most amazing comic book series ever was Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, which ran from 1989 through 1996 – formative teenage years for me and my peers – originally by DC Comics and (from issue #47) under their Vertigo imprint. Now it looks like The Sandman has been re-optioned for consideration as a television series. Though the series creator isn’t associated with the show, there’s still reason to be hopeful.
Early on in this film we see Bruce Willis with hair and looking young, and not Die-Hard bashed up, and we wonder absently if this time he’ll actually finish the film as scar-free as he began it. The Willis we begin with is quickly established as a ‘surrogate,’ the robot avatar of the real Willis character, Tom Greer, and it doesn’t take long for both Greer and his surrogate to get bashed up in familiar form.
Have you ever woken up in an extremely good mood, found you were left enough hot water for a skin-peeling shower, stepped on the scale and found it down two pounds in spite of the bacchanalia of the night before? Have you ever leapt out of bed feeling euphoric and thought, “I really love my life?”
Has anyone ever asked what you would grab out of your house if it was on fire and you could only make one trip? Or maybe the question was, if you knew you were going to be stranded on a deserted island, what would you take with you?