RELEASES - THE BATMAN: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON

Packaging Menus Art Announce Date: 5/24/06 Street Date: 9/12/06 (Changed from 9/26 and 9/19) Closed Captioning: Yes MSRP: $19.98 Packaging Type: Amaray Case Disc Configuration: 1) 9-Dual Layer 2) 9-Dual Layer Run Time: 338 Subtitles: English, Francais, Espanol Aspect Ratio: Original Aspect Ratio - 1.33, Standard [4:3 Transfer] Sound Quality: English: Stereo 2S Francais: Stereo 2S Espanol: Stereo 2S Episodes The Cat, the Bat, and the Ugly, Riddled, JTV, Swamped, Pets, Meltdown, The Butler Did It, Fire and Ice, Ragdolls to Riches, Strange Minds, Grundy's Night (Solomon Grundy), The Laughing Bat, Night and the City Special Features Featurettes Catching Up with...The Batman: Inside Season 2 - Have you been missing out on the action packed adventures of The Batman? Get caught up on the events of Season One and take a peek at what's coming up for The Dark Knight! Synopsis Riddle me this: who's the latest villain to set his sinister sights on Gotham City? Riddler, of course, and only The Batman has the answers to stop this enigmatic evildoer. In these 13 action-packed episodes from the hit TV series, Gotham's greatest protector stumps Riddler and other favorite villains like Joker, Mr. Freeze and Penguin, and his obsession with justice earns the trust of up-and-coming police detective Jim Gordon. When Gordon offers The Batman a tentative alliance ? "Just help me make this city safe for my daughter" ? another piece of the legend falls into place! Swoop onto this Deluxe 2-Disc Edition with All Season 2 Adventures plus Exciting Extras. See justice done as no other hero can deliver! Review by Zach Demeter: Improved story telling? Check. New villains? Check. Wonderfully choreographed fight scenes? A rounding "hell yes" for that check. Oh, and what about the mouth watering visuals? Of course, check! All of the above can describe the very impressive second season of The Batman. While many will find it as juvenile and kid friendly as the first season, the introduction of a new villain (Riddler), revisiting of old ones (Clayface) and one of the best season finals this show has had yet make this the best season of the show for me. In particular I can’t get over the amazing visuals in the "Fire and Ice" episode; there is a particular pan of Gotham City with snow falling and my jaw drops every time I see it. One thing you cannot deny that this show has is art direction; cityscapes, lighting and just about every other visual eye candy in animation existence are available somewhere in this show. Past the art direction, the choreography is breathtaking in this season as well. The clock tower three-way fight between Ragdoll, Catwoman and Batman is obnoxious in length, but it is so much fun to watch that you can ignore the run time. There are so many flips, kicks, twists and jumps in that fight that it makes my head spin; I can remember going back through the screengrabs I’d taken for that episode and finding I’d hardly shot any for the clocktower fight, as I was just too mesmerized by what I was seeing to remember to take any shots. "Grundy’s Night" is also a great episode to watch, simply for the mystery. I had never given it a second thought that this Grundy wouldn’t be real, seeing as he exists elsewhere in Batman mythos, but the twist that it was really Clayface was very interesting and I’m glad they haven’t tried using that trick more than once. The final episode in "Night and City" produced a surprising appearance by Commissioner Gordon and the end (so far) of Chief Rojas. One sad outcome of this season was the removal of the shows original cast; Yin and Bennett disappeared along with Rojas…but with a fourth season of the show quickly approaching, maybe we’ll get a glimpse into what happened to them still! Jumping into the DVD side of this season, we get the usual amaray packaging to house the two discs and insert detailing each discs contents. The plain white art fits the show well and the cover art is quite a treat to look at, but the disc art was really skimped on. Aside from background color, it is identical to the first season’s disc art, right down to the placement of the text and Batman’s head. Once again, no chapters are present in this release; always a disappointment and I will continue mentioning how the lack of them sucks until they start consistently putting them in these DVD releases. Audio is as strong as the previous release and video is the same as well; minor interlacing and compression show up once and awhile, but nothing that will distract the viewer too badly. Menus are static but have music over them and special features…well…there are no real special features. Like the incredibly disappointing "recap" on Teen Titans, The Batman gets the same treatment on his second season as well. Unlike Teen Titans, however, The Batman’s recap featurette looks like it was put on the disc half-complete. Instead of episode titles for each clip we see, we’re instead given such titles as "Eps 1", "Eps 11" and "Eps 14." Not only is this distracting to watch, but once again the clips aren’t in chronological order, so we start out at the end of the season, jump to the beginning, back to the middle and then we hit clips from the second season, which we’ve just watched. This is a very, very disappointing featurette and quite possibly one of the most useless "special features" since extra trailers (which are also on this release in abundance). Overall, buy it for the season and nothing else. You really won’t want anything else on this set aside from the episodes, so buy it for the excellent second season and highly enjoyable visuals, choreography and overall entertainment; not all the episodes on this set are gold, but there are certainly some serious contenders. [ Back to Releases ] Check out much more at The World's Finest. The Batman and all characters and related indicia are (c) and TM of their respective owners. Original content, copyright The World's Finest. Contact us. Follow The World's Finest on Twitter - Facebook - YouTube

 

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