Back to the Studio…How Hard Can it Be?

So, it turns out The Grand Tour is coming to an end. If you’re a fan of the show, you’ve probably already seen the news, but if I’m the one breaking it to you, I’m sorry you had to find out this way. As it turns out, this news has hit me way harder than I expected it to. After all, it’s the end of a show, shows I love end all the time. They come to a natural end, like Succession, they come to unsatisfying ends, like Dead to Me, they get unceremoniously and unjustly cancelled well before their time, like Lodge 49, The Tick, Terriers, Firefly, Infinity Train, and countless others. You’d think I’d be used to it now.

But this feels different. It’s not just the end of a show. It’s the end of an era. It’s the end of a phase of my life, and perhaps a phase of the world, that I was not prepared to see ended as I casually scrolled Facebook looking for people to wish a happy birthday to. If you don’t know, The Grand Tour is basically a continuation of the BBC’s revitalized Top Gear, starring Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond. It’s a show about cars, but also not about cars. It was equally scripted as unscripted (perhaps tilting towards scripted more and more as the years went by), equally a spectacle as a documentary, equally a comedy as it is nonfiction. But it’s always been a comfort to me. I discovered the show when I was in undergrad. I won’t go much into details, but undergrad was a very bad time for me. I was away from an unhappy home, but still in an unhappy situation. I was at the same time halfway escaped and yet halfway in an emotional prison. Needless to say, in a place like that, you try to find comfort wherever you can.

Richard cooks his signature dish, beans, in the back of his WRX living space

This is before the time streaming services were available. Netflix hadn’t even started mailing people DVDs, Hulu was only introduced around the time I was graduating. Amazon was shopping site; Prime didn’t exist yet, and Prime Video even further away. I retreated into my DVDs to drown out the reality around me, even to fall asleep. But, completely unprepared for my circumstances, I only had a handful of movies and a couple TV seasons that fit into a small bag with my CDs (CDs were like small circles that had music on them before iPods were replaced by phones). And, as it turns out, you can only listen to the first season of The Office on repeat while you try to fall asleep so many times before your sanity suffers. I’d always loved cars, ever since I was a small child. This blog, in its original form, was about the joys of driving, and was originally called Acceleration Therapy. My monthly drive out to Barnes and Noble to pick up the latest issues of Evo and Car magazine, UK publications, was just a brief refuge. As a friend turned me on to Top Gear, the only way then to get it was to torrent it. So I did. I immediately fell in love with the show. It was hilarious, eye-opening, and focused of course on European and Japanese cars and locations, places I’d never come close to seeing at that point in my life and cars that I’d never heard of from all over the price scale. It was nothing like the car TV I’d seen before, usually dry retellings of the printed magazine conclusions accompanied with a reading of a spec sheet. It was dynamic, fast-moving, filled with comedic observations and easy chemistry among the hosts. It gave me everything I wanted in a car show, especially for a young man hundreds of miles away from his PlayStation and his copy of Gran Turismo.

Driving one of the most dangerous roads in the world in SUVs that really shouldn’t be there

In only a short time, I started making playlists in WinAmp so I could fall asleep to the episodes as well as watch them as soon as I, ahem, downloaded them. Top Gear became a part of me. I shared it with my friends. I would go on car forums and discuss the latest episode. As my life changed, as I moved on from undergrad, I still watched Top Gear as regularly as I could. Over time, streaming services started to carry it, and I followed it around as it bounced from platform to platform. I ended up with a 2 year subscription to Motor Trend just so I could watch it on their woeful streaming service. When that iteration of Top Gear came to an end because of Jeremy Clarkson’s antics, I was crestfallen, but I understood. And yet, I was overjoyed when I heard the trio was returning on an Amazon Prime show called The Grand Tour. I followed that through its teething issues, got to its relatively perfected third season, and then again felt torn up when I found out they were ending the show. But it was only that format, mostly a copy of the old Top Gear format, where they had a studio, or in this case a tent, and audience, with different segments, car reviews, and celebrity guests. They’d continue on doing specials, arguably the funniest and most memorable episodes of either Top Gear or The Grand Tour. It made me so happy. But now that’s ending too.

