10 Hidden Easter Eggs In Batman The Animated Series
5. Rossum's Universal Robots
Here we have another licence plate serving as an Easter egg, though this is both more subtle and even more brilliant than the Rose Bud gag on Poison Ivy's car. In the episode Heart of Steel part one, Randa Duane is the name of the lady driving the car, with this plate serving as an extremely subtle spoiler for what is to come.
The episode revolves around the creation of H.A.R.D.A.C., a sentient AI. Karl Rossum is a retired Wayne Tech employee, who specialised in the field of robotics. After a theft at Wayne Enterprises of computer chips that would allow a computer to become self-aware, Lucius Fox advises Bruce that speaking to Rossum would make sense. What Wayne ends up discovering is much more than he anticipated.
The licence plate RUR is a reference to Rossum's Universal Robots, a play that was written by Karel Čapek in 1920, premiering in 1921. It has gained notoriety for introducing the word 'robot' to the English language.
The robots in the play are not the robots in modern understanding, but rather artificial biological constructs that may be mistaken for humans. Along with the RUR licence plate, both the play and Heart of Steel bear many resemblances to Blade Runner. William Sanderson, who provides the voice of Karl Rossum in the episode, also portrayed J.F. Sebastian in this film as well - which of course featured the Nexus 6 Replicants, a design of android that were almost identical to humans.