Phantasm is easily a better Batman film than either of the Nolan features. Unlike either, it features a truly credible and moving love story (Nolan's female characters have been pathetic in contrast), and unlike TDK, MOTP manages to feature the Joker but focus squarely on Bruce/Batman. There are no villains stealing…

preferences
Maybe I'm just nostalgia-resistant, but "Gray Ghost" doesn't resonant as much with me as it does with so many other folks. I'm not sure why, since I grew up watching 80s reruns of Adam West's Batman (and I still enjoy the show). That said, it's a very good episode, but I have to admit to finding "See No…

Statements like "Batman Returns is a pretty decent Burton movie, but not necessarily a good Batman movie" have become something of a cliche, and a false one too. There's no such thing as a platonic ideal of Batman—the character has evolved over time because different writers and artists have envisioned him…

On this week's review
Mr. Sava makes a convincing case why this episode doesn't fully deliver on its promise. The only quibble I have is that we don't really know if this episode was "a follow-up to Two-Face." Yes, it follows it in production order, but that may not mean as much as one might think. The first season…

A Request for Mr. Sava
Please don't pair "Heart of Ice" with another episode. It's practically the definitive episode of BTAS and deserves a review to itself. I would hate to see it tainted by being in the same article as utter shit like "I've Got Batman in My Basement." While I realize juxtaposing the two makes for a…

I should note that Sava says Richard Moll provides Thomas Wayne's voice—I'll have to rewatch the episode in light of that. Either way, the scene is still too heavy.

Two Good to Be True (but it is)
I concur with everyone else: this is the series' first masterpiece, and a lot of the credit goes to Alan Burnett, who provided the story and became the show's Story Editor, allowing it to go in darker directions. Mr. Sava's review does justice to the episode(s), though I could have done…

"There's some significance to the fact that Two-Face is one of the only characters that didn't really get redesigned for TNBA"

The Freeze storyline jumped the shark when they brought his wife back from the dead. Mr. Freeze was not a villain-of-the-week character, and the only worthwhile follow-up story with him was in The Batman Adventures Holiday Special comic.

I agree with Ye Yee—that episode with the Judge is built around a lousy gimmick. It practically screams "The writers ran out of good ideas!!"

Keaton's Doubles
IIRC, one of Keaton's biographers states that the only time Keaton used a stuntman was for the pole-vault scene in "College." By then Keaton was beginning to slip from his physical peak, and even Buster would have found it difficult to master pole-vaulting on short notice.

Grade Inflation
Mr. Sava is a good reviewer, but I fear he was much too generous to this episode, whose only saving grace is the way Mark Hammil says "kewpie."
Everything else is a wash-out—ugly animation, obnoxious kids and their obnoxious parents, a storyline that doesn't allow Mr. J to truly show his stuff, and an…

On How to Proceed
I'll chime in with everyone else and say that proceeding chronologically is the best way to go. I'm glad to see the DCAU, one of the greatest achievements in American animation (it's fun to enrage anime snobs with), get attention. Some further words:

Good Interview!
Thanks to Mr. Adams and the Onion for running this interview, which will surely increase the film's prospective audience. (There's a list of screening dates here: http://www.drafthousefilms…. "The Day Today" and "BrassEye" are quite likely the best television comedies of the past two decades—Morris was…

Classification
I'm always glad to see Dreyer discussed, especially on a website as popular as AV Club, and I'm sure this article will help increase the number of his devotees. But why he is discussed under the "Geekery" label? Dreyer's films have traditionally been regarded as part of the "high art" spectrum of…

On Sturges
A pretty good primer. But Mr. Rabin is wrong when he says that Sturges, when making "The Great Moment, "aspired to leave the ghetto of comedy behind and make a film that mattered." Sturges actually intended to make a biopic that was far less stuffy and full-of-itself than the usual model, and he made sure…

After you finish with Townes, Buck, Loretta and Twain…
…please devote a future edition of this column to Porter Wagoner—if you don't know where to start, try "The Rubber Room."

Moffat's works
Glad to see that Mr. Phipps mentioned "Joking Apart," which used to run on some PBS stations in the 1990s. The first episode of its second season is one of the best farces ever screened on TV. It's a vastly better show than "Coupling," Moffat's most impersonal and slick comedy. Moffat also wrote the…

Sorry about the spelling mistakes—that's what I get for writing hurriedly. I'm even more embarassed about not having said that this is by far Mr. Phipps' best piece on the Bond books. My only quibble would be his calling the bobsled chase "unthrilling" when it's a master class on editing and excitement building—Hunt…

Go Spy Go
I would also recommend reading The Spy Who Loved Me. Just don't go in thinking it's a typical Bond adventure. It's the most radically experimental of the Bond books, narrated in first person by the "Bond girl" herself, and, from a gender viewpoint, the most interesting Fleming novel of them all. It has the…