It’s not that I don’t understand. Pretty much everything about the show is questionable now. Clarkson himself is no stranger to controversy; he’s made casually racist comments, he’s been sexist, homophobic, I think he threw a phone at someone once. Or maybe he just punched someone. He’s no angel. Cars have been on the decline for over a decade now, I don’t even keep up with the car market anymore. Almost nothing comes with a manual transmission and cars are so fast these days, they’re made with such high limits that they’re no longer fun to drive at anything close to legal speeds. Sensation and feel have been replaced with spec sheet one-upmanship and a greater focus on technology integration. Instead of trying to get people to stop texting and pay attention to what they’re doing, cars started being designed to make it safer. I guess if you can’t stop people from texting while driving, that’s the right thing to do. Still, it makes me sad. Then there’s also the whole climate change of it all. I’m not a scientist, but I choose to listen to the scientists who, well, are, and they tell me cars have a negative impact on the environment. I’m not in love with that information, but I get that driving is a thing we have to do less. So an extravagant, globetrotting comedy show celebrating the automobile in its modern iteration can seem a little tone-deaf in this age. Not only that, Jeremy, James, and Richard are not young men anymore. Time eventually comes for us all; when I think about things I am too tired to do in my 30s that I did in my 20s, I can’t imagine mustering the energy to drive through mud in a modified Caterham with no roof or doors or sleep in the back of a WRX wagon while searching for the source of the Nile or build a truck by hand in a Mongolian desert in my 50s and 60s. I don’t even like camping now. So I understand. All things end.

Honestly, I need a shower just looking at this photo. I’m not built for the outdoors.

But I can’t help this feeling that there’s a hole in me now. Something missing. That some part of me has ended too. What an odd way to face your mortality. Mourning the loss of a television show about cars. And yet, here I am, doing just that. Mourning and facing my mortality. It’s funny how some things sneak up on you and others just punch you in the face. Life starts out so big. At one point in your life, everything you do, you do for the first time. The world is huge and you are so, so small. It’s full of wonder. Then, time passes and life gets a little smaller. You find out Santa’s not real, and even if he were, your house isn’t in his address book. You have your first heartbreak, maybe you fail your first test, maybe you get your driver’s license and taste freedom for the first time behind the wheel of a car like I did. You move away from the place you called home and come to the point where it’s not your home anymore. Dreams for the future slowly become the practical realities of today. Life keeps getting smaller.

Top Gear, The Grand Tour, and the boys Jeremy, James, and Richard kept that sense of wonder alive in me at a time when things weren’t good for me. They kept it alive for many years after that as well. They helped create an emotional home for me when I didn’t really feel like I had another. Other shows and movies helped me there too, and they’ve come and gone. But Clarkson, May, and Hammond have been there so long, I’ve seen myself grow from a Clarkson into a May (well, not perhaps exactly the man affectionately known as Captain Slow or Mr. Slowly, but I have found that his love for small, simple, honest sporty cars has rubbed off on me and I enjoy them a lot more than the latest winged hypercar with a million horsepower). They’ve been part of my life so long, I started to forget that there’d be a time they wouldn’t be anymore. And yes, I can be comforted by the fact that they’re still going to be making content. James May’s Our Man in Japan and Our Man in Italy and Oh Cook are shows I truly enjoy. Clarkson’s Farm, which I’ve written about in this blog before, has another season on the way and perhaps even more after that, I can only hope. Richard still has DriveTribe (with James as well) on YouTube and even though his show with Tory Bellici from Mythbusters, The Great Escapists, was largely unsuccessful, it’s still there to watch. But it’s not the same as the three of them doing something horrendously irresponsible in a car together. And while there’s such a large back catalogue of episodes I can revisit any time I want (for the moment, until the streaming license changes hands once again), it’s not the same as seeing them do it all for the first time.

I suppose, however, that if you look hard enough, change isn’t only a destructive force. Something new will come, some other way to keep the wonder alive. And maybe then, life will feel a bit bigger again. The holidays are coming up, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to note that art is a gift. Entertainment is a gift. And along with that, wonder is a gift. In a way, I write this blog for myself. I don’t know how many of you out there are reading this, but the analysis I do here, the praise I enjoy heaping on projects I love, the scorn with which I criticize properties that I think are best avoided, that’s my way of trying give a gift to all of you. I’d love to tell you all you have a car under where you’re sitting, but since I’m on the other side of Oprah, sharing with you all the things that I love and create that sense of wonder in me is my way of giving you a gift (I mean, logistically, I would have no idea when or where you’d be if you’re reading this, so how am I going to put a Pontiac G6 under your chair? Oprah had a studio, that’s a huge advantage). One that I hope you’ll take and share with other people. So we can all come together, regardless of the time of year, and help keep wonder alive for each other. And we can keep life feeling big.

