Batman The Animated Series coming to Blu Ray
 

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Batman: The Animated Series coming to Blu-ray next year. #NYCC

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I'll be able to retire my beat up DVDs...

I hope they do Sub-Zero, Superman, and Batman Beyond, too. The remaster on Mask of the Phantasm looked very clean, as did the releases for Justice League and Justice League Unlimited.

I'd assume they are doing The New Batman Adventures as well, but I haven't found anything conclusive on that yet.

B:TAS should include TNBA, it's technically considered the 4th season.

Will they remove the grain? The whole noir thing kinda works for BTAS so I don't know how the BR transfer will go if it's not done properly.

Exactly.
All that gave the show a darker feel. It complimented the show’s tone nicely. If they removed it, they’d be taking away something that helped make the show what it was.

I haven't re-watched any BTAS since the original sets were released, they seemed like such great purchases and I love the show but they were a waste of money since I've never felt the need to re-watch them. I will eventually since it's a great show but I mean you come to realize you don't need to own all these shows you can only watch a few times in your life for them to waste so much space on your shelves.

The first time I re-watching I was so impressed by how amazing it was but I wonder if another re-watch ten years later would fare the same results or if I'd feel disappointed.

When I was a teen, I had a DVD collection of over 300 titles, alot of them box sets of TV Shows. Then my dads alcoholic friend came into my room and stole all the box sets and sold them for booze money. After that happened, I just sold the rest of my DVDs and moved on to being a digital only guy.

All these years later, I'm glad I'm not lugging around all those box sets everywhere I go. They're cumbersome and outdated in a just a matter of years. Now I just keep updating my external hardrive of TV Shows I want to collect whenever a higher definition comes out. Totally happy with it.

This reminds me of the people who re-buy all of Dragonball Z like every 3-5 years when new sets come out, lol. Some series are just re-released and rehashed countless times.

MotP came from 35mm elements and JL/JLU were animated in HD to begin with, so not as much work had to be done for those.
I really hope they do a good job with this, and DON'T remove all the grain and grittiness.

It's about time, hopefully it sells well, and we can get Batman Beyond on blu ray as well. Heck blu rays for Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, etc.

I'm actually about to do a major purge of my own DVD/BD collection, but this show will always have a place on my shelf.

B:TAS is one of the only things from my childhood that I still think holds up. I enjoy watching it for more as an adult than I ever did back then (and I watched it a lot back then, believe me), and the context of the shared universe/timeline makes the experience richer.

That and all of the dirty jokes...

Teen Titans, TMNT 2k3, and some other shows I remember have not been so lucky.

I bet the scenes with rain it will still look like ****.

What do you mean? Both those shows still have consistently great episodes. There are some bad or boring eps of course, but you can say the same for any series.

So when will TMNT OT/2k3/Nick? :tcool: No excuse.

2k3 was digitally animated in SD. Who knows what materials they have left for the OT.

Nick might release the 2012 series on blu-ray in the next few years, the eps are already in HD on itunes.

From what I was told on twitter, it will be included.

It will be great to have this show on blu-ray. I watched all those DVDs a bunch and was the inspiration for my career choice.

Glad to see it confirmed.

BUMP

Batman: The Complete Animated Series Deluxe Edition on Amazon



I already have Sub-Zero and Phantasm, but it's nice to see all of it together. For those who don't care about the broader DCAU (Batman Beyond/Superman/Static Shock/JL, etc.), this is all of the core Batman stuff.

If I may ask, what episodes of B:TAS did you not like or care for?

I was really tempted to pre-order a set, but there are three concerns holding me back:

1. There has yet to be any official preview of what the "remastered" episodes will look like in higher-definition (so far as I've been able to find).
2. Some early box set photos featured a tease that the Blu Ray set would also include Digital HD download (likewise with the original Blu Ray limited edition set of the Adam West Batman TV show), but it looks like that was a marketing mistake and that the set will be Blu Ray disc only.
3. The silly Funko Pop figures built into the box packaging will just be inconvenient extra space for storing the thing.

The ep, "The Terrible Trio" is generally agreed upon to be the worst ep of the original B:TAS run. The one with the 3 rich kids who wear animal mascots.

Bruce also shoots a hunting gun in that episode even though he vowed never to use a gun. The writers of that ep had no idea what he was doing.

I actually like that episode.:)

I remember skipping most of that one.

My least favorite is probably "I've Got Batman in my Basement," followed by "Christmas with the Joker."

I think Superman: TAS, though about half the length of Batman, was much more consistent in quality.


Here's a comparison video featuring the Mask of the Phantasm remaster.

I remember back in the day when it was new, and I was a kid I'd be disappointed for episodes that didn't have an iconic villain in it and were just generic mobsters or whatever. Of course later I'd appreciate them more. I was new into non-West Batman and was eager to see the bad guys in a more dangerous manner.

I'm not sure if Batman TAS would work in today's fast paced world. It's very slow paced and people aren't cracking jokes every 5 seconds for today's kids. I think that's why The Batman had most of the bad guys be martial artists. Say what you will about The Batnan, the fights were crazier and more fast paced than anything in TAS.

There's also very little continuity from ep to ep, besides when Batman meets the villains for the first time. I mean the whole show was meant to air out of order just like all old 80's and 90's shows. I certainly didn't see the show in order when it originally aired. Besides the obvious 2-parters and Batman's first meeting with each villain, you can pretty much watch the show all out of order.

In fact there was very little continuity in the DCAU in general until Justice League Season 2. Almost all the eps were episodic, outside of some Superman stuff with Darkseid. Really puts into perspective what a, "different time era" these shows existed in.

Nowadays people don't bother much with shows that have no real continuity.

Honestly continuity in cartoons didn't get me until X-Men TAS. That's what made me look back at Batman and be like '....wait a minute'.

I have seen the Mask of the Phantasm comparison, and if the actual episodes look as good as that, then I'll say A+ job, but as an early post mentioned, the movie had a distinct 35mm master. That film was announced for Blu Ray long ago, and I'm a bit nervous that it's the only part of the collection that has been previewed thus far. I really need to see what these episodes look like before I take the plunge.

I'm all over this. This is easily one of the greatest animated series of all time. I'd put it in the same class as early Simpsons, and I'd throw HBO's Spawn a bone, as well.

I’m thinking of getting this and Teen Titans blu ray.

I like The Terrible Trio and The Underdwellers which are both considered bad by most peole. Is I've got Batman in my basement the episode with the penguin that Batman fights off with a screwdriver and the help of a kid? If so I don't like that one. There's definitely some episodes I dislike but I can't recall right now, I haven't rewatched BTAS since the TNBA DVD box set came out so over ten years? What a waste of money that turned out to be :lol:

I defintiely won't be buying this but if the DC streaming app will allow me to watch the entire show for only 8 bucks then I'll do that instead. My DVD viewing habits ended up being "once or twice" over the last 20 years for almost everything I bought sans a few exceptions so it's better for me this way.

The Batman in the Basement one wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't Penguin's intro episode. It was weird how he was the first villain in the TAS comics and it took forever to see him in animated form.

Okay, I'm finally sold on this set!
https://www.slashfilm.com/batman-the...eries-blu-ray/

23% Amazon discount, digital copy now included with bundle, and the clip of the remastered intro looks great, though I still wish they'd share some of actual episode clips in remastered hi-def. I'd say that is well worth a couple weeks' delayed release.

This may sound silly, but where would you redeem a digital code like that? Should it be possible on my PS4 or Sony 4K smart tv? It’s not relegated to Itunes or something is it?

Usually when I go digital, it means buying from the PlayStation store.

My guess is that it is most likely compatible with UltraViolet and possibly itunes (those two have been the standard digital redemption platforms for TV shows in the last few years). VUDU is probably the most popular means of viewing UltraViolet digital content, but one problem is that the Batman: The Animated Series content on VUDU is only currently available standard definition, so any redemption via that service would be an obvious downgrade. Likewise, itunes only offers the SD digital set at present. That could change in a couple months.

