Batman: Every Screen Batmobile Ranked From Best To Worst

9. Dark Deco - Batman: The Animated Series

You go in the exact opposite direction, that's where. Batman: The Animated Series is arguably the most successful adaptation of the "classic" Dark Knight. Gotham City is a brutalist metropolis which seems to be suffering a permanent midnight, and it's got a masked vigilante which patrols its streets to match. With Kevin Conroy's never-bettered vocal performance, the animated Batman isn't quite the Droopy-faced sort Affleck's upcoming portrayal looks to be capturing - he cracked a few jokes in his time and deigned to have a couple of colours in his costume - he did take the job a little more seriously than the mugging, nudge-nudge wink-wink say-no-more silliness of Adam West's Caped Crusader. With a more straight-faced take on the character and a moodier, less sunny version of Gotham to be careening around, he needed a suitable Batmobile to drive. And he did. And it was good. You could even say that it was our second favourite Batmobile in the character's on-screen history to date. The Animated Series Batmobile mirrors the exaggerated Art Deco style of its Gotham City (dubbed "Dark Deco" by critics of the time), taking advantage of the fact that it's a cartoon and therefore the car in question doesn't have to be in any way functional or realistic. So we get an impossibly long Batmobile that's all smooth, sleek curves juxtaposed with sharp corners, with the same Cadillac-like points as the West car but on something that looks less like the sort of thing an actual eccentric millionaire from the sixties would drive, and more like a pimped-out hearse. Plus it came equipped a Bond's embarrassment of gadgets, including smoke and oil dispensers, wheel slasher hubs, a missile rack, tear gas dispensers, ejection seats, titanium alloy wheels and body panels, and reversible jet exhausts.