Thank you for making it this far. I know this was a more personal post than most, so I appreciate you reading it. I’d like to end here, not with despair, not with mourning, and not even with a hopeful message for the future. I’d simply like to thank Jeremy Clarkson, James May, Richard Hammond, and everyone who ever worked on Top Gear or The Grand Tour, all the crew, all the health and safety folks, the guests, anyone who contributed in any way to make them the shows that had the impact on me that they did. Thank you all for being a part of my life. I will miss your work dearly and share it with as many people as I can.

One Piece: Live Action Anime for the Ted Lasso Era

I should probably preface this by saying that I am not much of an anime fan.  I’ve tried, I remember watching shows on Cartoon Network’s Toonami after school and not really connecting with most of them, save for one.  Gundam Wing.  I was immediately drawn in; the show had everything I was looking for.  Political intrigue, giant robots, complicated moral quandaries, giant robots, likable and (relatively) relatable characters, giant robots, and giant robots.  As I write this, I have a Tallgeese action figure (my favorite mobile suit, as the giant robots are called) and a Gundam Deathscythe on my desk.  Needless to say, it left an impression on me, that even subsequent Gundam series haven’t matched.  Much to my simultaneous chagrin and relief, there’s never been a live action Gundam series, so I don’t have to fret about the fidelity or quality of any adaptation.  So after watching live action anime adaptions fail one after another when not even the source material for most of them resonated with me, I wasn’t exactly champing at the bit when I heard about Netflix’s One Piece live action.

Monkey D. Luffy points out over the East Blue towards adventure.

Truth be told, I was so unfamiliar with One Piece that I often mixed it up with One Punch Man, another anime that I didn’t watch.  However, one late night, I found myself drawn to it.  With no familiarity with the source material, I thought I could at least approach it with fresh eyes and no preconceived notions as to how the show is suppose go, look, or feel.  And, frankly, it was kind of a liberating experience.  So many of the things I watch are steeped in decades of lore and nostalgia and my own experiences as a kid with an IP such as, say, Star Wars, colors how I engage with and enjoy it now.  I can’t sit down and watch Ahsoka without being reminded of how much I disliked the prequel trilogy, but on the other hand, I am also reminded of how much I liked the Clone Wars series and how much I loved Rebels.  However, with nothing to draw on, I could just dim the lights and watch.  I could do something so rare in media these days, especially when you consume as much of it as I do—I could watch something novel and experience it for the first time, completely clean.

And I loved it.  I did.  I had no idea what to expect and yet when all the pieces of the puzzle were in place, it just felt right. Every character was likable and when you can pull off that minor miracle, you can get away with almost anything.  At least for me, anyway.  If I can connect with the characters, sympathize and empathize with them, care about their plights and journeys, it can cover all manner of sins in the other aspects of storytelling.

Emily Rudd puts in an excellent performance as Nami, seen here doing boat stuff. Probably, I’m not a sailor.

But, before I get into that, I guess I should give you a little bit of a background on One Piece.  It follows the story of a young man who wishes nothing more than to become a pirate and find the “One Piece”, which, if I’m completely honest, I don’t exactly know what that is.  I don’t believe it’s a bathing suit that covers the stomach, but rather the treasure hidden by notorious pirate Gold Roger, its existence he divulged as he was publicly executed by the Marines.  Or possibly it’s a map to that treasure?  The young man, ridiculously named Monkey D. Luffy, dreams of finding the One Piece and becoming King of the Pirates.  I’m not sure what that title entails or how it’s supposed to work, but he barrels forward with the enthusiasm of a young Ash Ketchum, telling everyone who will listen both his name and his goal, and the relentless positivity of Ted Lasso eating cotton candy while chewing bubblegum.  Seriously.  It’s a lot at first, but Iñaki Godoy plays Luffy with such convincing sincerity that you can’t help but root for him.  As he recklessly moves through the seas, he picks up a ragtag crew (as if there is any other kind) as well as picking up a fair few enemies along the way.

Pretty bold of them to slip in an episode of The Bear and think I wouldn’t notice.

