I've Got Batman in My Basement is widely considered one of the weakest in the entire series. Heart of Ice won an Emmy and redefined a villain for every medium that followed. These two episodes air back to back.
This week on Toonami Absolution, Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Episodes 13 and 14: \"I've Got Batman in My Basement\" and \"Heart of Ice.\"
\"I've Got Batman in My Basement\" introduces the Penguin, here designed to resemble Danny DeVito's portrayal in Batman Returns. His Fabergé egg heist goes wrong when Batman confronts his giant South American vulture. However, Batman soon gets it worse as he gets sprayed with nerve gas from Penguin’s umbrella, staggers into the Batmobile, and collapses. Thankfull, two children see this and quickly drive the Batmobile through the streets of Gotham before hiding Batman on their basement couch. The episode is not the series at its best. It is, however, the Trope Namer for a specific kind of story, which is something.
Then \"Heart of Ice\" arrives and everything changes. Written by Paul Dini, directed by Bruce Timm, voiced by Michael Ansara, and designed by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, this is the episode that took Mr. Freeze, a gimmick villain from a 1959 Batman comic, and turned him into a genuine tragic figure. Victor Fries was a cryogenics scientist who froze his terminally ill wife Nora in a stasis chamber he built himself, hoping to keep her alive until a cure could be found. However, GothCorp CEO Ferris Boyle had him thrown into the chemicals to shut the project down. Freeze survived, transformed, and has spent however long since building a weapon and a revenge list. The episode won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Writing in an Animated Program. Its version of Mr. Freeze's origin has been used in virtually every subsequent adaptation, including Batman & Robin.
We discuss the jarring tonal whiplash of watching these two episodes back to back, what makes \"Heart of Ice\" a landmark in animated television, and what Paul Dini and Bruce Timm understood about Mr. Freeze that sixty years of comics hadn't.
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📌 Topics covered this episode:
– Batman: TAS Episode 13 \"I've Got Batman in My Basement\" recap & review
– Batman: TAS Episode 14 \"Heart of Ice\" recap & review
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