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Batman: Caped Crusader Season 1 Review

Batman: Caped Crusader is a superhero noir animated television series that premiered its first season on Amazon Prime Video in 2024. It’s a stellar show.

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“You don’t bend with the world

when it goes bad, you push back“

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This series offers a noir-inspired reimagining of the Batman mythos, focusing on a young Bruce Wayne during the early stages of his crime-fighting career in Gotham City, drawing inspiration from Batman stories of the 1940s and 1950s. As somebody who has always gravitated more toward this character’s earlier era and style, this show was right up my valley. It brings back Batman as the detective, which was refreshing to see.

The animation is reminiscent of the famous ‘Batman: The Animated Series’, though it may feel less artistic overall. Yes, the character designs are plain, but the background work is gorgeous and stylistically inclined. I also loved the noir atmosphere that was beautifully achieved thanks to its superbly menacing atmosphere, a phenomenal score that evoked those noir films from the forties effortlessly and excellent voice acting with every single person delivering period-appropriate jargon and mannerisms.

Yes, there are numerous characters here whose race, gender and/or sexuality are changed just for the sake of it, but the most important thing is to get the mood, the story and the idea of the character right, which is what they did here, so I did not mind those changes all that much. I ultimately preferred it over the aforementioned show and I find it to be quite underrated.

Because this series is actually more episodic than serialized, I am now going to discuss it episode by episode and through each installment I will comment upon the major players in the story. In Treacherous Waters is one of the weakest episodes of this first season. I still liked it and I found it to be a lot of fun in its caper approach to storytelling, but Penguin being a woman fared the worst of all these changes as it was so unnecessary, even if I did really dig her dynamic with her sons.

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…And Be a Villain fared much better as this film history-inspired mystery story about Boris Karloff that was effectively creepy and engaging. Kiss of the Catwoman is one of the best and most purely entertaining episodes of the season. I loved this rendition of the Selina Kyle character as she was both fun and campy. Her dynamic with Batman was so amusing, but the highlight is her servant Greta whose dry sense of humor consistently made me laugh.

The Night of the Hunters exemplifies this show’s usage of lesser-known villains in the Batman lore for better and for worse. Although Firebug was a bit too odd, he still was a memorable villain when all is said and done, and the action toward the end was quite well executed. This series uses action scenes sparingly, which worked for me as I appreciate storytelling and character arcs much more than epic set pieces.

The Stress of Her Regard is a Harley Quinn episode and for the most part I did like what they did with Harley. This is a different type of Quinn as one who is sillier and goofier as a regular girl and more sinister as a villain when masked. This change worked as it made her more competent and menacing.

Now we come to three episodes that are all supernatural to a degree and they all functioned well as these different than usual genre pieces, though they did contrast somewhat oddly with the show’s otherwise grounded take on this franchise. Night Ride features a ghost character and this is the favorite of the three episodes to me. It was eerie and very engaging. Moving Target uses this very cartoony villain, but the action is so good that it mostly worked. Nocturne is about a vampire girl and this one also worked despite being so weird compared to the other installments. The girl was well realized and the carnival setting was charming.

The Killer Inside Me and Savage Night are all about Harvey Dent, who is effectively this season’s only serialized arc that was present from start to finish at a consistent basis. This version of Dent is humanized quite a bit and his plight is tragic and well explored. I loved his story and how deep it felt. The final episode was so tragic and it ended the season on such a high note.

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Batman: Caped Crusader isn’t much of a Batman story as it focuses much more on its villains and other supporting characters, such as Commissioner Gordon and Barbara. These two got the most screen time and I did like them quite a bit, though they weren’t as fun as the villains. Same goes for Montoya herself. The gangsters, politicians and rich people overwhelmingly so, but I still found this Batman to be pretty memorable and the show making fun of his broody and tortured personality was an excellent idea. I loved its self-aware humor. Alfred is one of the standouts here and their relationship was genuinely charming and heartwarming.