Each one in the crew gets a full backstory, three dimensional characterization, and depth that often main protagonists can lack in television shows.  They’re not just support characters—they’re real people and they feel real, at least in the context of a world where a person can eat a fruit and gain physics- and logic-defying powers.  That alone is a kind of a triumph in storytelling, as many shows use their secondary characters as a mechanism to simply drive the plot forward—they pipe in with the jargony explanation at just the right moment, they do the real investigative work while the main characters flirt with each other, etc.—but not here.  One Piece is Luffy’s story, sure, but it’s also theirs, and the show makes sure they never get left behind.

At the core of each character in Luffy’s crew is a deep goodness that radiates through all their actions.  None of this is more evident than with Luffy himself, as he bids farewell to a friend who is joining the Marines—the enemy of pirates everywhere—and Luffy commends him in following his dreams and assures him that they’re friends no matter what side of the fight they’re on.  But whether a gruff swordsman, tale-spinning raconteur, misanthropic thief, or skilled culinary artist, each of Luffy’s crew has kindness in their hearts, even if sometimes it takes Luffy to help bring it out.  And much like the show itself, initial impressions are only part of the story, as the characters unfold and grow and endear themselves to you in properly magical ways.

“We are men of action, lies do not become us” is not something Usopp would ever say. That’s Princess Bride.

I’ve always felt that live action anime adaptations don’t work and can’t work because anime is such a specific thing—it’s hard to pin down what makes anime special or different from other media as someone who doesn’t watch much of it, but I can tell from what little I’ve seen that it’s not much like other genres of entertainment that I do watch regularly.  So in an effort to smooth out the strangeness, for lack of a better word, of many anime titles, live action adaptations lose that je ne sais quoi that anime has, simultaneously losing fans of the source material and failing to bring in new ones.  And yet, standing tall in the shadow of Cowboy Bebop’s failure, One Piece manages to take the biggest heart stuffed into a show since Ted Lasso and win me over completely.

At first, when I watched the show, I thought it was good fun—a bit silly, a bit over the top, but a fun show in a time when fun is very much welcome.  But as the episodes progressed and the outer layers of the artichoke were cut away, revealing the heart, I was stunned by the surprising depth and emotional affect that it had on me.  I laughed wholeheartedly, I cared about the characters, and I shed more than one tear as their journeys and stories unfolded.  I don’t want to go into too many details, because if you aren’t familiar with it, like I wasn’t, I don’t want to spoil your ability to go in fresh and experience it for the first time without being colored too much by prior knowledge.  I will say, though, that there’s a guy who carries three katanas and that is awesome.  One time through the first season wasn’t enough for me, I’m going to have to watch it again.  And maybe a third time.  But not a fourth.  Okay, probably a fourth, but definitely fewer than eleven times.  Well, we’ll see.

Times change; when I was a kid, they used to say not to sleep in a hammock with your sword because you’ll cut your stuff off. I still think it’s good advice.

[If you’ve made it this far, I would like to change gears for a moment and say that I fully support and stand in solidarity with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.  Though it means that projects I love may be delayed or cancelled, what they are fighting for is important and I support their efforts for fair pay; none of the wonderful works of art we get to enjoy beamed into our homes would be possible without them and they deserve fair compensation for the work they do that delights us on a daily basis.]

The Big Door Prize Answers The Most Painful Question Imaginable

Maybe you missed the Ted Lasso train.  Maybe, like me, you still haven’t come around on Jason Segel, so you were hesitant to watch Shrinking (which I’m glad I did, despite my reservations about Segel).  Maybe someone split your brain in two and you watched Severance at work, so you don’t remember it when you’re at home reading this.  So you didn’t watch Wolfwalkers because you thought it was just for kids.  Maybe you’re well-adjusted and without insecurity, so you didn’t cry for 34 minutes straight while you watched The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.  In case you missed all those shows and movies, I’m here to inform you that Apple TV has some really good stuff on it.  And the latest triumph of Apple TV’s short tenure is The Big Door Prize.

