'Beware' of new villains in new Batman cartoon

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Exclusive clip: 'Beware the Batman' premiere An exclusive preview of the series premiere of Cartoon Network's "Beware the Batman," featuring Anthony Ruivivar as Batman, J.B. Blanc as Alfred, Brian George as Professor Pyg and Udo Kier as Mr. Toad.

New cartoon %27Beware the Batman%27 premieres Saturday morning on Cartoon Network

The show features a horde of supervillains other than the likes of Joker and Catwoman

Alfred is an aging action-hero type who looks out for Batman

Gotham City and its most famous denizen are getting an animated makeover like none before.

Producers Glen Murakami and Mitch Watson bring a lot of change to Beware the Batman, the new animated series debuting on Cartoon Network Saturday morning (10 ET/PT). It's a computer-animated take on '70s detective dramas starring a young Dark Knight, for one, but they're also tweaking classic characters such as Alfred Pennyworth and giving Batman a whole new rogues' gallery to battle weekly.

So, instead of the Joker, Penguin and Catwoman, Bat-fans have Anarky, Magpie, Professor Pyg and Mr. Toad to watch the superhero battle.

"A lot of the stuff has already been done, either in animation or the comics," Murakami says. "We need to do something different or we'll just be doing a rehash of everything that's already been done.

"People asked if any comics influenced the show, but I don't really know if I could point to one. We made such an attempt to do something different."

Beware puts a film-noir aesthetic on many familiar Batman tropes: There's a Batcave with all sorts of high-tech computers, gadgets and gizmos, an intimidating and sleek Batmobile and lots of Dark Knight derring-do from Bruce Wayne's cape-and-cowled alter ego.

Once they had the key ingredients for any successful Batman project, Murakami says, they could push the characters — some of whom have been around since 1939 — in new directions.

Alfred (voiced by J.B. Blanc) — in most Batman stories an old butler, guardian to Bruce Wayne and assistant to Batman — is an aging Jason Statham action-hero type in Beware the Batman. He is a onetime member of the British secret service, he actually teaches Batman (Banshee star Anthony Ruivivar) quite a bit.

"We just asked the question: What if Alfred really wasn't the butler? Let's take all these different things about his backstory and focus on that," says Murakami, who also worked on the Bat-cartoons Batman: The Animated Series and the futuristic Batman Beyond.

Watson started developing Alfred using a model of Sean Connery in The Untouchables, which to the producer seemed like James Bond in his later life.

"This is a guy who isn't just a stiff-upper-lip butler who's waiting on Bruce Wayne and looking out for him," the producer says. "In the comic books, they've never shied away from the fact that Alfred feels very protective over Batman. OK, well, let's say he's not just watching out for him, he's helping to train him and giving him some of the techniques he learned in the secret service and some of his life experience.

"In our show, although Batman is very, very skilled, he's still young. He hasn't had the same life experience that Alfred has had."

An old member of Batman's Outsiders from DC Comics lore, Katana (Sumalee Montano) is a sword-wielding bodyguard for Bruce Wayne, who's a bit more proactive as a crimefighter than folks have seen him, according to Murakami.

Spurred to be a superhero by his parents' death when he was a kid, the producer says, "he's not sitting in the Batcave moping about it, and I think that's changed the character slightly, that he doesn't just want vengeance and is brooding."

Adds Watson: "He is a guy who has chosen to dedicate his life to putting on a suit and fighting bad guys in the shadows for absolutely no credit whatsoever. This is not a normal guy."

One thing they also wanted to make sure was that the Bruce Wayne aspect of his personality was just as strong as Batman, Watson says, "and one can't live without the other. And literally if one did live without the other, things would go off the rails pretty quickly."

He does mention that Beware the Batman will focus on Bruce Wayne trying to figure himself out psychologically and physically — with the latter aspect, he'll be trying to "bodyhack" himself in order to be a better superhero.

Batman will need it against the weird and wild crew of new villains that Murakami thought to throw at him.

The eco-terrorist duo of Professor Pyg (Brian George) and Mr. Toad (Udo Kier) — who first appeared in Grant Morrison's recent Batman & Robin comic — tussle with Batman in Saturday's premiere episode, and will be followed by the likes of the politically charged Anarky (CSI's Wallace Langham), the jewel thief Magpie (Grey DeLisle), and Ra's al Ghul (Lance Reddick) and the League of Assassins, who played a role in director Christopher Nolan's recent Batman films.

For Murakami, they made more sense than doing the umpteenth animated version of the Joker.

"Honestly, what could we have done differently?" he says. "If we had radically changed the rogues' gallery so much, then it's almost like you're creating a new character. Or the expectation is so high that if you change it, then you're almost betraying the character.

"It's almost like people know too much about the villains that it telegraphs what the story is."

They may be unfamiliar to some mainstream viewers, but the new baddies are similar to more known names. For example, Anarky's a bit like the Joker in that he's a force of chaos scheming to undermine Batman, and like Catwoman, Magpie's a thief but with a multiple-personality disorder and doesn't feel pain. As for more classic Batman characters, Humpty Dumpty is the series' Riddler as a criminal savant who sets traps for the Dark Knight, and the League of Assassins is a group that includes Lady Shiva, Silver Monkey and a mess of ninjas.

The Beware producers chose villains who would allow them to highlight new aspects of Batman and Bruce Wayne's personality and also characters who fans could understand quickly.

"Each character you'll see has a certain motif they have that is instantly recognizable and that becomes the playing field we have," Watson says. "Other nuances might come out down the line, but you'll get who these characters are."