Batman: Caped Crusader Showrunner Bruce Timm Rejected a Bruce/Barbara Romance: “We Weren’t Going to Be Doing That”

The DC Animated Universe may have flirted with a Bruce Wayne and Barbara Gordon romance, but the relationship is “purely platonic” in Batman: Caped Crusader. Showrunner Bruce Timm, who co-created the Emmy-winning Batman: The Animated Series and its spinoffs, has shut down speculation that the Dark Knight’s latest animated incarnation (voiced by Hamish Linklater) and Barbara Gordon (Krystal Joy Brown) might become an item in the newseries that premiered its 10-episode first season Thursday onPrime Video.

“The Batman / Barbararelationship in Caped Crusaderis purelyplatonic. Honest,” Timm wrote when responding to a post discussing the topic on the animesuperhero.com message board. “But the whole ‘[Bruce Timm] is obsessed with Batman/Babs!!!’meme is so ubiquitous now that people are going to see what they expectto see. Whatever…”

Timm then recounted how “early in our development process,” an unnamed executive “enthusiastically asked: ‘Hey, what if Batman and Barbara became romantically involved?, apparently unaware of the uncomfortable history of that particular topic.”

“I said we weren’t going to be doing that, and explained why,” Timm wrote. “I’m not stepping on that third rail again.”

The 2003 direct-to-DVD animated movie Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman, which didn’t involve Timm but took place in the DCAU continuity, suggested Bruce and his younger protégé were dating. The future-set sequel seriesBatman Beyond confirmed the former Batgirl’s romantic entanglement with the Kevin Conroy-voiced Batman — a dalliance that was more explicit in 2016’s Timm-produced Batman: The Killing Joke. While not part of the DCAU canon, the R-rated animated adaptation of the Alan Moore comic sparked backlash over its Bat-ship sex scene between Bruce and Barbara.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that some of the fans who ‘know’I’m obsessed with Bruce/Babs have never even seen The Killing Joke orthe Batman Beyond episode where their prior relationship was mentioned,” Timm wrote in a subsequent post.”Maybe they’ve just seen the meme over and over and over again on theinternet (like for instance on this here site — and in fact earlier inthis very thread) and just accept that it MUST be true. Oh well!”

Batman: Caped Crusader is a hard-boiled detective noir set in 1940s Gotham City and reimagines Barbara — the daughter of Gotham City Police Commissioner Jim Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart) — as a different kind of crusader: a public defender whose pursuit of justice brings her face-to-face with Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader). The series, produced by Timm, Matt Reeves, J.J. Abrams, and Ed Brubaker, is now streaming on Prime Video.