The plan worked. Robin helped boost Batman’s popularity and launched a wave of teen sidekicks. Captain America palled around with Bucky. Green Arrow fought alongside Speedy. Sandy the Golden Boy joined Sandman. So popular was the concept that DC started publishing stories about Superboy despite initially rejecting the idea before Robin’s arrival and, in 1964, gathered them into their own team, the Teen Titans.
As enduring as it the idea was, many still thought teen sidekicks were a bridge too far. Psychiatrist Fredric Wertham famously saw something unseemly in the close bond between Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. Stan Lee hated the idea of sidekicks and thus killed Bucky off-panel when he resurrected Captain America in Avengers #4. And countless smart-alecky satirists have taken aim at the idea, from Rick Veitch’s The Brat Pack to Garth Ennis’s Team Titanic in The Boys.
Still, Batman has never been long without his Robin, at least in the comics. The movies have been another story. Sure, Douglas Croft and Johnny Duncan portrayed the character in 1940s serials, Burt Ward brought his small-screen version to theaters in 1966’s Batman, and Chris O’Donnell tried to do a bad boy rebel sidekick in Joel Schumacher’s movies from the 1990s, but more recent takes have separated the Dynamic Duo. The insecure, over-eager Robin of Teen Titans, Teen Titans Go, and Teen Titans Go to the Movies resents Batman’s shadow, as do the edgier Robins on the series Titans. The Dark Knight Rises famously juked around the concept altogether by making Joseph Gordon Levitt‘s cop John Robin Blake.
It’s not too hard to see the reluctance to give a proper Robin to Batmen played by Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson, or a living Robin to Ben Affleck‘s Snyderverse version. Heavy line work from Frank Miller and caricatures by Tim Sale can convincingly put a smiling teen next to a brooding Batman, but few directors can pull off the same feat in live action. Heck, even Tom Hardy’s Bane and Colin Farrell‘s Penguin looked a little odd in their respective films.
The announcement for Dynamic Duo seems to have found a surprising solution. The movie will be directed by Arthur Mintz who, along with his wife Theresa Andersson, operate Swaybox Animation. “Swaybox uses a technology known as “Momo animation,” which is a cross between CGI animation, practical elements of stop-motion, and live-action real-time performance,” Deadline reports. “The result is long-form storytelling billed as visually breathtaking, dynamically expressive and more human.”
Instead of running from the goofier aspects of Robin, Dynamic Duo seems to be embracing them, using them to tell a very different type of Batman story from those we’ve seen so far. James Gunn and Peter Safran have been very upfront about the fact that everything from their DC Studios tenure will be interconnected, even across media. So even if Batman isn’t a major part of Dynamic Duo, it will relate to the new era’s first proper Batman picture, The Brave and the Bold, directed by Andy Muschietti and featuring the Damien Wayne Robin.
With the new movie Dynamic Duo, DC is finally ready to reteam Batman and Robin. Here’s why this is a very good thing. Read More