When producers Alan Burnett, Glen Murakami, Bruce Timm and I began developing Batman Beyond in early 1998, we made a conscious decision to downplay much of the lore established in our first animated Batman series. It would have been easy to craft Beyond completely around the elements from Bruce Wayne's life, which had resurfaced to confront his young pupil, Terry McGinnis, nearly forty years later. After all , who wouldn't want to see our new Uncaped Crusader lock horns with the youthful clone of Catwoman or match wits with the supercomputer programmed by the original Riddler?

The notion of going that route for fifty-two episodes was very tempting , which was all the more reason not to do it. It wasn't out of lack of affection for the old show - we all still love it. In nearly ten years, Batman, Robin, Joker, Harley Quinn, and all the others have become very old friends to everyone on the crew, myself included. Yet, early on we determined if Batman beyond was to succeed, it had to do it on its own terms. The series' energy had to come from the tense relationship between Bruce and Terry, the differences between Bruce and Terry, the differences in their methods and motivations being the engine that would drive Batman far into the twenty-first century.

Once that had been established, only then would we feel ready to go back and answer a few of the questions fans had asked about Batman's life and his original crimefighting partners. Where's Robin? is Nightwing alive or dead? Batgirl hung up her cape and cowl to fight crime as the new Commissioner Gordon, but what terrible secrets and memoirs still haunted her? Most important, what of Gotham's most insidious villain, the Joker? Did he, as rumors suggested, die at the hands of the first Batman or had he hidden himself away to plot some devilish future revenge?

When the good folks at Warner Bros. Home Video gave us the green light to produce a feature-length Batman Beyond adventure, we decided to use the movie format to answer those questions. Bruce, Glen, and I tossed around a number of ideas pertaining to the fate of the old Bat team, as well as the miraculous return of the Joker and the new threats he would bring to Batman / Terry's world. That's always the best part of this job, the magical, collaborative spirit that infuses the start of any new animation project. I was shouting dialogue, Bruce was sketching orbiting death-rays, and Glen was tossing plot twists and wondering how in God's name we were going to get all this done in only sixteen months.

Once the story was more or less set, I went away to write the script. Remarkably, I have no memory of this next stage. I can dimly recall the six weeks I spent slamming my head into my computer keyboard while weeping in frustration, but that's about it. Somehow at the end of that time something came out of my printer which the gang at Warners liked. As with every screenplay, there were segments written for Return of the Joker which did not make it into the finished picture. The scene where Bruce Wayne confronts his ambitious business associate Jordan Price provided the opportunity for the two adversaries to have a face-to-face encounter, but it essentially underscored the fact that these two guys don't like each other, something the audience already knows. And while the Penguin's flashback cameo and Bruce's visit to the ruins of Arkham Asylum added a lot of classic atmosphere, they did little to advance the storyline. The resulting story is both tragic and triumphant, recalling the lore of our classic Batman while bridging the gap to Beyond. I think we did a good job, but the deciding vote now rests in the hands of the people who have always known Batman best, his readers.