Apparently the early 2000s have finally reached the small town of Deerfield

While the pilot goes to some very pilot-y lengths to set up the season’s story by throwing you off the deep end into a swimming pool of trailer-friendly, heavy-handed one-liners, the show quickly settles into an interesting narrative.  Using its small town setting to its advantage, The Big Door Prize plays with the spread of information through Deerfield’s denizens against what it shows you to great effect.  Information spreads through the town like a virus, but you don’t always get to see it when you want to.  The show makes you wait, makes you all but plead to find the information it teases in front of you.  The premise of the show is a new manifestation of that old video game urban legend.  Like so many Polybius machines that allegedly mysteriously appeared and then as mysteriously all disappeared, a large, butterfly-themed Morpho arcade cabinet shows up in the local grocer’s store while the stock boy Jacob is out back getting blazed.  No one knows where it came from.  No one knows how it got there.  The owner of the store didn’t order it, he was as confused as his stoned employee.  Jacob posits that it’s some kind of game, after he tries it out for himself.

Unlike a regular arcade cabinet, however, you climb into it through a butterfly wing door, insert your coins, and enter your social security number and hand prints.  Once the data-mining (the alleged purpose of the Polybius cabinets) is complete, rather than play a game, the machine promises to deliver you a little blue card with your life’s potential on it.

Right there.  In writing.  The most your life can amount to.

Why the hell would you ever want to know that?

Maybe I’m just getting old, but the more I look at the doors that have closed behind me, the more I find myself wondering why anyone would want to know what possible life could have existed behind them.  The protagonist of the series, Chris O’Dowd’s Dusty, is a high school history teacher with a daughter in high school, so there’s naturally a large age split in the characters.  So, maybe I’m not looking at this through the eyes of the high schooler I once was, but being in my 30s, the idea of knowing my full potential is the worst possible thing I can think of.

One by one, like little confused penguins, the citizens of Deerfield succumb to the temptation of the Morpho machine, whether enthusiastically or begrudgingly.  Some hide their cards. Some throw them out.  Some get their picture taken with them and put on the wall at the market, like some kitschy restaurant’s tacky sports memorabilia.  Some residents even make their potentials into sweatshirts and wear them in the same brilliant shade of blue that the cards are printed on.  I get it, it’s a pretty shade and blue is my favorite color, but that’s a bit much for me. .

It’s a lovely play on temptation; a classic Tree of Knowledge situation.  No good can come of knowing what that card is going to say, but not knowing can feel even worse.  Dusty grows obsessed with the Morpho machine, often derailing his own lesson plans to discuss the machine with his students.  He finds a card with an upsetting potential in the trash and it sends him down a different direction, spiraling towards and against the Morpho machine at the same time.  People’s cards seem to have the same effect on them; the town residents go on making huge life changes after getting their fortune told by their modernized Zoltar machine.  Buying a motorcycle, William Telling in the front yard with your kid’s head holding the apple, or taking a full on life pivot to be the next David Blaine, it seems at every turn Dusty’s friends and neighbors are making major life changes based on a word or two printed on a card that came from a magical machine that only takes quarters.

I’m not clear how many quarters it takes to tell you your life’s ultimate potential, but it seems like it would be a lot

It all makes me return to my original question.  Not every potential can be great, right?  A rural town where every single person is destined for greatness would be quite the geographical oddity indeed, even moreso than the town that’s two weeks from everywhere.  Why would you ever want to know it?  If you’re a young person, maybe it would be interesting to know how far you could go.  Or maybe the weight of expectation would rest on your shoulders like Sisyphus’s rock, a daily burden to be carried until the end of time.  If, like me, you’ve got a few decades under your belt, why would you want to open the door to what could have been?  What could ever be printed on that card other than a road map to pain?  All you’ve got are two possible answers.  Your life is all that it can be.  Your life is not what it could be.  Sure, if you’re happy in where you are, an elusive state of being so hard to find, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even an attainable goal, finding out you’ve reached your potential could be a comfort.  Although, it does beg the question; if you are content with how your life is going, what does it matter what some card says anyway? You could just be happy the way things are and never look for any external validation. But even if only one percent of you wanted more or wondered what could have been different or had any regrets, how could knowing that where you are, what you are, is as far as you could possibly go be a good thing?  And if it’s not, if you find out you could have been or still could be more, you’re faced with either the realization that you’ll never reach your greatest potential or you have to weigh blowing up your life to reach it.  Or still, and possibly even worse, do you decide that your potential is something you won’t strive for, something you’re not willing to throw away everything you’ve built, not willing to fundamentally change your understanding of yourself for?  Do you settle for the life you have?  What does it mean if you decide to change?  What would you leave behind? Who would you leave behind?

I know I don’t need to know, but I just need to know. Don’t I?

