Inner Fangirl

In just the past two months, Sony has:

Said the PS6 will be more than $1000 at launch

Announced the end of all physical PS game releases

While simultaneously announcing the end of two of their console game stores — ensuring multiple games will die forever

Declared that they are wholly dedicated to (A) leveraging A.I. when making games and (B) creating live-service games above all other game types

Announced that if you bought any movies through their PlayStation Store, over 550 of them will soon be deleted from all users' libraries — with no restitution offered of any kind

Gamers, it is time — to paraphrase Robert Vann — to turn Sony's picture to the wall. Any one of these insults would be bad, and taken alone? Maybe it could be swallowed. But this is an ongoing campaign of disdain towards customers, with each declaration worse than the last.

The backgrounds for the entire series were done on black paper, a first for any animated show. It's Batman, which means everything is at night and incredibly dark. So, the majority of the backgrounds were going to be black anyways and using black paper would cut down on the time it took to create all of the backgrounds. Adding color over the black paper instead of the traditional method gave it a much more stylized look that helped make it iconic.

It also forced some other creative choices, such as using an airbrush to do all of the background art. During the early testing, they found that using an airbrush was easier to apply paint with than a paintbrush and that it looked better. Airbrushing let them be more experimental with painting techniques, such as the spattery fades you can see in the "Bane" and "Deep Freeze" title cards above or the soft, deeply shadowed face on "the Last Laugh." The overall effect of airbrushing on a black background is a much darker, moodier vibe than could be achieved with a traditional approach.

They were made for the Palio di Legano, a medieval pageant and horse race held annually in the Italian city of Legano to commemorate the Battle of Legano in 1176.

The Palio di Legano was started in the 1930’s with the support of the fascist government (sigh), but was restarted in the 50’s, seemingly with most of the fascist gunk scraped off. It continues to the present day as a historical and cultural event, taking place annually in May.

The costumes are extensively researched for accuracy to the period, and they’re handmade with high-quality materials. I wasn’t able to find information on every costume pictured here, but these ones

are from 1961.

I’d guess the others are from around the same time.

Here’s a photo from this year’s event:

Sources under the cut: