10 Mind-Blowing Facts You Didn't Know About Batman: The Animated Series
2. Robin's Older Age Was Down To Censorship Rules
Warner Bros.
In what could be considered a happy accident, given how it enabled BTAS to depict Robin's transformation into Nightwing, the reason why Dick Grayson was depicted as a university student in the show was actually down to censorship rules.
BTAS had to abide by a lot of censors during those seasons with Fox, with one of the most decisive relating to the endangerment of children. Although Dick Grayson's Robin was commonly depicted as a child in most Bat-related media up until BTAS, the show decided to showcase the character as a young adult to please the censors.
The only time audiences ever saw Grayson's childhood was in the Emmy award-winning two-parter, Robin's Reckoning, which also found itself unintentionally aided by censorship when the episode depicted the deaths of Grayson's parents in a flashback off-screen.
It was only when BTAS moved to The WB that a younger Robin, Tim Drake (a mishmash of Drake and the hotblooded Jason Todd), came aboard.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