How can you even boil down a person’s life potential to a one or two word statement printed on Vistaprint’s card stock?  How do you sum up a person’s life into a business card that you can sit around and compare with others?  It can’t be possible.  There’s no way the nuance and facets of a person’s life could be summed up in a book, not even an Infinite Jest sized tome; people are far too complex to be made into a business card.  You’re not your fucking khakis, you’re not what a card says you are or can be.

But that’s the brilliance of the show.  Even having said all that, knowing what I know, feeling what I feel about the Morpho machine, stating unequivocally that there’s nothing good that can come from inserting your quarters into that machine, I know, I just know, I’d be tempted by it.  I’m not sure I’d be able to hold my curiosity.  I know that I don’t want to know if this is all I could be.  I know that I don’t want reassurance that my life will never improve, I get enough of that from that annoying voice inside my head.  People are striving for better everyday, in all walks of life, whatever better means to them, and it’s hard work.  There’s no magic turnaround, no card that can make it happen.  But at the same time, knowing that it’s out there, that some machine is capable of telling me that I’m going to become a best selling author (or at least I’ll finally finish my novel) or I’ll argue in front of the Supreme Court or that more than the five people I send this blog to will read it, I’m not sure I’d be able to keep myself from finding out what that destructive little card will say.  In the face of such temptation, what saint among us could possibly resist?  The Big Door Prize, at least after watching the first three episodes, is not the feel good romp that Ted Lasso is.  It’s not the deep, lore-laden mystery of Severance.  It’s not the story of someone struggling to pick up the pieces like Shrinking.  It’s a story of people tearing themselves apart in pursuit of what could have been.  Of temptation overpowering their better angels.  And I don’t know what they’re going to find at the end of it all, but I want to find out.

The Legendary Kevin Conroy

It’s strange for me, being someone who uses words for a living and for his hobby (that I hope to turn full time at some point) to be at a loss for them.  But that’s where I’ve been since I heard about the passing of Kevin Conroy.  Admittedly, I don’t know much about the man himself (his contribution to DC Pride 2022, “Finding Batman” is high on my to be read list, but I don’t have the tears left to read it right now), but I make no exaggeration when I say that he was as strong an influence on me and the man that I’ve become as any other person or piece of media that I’ve experienced.  Putting into words what Kevin Conroy means to me will not be easy.  But I have to try.  I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t do my part to share with you this man’s great legacy.

It would be simple for me just to tell you how good Batman: The Animated Series was, how it just might be the best cartoon of all time, and how it’s a piece of media that’s genuinely for all ages.  But so many hands went into making that animated giant the pillar of storytelling that it is—writers, animators, directors, everyone on the technical side about which I know very little.  I want to just focus on Bruce Wayne and Batman—and Kevin Conroy’s beyond iconic performance in the series and in others, bringing Batman to life in a way that defined the character for multiple decades and for at least one entire generation, if not more.

Kevin Conroy’s Batman was simply the definitive performance.  When Christian Bale was cast in the excellent Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy, it wasn’t Michael Keaton I measured him against.  It certainly wasn’t Val Kilmer or George Clooney, that’s for sure.  And it wasn’t even the great Adam West, either.  It was Kevin Conroy.  For many people, their childhood was defined by people like the incredible Mr. Rogers or Bob Ross, or Elmo and Big Bird on Sesame Street.  And sure, I watched them too (with the exception of Bob Ross, somehow I missed that train), but for me, it was Batman to whom I looked to for moral guidance.

And he did not disappoint.  You may think of Batman in terms of the large, spectacular set pieces from the movies or the fantastical villains he often found himself going up against, but it was always the quieter moments of Conroy’s Batman that made the most impact on me.

In the episode “It’s Never Too Late”, Batman deals with a mob war raging in Gotham—a younger, rising mobster wants his elder rival out of the way so he can have his run of Gotham’s streets.  And yet, it’s not Batman’s punches that resolve the issue; sure he probably could have descended violently through one of Gotham’s many skylights and beat the mob bosses senseless, but he takes another course of action.  He takes the elder mob boss on a tour of his old neighborhood so he can see the destruction his criminal empire has wrought.  Drug addiction runs rampant, with the boss’s own son in a rehabilitation facility, suffering from withdrawal.  Now, it’s not just that the topics are incredibly mature for what is ostensibly a kids’ show, but what is remarkable is how the show handles it with such delicate empathy.  Addicts aren’t shown as degenerate, they aren’t demonized.  Conroy’s Batman see them as human beings—victims of a nefarious organization that creates, feeds, and profits from their pain.  Though the mobster decides to take things into his own hands at first, he’s ultimately brought back from the brink by an old friend who convinces him to end his criminal career and cooperate with the police.  Yes, there’s some punching, but it’s the showing of humanity that wins the day.