Alternatively, the Batman digital set could tie-in with the new DC Universe streaming service, launching on September 15. BTAS is coming to that service in 1080p. I know that service will be subscription based, so I'm not sure what options exist to "own" digital content.

EDIT: And because the Limited Edition Blu Ray set is an Amazon exclusive, I suppose the digital redemption could also be exclusive to Amazon Video, which is also currently limited to SD.

Warner Bros. posted a video of the remastered opening.

Target.com also has it for preorder, so it's not just Amazon.

I'm guessing a new HD digital copy will come out along with this set. AquaParade, if you redeem it on Vudu, which I'm 99% sure it will work with, you can get a Vudu app on your smart TV and probably PS4 as well and watch it that way. But then you can also sign into Vudu on your phone or computer and watch it that way.

A non special edition will be coming out around November 27, 2018.

https://dcanimated.com/2018/10/batma...lease-edition/

My Honest Thoughts
 

I received my Blu Ray set in the mail today via Amazon. Me not being a Prime member, Amazon treats all my media orders like they are used clothes, and shipped the big box in a flimsy, bubble-lined envelope without any additional padding. The Blu Ray box was a little bent at the bottom, but thankfully otherwise intact.
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My impressions opening the package was that things fit nice and tight into a relatively concise package, about the height of a standard dimension DVD case.
Fortunately, the Funko mini-figures aren't near as annoying and distracting as I thought, and they don't add too much unnecessary bulk to the package; at worst they just make the box require twice as much linear shelf space as it might need.

My biggest complaint about this presentation is the decision made for disc holders, those infamous slip-case pages. The slipcase book-style packaging over the discs certainly looks nice, as I'm glad to see much of the stock art reproduced in the episode guide. But getting the discs out is a pain; truly a nerve-wracking experience for a collector. Fingerprints are guaranteed to get on the discs when trying to pull them out by the top, and discs tend to jam in the packaging about half-way out. I went through my whole set and spent some time trying to widen up the paper sleeves by jamming my fingers into the corners, hoping I didn't break the paper.
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Getting the discs back into the paper sleeves is almost as bad as getting them out. One would think the advantage of gravity should help those things slide into place, but they tend to settle halfway in, and I have to push them down to finish the process. It's bad, folks. On the plus side, once the discs are in place, they should hold in place without any rattling around. I expect when WB releases the second run of BTAS Blu Rays, they will use more traditional (but cheap) plastic disc holders that will probably break off their pegs if you shake the case too hard, so if I don't snap a disc trying to pull it out or in, maybe the slip-case book works out fine.
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The biggest fan controversy seems to be over the nature of the digital redemption process. The insert included with the discs instructs users to go to https://www.wbdigitalcopy.com/ and then choose a service provider to complete the redemption process. According to user feedback in the VUDU.com forums, the VUDU service seems to be the automatic redirect at present time:
https://forum.vudu.com/forum/vudu/ge...nimated-series
Unfortunately, VUDU only offers the BTAS series in SD, while most owners logically assume they will get getting the HDX version. A VUDU rep commented on the thread that the company is working with WB to get the HDX version added, but that it is not a 100% certainty. Furthermore, the Mask of the Phantasm and Sub-Zero movies are not included in the digital deal, only the episodes with none of the special features; this despite the fact that VUDU offers both movies in HDX and even as Disc-to-Digital conversion options. That is unfortunate and an embarrassing look for WB. I hope some disgruntled fan sues Warners for false advertising if the Digital HD version is never provided. I am content to hold off on my Digital redemption until something gets resolved, as the codes are guaranteed up through the end of 2019.

My Blu Ray player has been malfunctioning, and thus makes for an inconsistent option to play the discs. I haven't yet put in a set of episodes on disc to see the quality, but the Sub-Zero disc does great look in HD. Even the four bonus Mr. Freeze episodes in SD look great. I am happy at the price I paid to get the set from Amazon, but unless you have Prime, you might want to consider other options that might take more care in their shipping process.

They treat Prime Member packages the same way. Bubble Mailers for everything and blu ray cases sometimes come damged