Studio: Studio 4°C
Director: Shōjirō Nishimi
Writer: Josh Olsen
Wha’ happen’?
Four kids meet up in a skate park and three of them tell stories about encountering Batman that day fighting a masked man with a jetpack. The three stories all describe very different depictions of Batman; as a shadowy monster, a human/bat hybrid and lastly a high-tech robot. Then, the real Batman bursts
into the skate park chasing the jet pack man and the fourth kid is able to save Batman by clocking the dude on the head with his skateboard.
How was it?
It sucks.
Torchesandaardvarks noted in the comments that Gotham Knight is just worse versions of Batman the Animated Series episodes. I don’t know about that, yet, but it’s definitely fair for the opener. Have I Got a Story For You is a direct lift from Legends of the Dark Knight, an episode from The New Batman Adventures that was itself an adaptation of The Batman Nobody Knows from the seventies. Gonna steal, steal from the best, I guess, but the problem is that Legends of the Dark Knight was a glorious celebration of multiple eras of Batman’s history with the production team going to insane lengths to mimic the style of Dick Sprang and Frank Miller. The message of that episode (outside of a mean and low-key homophobic jab at Joel Schumacher) is that Batman is vast, contains multitudes and that every
interpretation and version is wonderful. But Have I Got a Story For You isn’t an examination of who Batman is or what he means to people. It’s really ust about…how he looks. One kid thinks he looks like a shadow monster, one kid thinks he looks like a bat monster. Okay. And?
It also kind of breaks credibility that these kids were that close to Batman in broad daylight and couldn’t see that he is, in fact, a man in a bat costume. One kid claims to see Batman just emerging from the ground like liquid shadow. What’s the rational real world explanation for that other than the kid being high on mescalin?
Plus, when we finally see this terrifying figure of the night?
He looks like a Dad at a baseball game who got heatstroke.
So yeah.
Off to a bad start.
How do you fuck up animé Batman, and shall they do it again?
unshavedmouse 
Anime Batman?
I’m pretty sure there was an animated movie of that.
Shush you
You talk like Batman Ninja is not a masterpiece.
Oh yeah, I remember that gag about Schumacher from the episode. Kid with the feather boa.
Sheesh, you’d think the people who made Harley and Ivy and packed it with so much gay subtext that I picked up on it at age 8 would be a little more progressive.
From the first few sentences I was thinking, “Yeah this sounds a lot like Legends of the Dark Knight.” And wouldn’t you know it? It’s a worse version of that. I guess this version of Batman does wear hockey pads.
Btw. Good on you for mentioning the low-key homophobia of “Legends of the Dark Knight.” Plenty of problems with those movies but Joel’s sexuality wasn’t one of them.
Would we have had Batman and Robin’s nipples without Joel’s sexuality?
Honest question. If a heterosexual director had put nipples on Batgirl’s costume, wouldn’t we be rightly calling him out on her sexualization?
We would, but we have now accepted that most of the faults with Batman & Robin were due to 1. Akiva Goldsman’s script and 2. The execs forcing Schumacher to take a campy approach (he personally preferred the edgier style of the late 80s).
In that context, the nipples are a relatively minor transgression overall…
To be honest I doubt the studio asked for nipples, or for most of the rather problematic depiction of women in both of the Schumacher films, if you want to address a much bigger problem. This was back in the nineties from the same execs who thought Batman Returns was too sexual for the child audience they wanted. And homoerotic subtext was still balked at.
The homophobia in Legends of the Dark Knight is why it’s one of the only DCAU episodes I’ve never gone back to, despite it being one of the better TNBA installments. Those shows have kind of become comfort food for me over the years, I don’t like being reminded of real world crappiness in them (at least, not when it’s being outright encouraged.)
Also, one thing that’s always bothered me about this film (even when I was a kid) is that the shorts feel very generically Batman, there’s very little to really tether them specifically to Nolan’s Bat-verse. The idea of an animated movie in that setting could have been really special if they had really committed to it instead of recycling a bunch of generic Batman plots and themes that we’ve already seen.
I wasn’t even able to finish Gotham Knight honestly. Tried watching it at one point around when it came out and I think I tapped out around the fifth short. Just found the whole thing very, very dull.
I finally have time to read this one (busy time for me in the retail job), and I see I am mentioned immediately. Good to know I am a trusted advisor (and incredibly humble).