Conroy brought some very real world humanity to the character of Batman as well.  In the episode “Nothing to Fear”, Batman is dosed with Scarecrow’s fear toxin.  And what are his hallucinations about?  What are his deepest fears?  Not bats, not dying in a fight with Mark Hamill’s Joker; no, nothing like that.  It’s bringing shame to his family by doing what he’s doing.  This resonated with me deeply.  As the first generation born to immigrant parents, you don’t always get to live for yourself.  Pressure is put on you, unfairly, to live up to the sacrifices your parents made to give you the life you have.  To see Batman, the greatest hero I had ever seen, struggling with those same feelings, fearing that he’s taken what was given to him and wasted it not only weighed heavily on my shoulders, but showed me that I wasn’t alone.  I may not have been able to express this or fully understand it as a child but when Bruce Wayne hears his father’s voice telling him that he failed him, I understand that now.  I know what that feels like.  And if my greatest hero felt these things and found a way to push through, then I knew it was possible.  I knew I could do it too.

In one of the most touching episodes, “Appointment in Crime Alley”, Roland Daggett denigrates and terrorizes those living in the aptly named “Crime Alley”, only to have Batman thwart his plans to illegally evict, in Daggett’s words, “the underclass” in the name of progress (and his own profit; Daggett’s role as a foil to both Bruce Wayne and Batman is on full display in this episode).  The details aren’t important, but as the episode comes to a close, Conroy’s Batman reassures longtime friend and confidant Leslie Thompkins that no matter how bad things seem at the time, that good people still lived in Crime Alley.  His view of Crime Alley’s denizens is completely divorced from their socioeconomic status.  How he saw them had nothing to do with their income or poverty, their circumstances, or anything like that.  They were human, they deserved respect and dignity, and Batman saw them that way without any judgment—a stark contrast to the unfeeling and villainous Daggett.  People are not their salary.  They are not their struggles.  They are not their small apartment in a rundown building, they are not anything that people like Roland Daggett would use to make them feel like less.  Batman saw that.  And he taught a generation to see that too.

In “Perchance to Dream”, the Mad Hatter creates a literal dream scenario in which Bruce Wayne’s parents are still alive and he’s engaged to his love Selina Kyle, but partly because he couldn’t envision a world where Bruce Wayne does nothing to right the wrongs he sees in his fair city (and partly because you can’t read in a dream), he’s able to wake up and put a stop to the Hatter’s schemes.  In the episode “I Am The Night”, Batman struggles with self doubt again, wondering if he’s actually making a difference.  How human is that?  The episode ends with his hero, Commissioner Gordon—his surrogate father—telling him how he inspires him, how he makes him want to be a hero, and how you can never stop fighting for good, and Batman is renewed.

And that’s what Kevin Conroy’s Batman did for me.  He taught me so much about compassion and empathy, that failure and self doubt are normal, that failing doesn’t meaning you’re a failure as long as you keep trying.  That doing right has a cost that is always worth paying and that there are always people worth standing up for.  He taught me that if, at the end of the day, you have any strength left to give, that you should do something to help people.  As little or as much as you’re capable of giving.  Just keep trying.  Because trying counts, even if you come up short.  This is just a small sample of Kevin Conroy’s excellent performances that had a profound impact on me.  There were many more in this series, let alone his performances as Batman in other series as well, like Justice League, that gave so much to those who watched and listened.  I will never stop missing Kevin Conroy.  I will never stop mourning him.  But I will also never forget the lessons I learned from him.  And all I can do is thank him for that.  I wish I had a chance to do it when he was still alive, but now that he is gone, I can still share it with you.  Kevin Conroy was such a formative figure in my life.  If you peel back the leaves of my artichoke heart, Kevin Conroy’s Batman is one of the things at the center that still drives me today at my core.  It’s his voice that I hear when I’m going through tough times.  It’s his voice that helps me still believe that there are good people in the world trying to do good.  He is vengeance.  He is the night.  He is Batman.  Always.