One of my all-time favorite episodes of Batman: The Animated Series was “Heart of Ice” which beautifully reimagined the classic Batman villain Mr. Freeze. The version of the character in this episode is the best version of the character that I’ve seen.
Thanks to on breakdown of the series we have some interesting details on how that fan-favorite episode actually came together. Co-creator Bruce Timm explained that he brought up the character in one of their development meetings describing him as “just kind of a throwaway character in the comics.”
Timm went on to say: “He wasn’t really considered one of Batman’s top villains. And I thought, Well, if we can take a character like Mr. Freeze and give him some gravitas, that’s what we should be doing with all of those secondary characters. I specifically said at the time, ‘What if ice isn’t just a motif, but if it’s also an emotional thing with him? For instance, if his wife had a tragic death, and then his response to it is that he’s emotionally closed off; he’s emotionally frozen.’ And Mitch and Paul went [snaps fingers], ‘That’s something!’ So we had written that down real quickly as a note.”
Writer Paul Dini was actually looking to leave Warner Bros. and move on to the next thing when writer and producer Alan Burnett sat down with him and asked him about doing something for the series and asked if he had any story ideas that he’d like to do, and he said: “Well, yeah, I do have this idea for a Mr. Freeze story,” and Burnett told him to write it up.
When talking about coming up with his initial concept for the story, Dini explained: “I came up with an image of him sitting in a cell, crying, and his tears becoming snowflakes. I thought, That’s kind of cool, kind of gets you at the heart. I thought, Let’s work backward from that. How do I get him to that point? Alan and Bruce and I talked about horror movies — we’re big fans of classic Hammer horror and Universal horror. There’s probably a little bit of Dracula in there, there’s probably a little bit of Dr. Phibes in there, there’s a little bit of Edgar Allan Poe. The lost love who’s dead but maybe not completely gone, and that mournfulness. So we wove that all together, and that became Mr. Freeze.”
You can definitely see all of those influences! It’s probably one of the reasons why I connected with the story so much, because I loved those Universal and Hammer horror films as well.
Burnett went on to share his experience reading the story for the first time: “I sat down and I’m reading this — it was a two- or three-page, single-spaced story [outline]. And I remember just being knocked out by it. And I called the network. I said, ‘I’ve got a great story and Dini wrote it and if this isn’t what you’re looking for, forget about it. This is what I wanna do.’ I called Paul up also and I said, ‘You gotta run it on the show. This is a fabulous story. You’ve got to stay on it!’
Timm added: “That’s kind of a good template on how to treat these characters. Even silly characters, like the Mad Hatter, if you add some pathos and some genuine human emotion to that character, then suddenly they’ll be quite a bit more interesting than they were previously.”
And that’s one of the many reasons that Batman: The Animated Series was such a great show, and the stories were so well done! The creative team knew how to properly handle these characters.