BATMADNESS Match-Up 4: ON LEATHER WINGS vs. READ MY LIPS

VOTE in BATMADNESS: The Animated Tournament…

Welcome to BATMADNESS: The Animated Tournament — your chance to VOTE for the greatest Batman: The Animated Series episode of all time.

Writer Fred Van Lente, a 13th Dimension regular, and his artistic collaborator Ryan Dunlavey have produced The Comic Book History of Animation — a five-part series that debuted this week from IDW. To celebrate, we’re holding a tourney to pick the best episode from the greatest comic-book animated series of them all — and YOU get to decide.

Fred and Ryan have seeded eight episodes each for a Sweet 16 and we’ll be pairing them off until we have a champion in January. (Click here to follow the whole tournament.)

HOW TO VOTE: You can pick your choice two ways: 1) Note it in the comments below; or 2) Take part in our Twitter poll, also below. Votes will be tabulated and the winner will be announced in the following round.

We’re up to MATCH-UP #4:

ON LEATHER WINGS (Fred’s No. 4 seed) vs. READ MY LIPS (Ryan’s No. 5 seed)

Written by Mitch Brian. Directed by Kevin Altieri.

“It took balls to have Man-Bat, no one’s favorite Batman villain, be the antagonist of the series pilot. Though it definitely establishes the police as antagonistic to Bats right from the jump, when they pursue him for Manny’s attacks. There’s nary a hotline phone or Batsignal to be found (though on the insistence of Timm’s team, that would be added later).” — FVL

Teleplay by Joe R. Lansdale. Story by Alan Burnett and Michael Reaves. Directed by Boyd Kirkland.

“‘You’ve had your share of odd opponents, sir, but this one does take the biscuit.’ This episode’s spooky mind-twister of a premise could have easily turned silly but it’s so cleverly pulled off thanks to a hard-boiled plot, some of the best dialogue in the whole series and an astonishing vocal turn by George Dzundza as the Ventriloquist/Scarface. Even Scarface’s goons are memorable! One of my favorites.” — RD

Now, which do YOU prefer? VOTE!

For the complete BATMADNESS: The Animated Tournament: Click here.

NEXT: Feat of Clay (Ryan’s No. 4) vs. Showdown (Fred’s No. 5). Click here.

Author: Dan Greenfield

Share This Post On

5 Comments

  1. This one is not so obvious to me. To be honest, my favorite has to be The Grey Ghost. That one has to be in the mix. For today’s however, I’m going with “Read My Lips”. Oh, to help out here’s a link to all of the episodes with brief descriptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Batman:_The_Animated_Series_episodes

    Someday you will need to do a list of episodes not done that should have been. For me, I would have loved to see a BTAS version of The Shadow.

    Post a Reply
    • Buck – you’re going to be disappointed, because Grey Ghost didn’t make the cut. It’s a really clever casting choice for Adam West and it was Fred’s initial short list but upon re-watching it we both thought the end result is slow, depressing and just no fun at all.

      Post a Reply
  2. Love the show’s version of Scarface, but Man-Bat is a long-time personal favorite thanks to Power Records, and this episode showed the series was going DEEP in Bat-Lore, so …On Leather Wings.

    Post a Reply

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: