It is quite possible to start anywhere in Batman: the Animated Series, provided the episode you have selected is one of the remote few that hark back to a previous storyline, but even then it is far from a puzzling affair. Holiday Knights irritated so many fans because even though it kicked off a similar anthology series, it conflated several continuity mysteries and a visual overhaul with a most anthological structure of three unrelated vignettes, each rushed and whimsical, and yet intentionally posing questions to the viewer that it wryly refuses to answer.
Each segment serves a specific purpose, and the first mini-story about Harley’s and Ivy’s holiday shopping spree is the most flamboyant about the series’ new courage in going after even more extreme tonal departures from the usual dark nature of the show. Batman: the Animated Series featured many a screwball comedy, but rarely any so self-conscious as this. Harley and Ivy wink to the audience, make cheap gags in unlikely situations, and even star in a colorfully abstract fashion show montage set to a perky musical rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas. This opening segment, arguably the most Christmas-y of the bunch, also gallantly expresses the new design preferences for hard shapes over sinuous lines and shadows, possessing a chic angularity as out of a fifties Warner Bros. cartoon. The shot of a retro, symmetrical department store grounded behind the circular contrasts of falling snow is exemplary of this new geometric style.
If the Harley and Ivy romp is designed to communicate a more stylistic openness for The New Adventures of Batman, then the lesser story that follows sets out to confuse our perception of series-to-series continuity. B:TAS was serialized to the point that one may as well start in the middle, but certain characters had their own miniature arcs, which set aside episodes as diverse as Mudslide, Second Chance, and Avatar as direct continuations of previous installments. If there were any character whose fate was left dangling by the end of the series, it would be Clayface, who in Mudslide was presumably left to a watery grave. It is hard to conceive that Paul Dini would resurrect him for the new series’ debut without any intention of befuddling diehard fans and making a deliberate point to throw out continuity in the spirit of holiday fun. Regardless, this remains the weakest of the three, the high point being Harvey Bullock’s hilarious undercover position as a department store Santa, perhaps the closest thing in all three parts to a demonstration of the awkward marriage between holiday festivity and the dark subject matter we typically associate with Batman.
The third segment all but eradicates the colorful, comical attributes of the first two, ironic given this is Joker’s show. Where World’s Finest exploited the new Joker design to its manic extremities, the stiff on-model work here demonstrates where the new design fails, gambling away many of the character’s iconic features capable of enlivening the most poorly animated B:TAS shows for a desired cartooniness that doesn’t always pay off. If this final vignette serves any function, it is to shock the viewer by bluntly alluding to death and mass murder and having Batman suffer a bullet to the arm. Unable to reach the nuance of the best Joker spotlights, this third segment only seems concerned with its most basic operations, the first of which is the shock value, the second of which is the surprise of a new Robin, and neither of which quite pay off.
But the segments are somewhat unified; all of the events are related in the sense that they take place within close temporal approximations of each other, reinforcing a sense of networking wherein multiple heroes can be involved in different struggles in different parts of the city, though the impact of this multiplicity is undercut by structured sequence and tonal dissociation. Each one does, however, end with a familiar holiday tradition playing a part in the capture of each of villain—a Christmas tree, Santa decorations, and the New Years countdown bell—imposing an amusing pattern. When Batman holds his ritualistic New Years Day sit-down with Gordon in the coffee shop, the vignettes start retrospectively blending together into a single string of compounding, exhaustive threats, each just barely overcome. This ending at once expresses a weariness at events past and a celebratory look forward to things to come, marking Holiday Knights as the quintessential transition between Batman: the Animated Series and The New Adventures of Batman, whatever its faults.
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