Trivia / Batman: The Animated Series E8 "The Forgotten"

• Creator Backlash: The creators disliked this episode mainly for being a message show put forth by the original story editors.
  Bruce Timm: I didn't want to do this show from the very beginning. Sean Derek was big on doing shows with social messages. And my big problem with message shows, is that you can't solve the world's problems in a half-hour cartoon. If you raise the issue of homelessness, what can you do? It makes the episode look very exploitative, because you're just using the problem as an exotic background. You can't discuss the problem on any meaningful level in a 22-minute action cartoon. So I put in the Dream Sequence with Bruce in the barracks where these multitudes of people are looking to Bruce for a handout, and he doesn't have enough money for them all, and they're surrounding him and suffocating him. It's not enough for him to put a band-aid on the problem at the end, by offering the two guys a job. It just doesn't work.
  • Director Boyd Kirkland felt that BS&P undercut the script's essential message (although a few homeless women still appeared in the finished episode):
    Kirkland: There was a sequence at the beginning where Batman is wandering around the city, trying to find out why people were disappearing. It was staged with homeless people hanging around on sidewalks: families, mothers, and kids. They made us take all that out of the boards. They said it was too much for kids to see that maybe a woman or a family can be out on the streets. They specifically asked that we only show men as homeless.
• Inspiration for the Work: The idea for this episode was conceived when Bruce Timm and the writers wondered what Bruce would do if he lost his memory and was forced to find a solution without gadgets or his costume.

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