Writing 'Teen Titans'

Plus: animation newsbits.

Detail of an early Teen Titans concept piece by Glen Murakami

Welcome! It’s a new issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — our last Sunday edition of February. We hope you’ll enjoy what we’ve prepped today:

• 1) The writing process behind the classic Teen Titans series.

• 2) The news in animation.

If you haven’t already, it’s free to join the 20,000+ readers who receive our Sunday issues by email every week:

And now, here we go!

1 – Iconic characters

Writing for children’s TV animation is harder than it might seem.

The people who do it well (like the writers of Foster’s Home) make it look easy. But crafting a great show that engages kids without talking down to them, and that stays age-appropriate without boring parents or older siblings, is a tricky balance.

When a show nails that balance, it’s remembered. Avatar: The Last Airbender just beat out another live-action remake this week — in large part because the new one’s writing doesn’t measure up to the source material. The original series actually aims younger, but it has scripts you can grow up with. People of all ages can take something away.

Back in the 2000s, that’s kind of how it turned out for the writers of Teen Titans, too.

Titans was meant for the 6–11 range, first and foremost. “The main mission was making a good superhero show for kids,” said producer Sam Register. “Now if the fanboys happen to like the Teen Titans also, that’s great, but that was not our mission.”¹

There was real blowback against this approach at the time. “When OG Teen Titans first launched, many lifelong fans hated what we were doing,” noted David Slack, the show’s head writer. To them, this series betrayed the more detailed, adult-oriented Teen Titans comics of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

But the team took its job seriously. “I’m just trying to make Teen Titans a cool show. Just because it’s aimed at 6–11 year olds, that doesn’t mean it can’t be a cool show,” said creator Glen Murakami. He’d risen through the ranks on Batman: The Animated Series and its follow-ups — this was his own breakout project. He loved animation and comics (including the Titans comics), and he just wanted to tell good stories.

That’s what he and the team tried to do here. Over time, they won people over. As Slack explained in 2004, a little over a year after Teen Titans first hit the air:

The thing that’s so great about it is that so many different people like it. Doing panels and signings, you look out and see little kids, grown-up fans, teenagers, boys, girls, men, women. Just that so many people are enjoying this despite their “demographic group.” We were trying to make something everyone would like. At [San Diego] Comic-Con, it felt like we did that.

In the end, the restrictions of writing for kids’ TV didn’t kill their work. You could say that it was sharpened instead. The whole style of the show was created by restrictions — and by the team’s desire to be creative within them.

Early character design sketches by Glen Murakami (courtesy of this image gallery)

When it came to writing Teen Titans, the word of the day was “iconic.” Glen Murakami used it a lot. He wanted to “keep all the characters really iconic and really clean.” He meant iconic in the literal sense — like a symbol. Just the essentials. Just the core.

The comics by Marv Wolfman and George Pérez that inspired the show were years old, and complicated, and (again) not really for children. Murakami explained that “our target audience had never even heard of the Teen Titans.” They were too young.

“So things had to be relatable,” as he put it. “You don’t want to get into an elaborate backstory.”²

The team was making a script-driven, character-driven superhero series that young kids needed to understand. At the time, Justice League wasn’t reaching this age group — its stories were more complicated and its fans were older. Teen Titans was planned as the solution. For that to happen, iconic characters were a necessity.

Winding comic-book lore and even secret identities got the axe. Everything came down to characters you could grasp at a glance. They had to pass what Register called the “squint test.” Asked which Robin (Dick Grayson? Tim Drake?) appears in the show, Register said, “My thing with Robin: I am so completely bored with the DC universe and continuity and all that crap. To me, he’s just Robin.”

This show’s Robin had to stand on his own. He had to interest kids episode by episode, minute by minute. So did the whole cast: they needed to be compelling even without nostalgia, detailed origin stories or callbacks. How did these characters work in the moment, with none of that baggage? And could viewers get invested in them quickly, in one episode?

A big reference point here was the original Star Trek from the 1960s. Murakami cited it often — even in the show’s press kit. To him, the early Trek characters were iconic, instantly recognizable and relatable in the way he wanted the Titans to be. David Slack once said:

We wanted it to be emotionally complex but with plots that are not complicated. … I remember Glen and I had a discussion about why the original Star Trek was better than Star Trek: The Next Generation. And Glen’s argument was that it ultimately came down to the fact that it was emotional. Next Generation sort of got lost in its own mythology of transporter buffers and positronic brains and all that stuff. The original Trek was Spock as the superego, McCoy as the id and Kirk in the middle having to make the choice. So we leaned towards more emotional stories like that.

Murakami doodles on a script during a recording session (courtesy of his Instagram account)

To match that iconic, Trek-style simplicity, the five heroes that the team took from the comics had to be stripped down. Slack compared them a lot to The Breakfast Club — those archetypes from high school. As he said:

… we realized early on … that the Titans had to be metaphors for people we knew. In school, everyone falls into roles. So we took the Titans apart and analyzed who they would be if they were just ordinary kids. So Robin becomes the serious student, Starfire’s the foreign exchange student, Cyborg’s the jock, Raven’s the goth girl and Beast Boy is the class clown.

Everything about their personalities and powers needed to be readable on the surface. “Oh, there’s the robot guy. There’s the alien girl. There’s the witch girl. There’s the shape-changing boy,” like Murakami put it.

The point of simplifying the characters wasn’t to water them down. They were trying to “take the best of the Wolfman and Pérez stuff and just distill it,” according to Murakami. Turning the Titans into icons meant making their flaws and strengths easy to get, easy to write, easy to bounce against each other. As with Star Trek, the characters would come alive in their interactions and interpersonal conflicts.

“Once we knew what the characters’ limitations were, we knew how to play them off one another. … Playing the characters against each other is where you get the conflict and the humor,” Murakami said.

It’s also where that idea of the Titans as metaphors became even more important.

Amy Wolfram, one of the main writers and story editors on Teen Titans, made it clear that “we always wanted it to be something that would feel real.” Each story needed to have a direct tie to the real world, to universal stories that anyone could understand. The way characters interacted was far more important than hairsplitting over lore.

Slack liked to tell the scriptwriters to “look for a metaphor in the experience of childhood that we can then blow up to super-heroic proportions.”

The idea wasn’t to do an after-school special (something the team mentioned often) but to keep Teen Titans rooted in the relatable. And so we get the superhero versions of bullying, jealousy, betrayal, custody fights. Raven reads a magical book that talks to her — “an internet chat room,” Slack noted. The episodes with Terra, a traitor who joins the Titans, are about “the bad friend … somebody who got lost in life.”

Wolfram was the editor of the standout Haunted, where Robin goes off the deep end in his hunt for the Titans’ nemesis, Slade, who’s believed to be dead. Robin thinks he’s alive and can’t stop chasing ghosts. As Wolfram said:

That one was definitely very dark. That episode came about for two reasons. First, it came out of Robin’s character. Robin’s greatest strength is that he’s obsessive and he won’t ever let anything go — ever. But that also becomes his greatest weakness. … Whatever the case, it was very real to Robin whether it’s really Slade or not. I think that’s true with children. If they think there’s a monster under the bed, to them, there is a monster under the bed. It’s real to them. So we wanted to address that.

Design development drawings by Derrick Wyatt (courtesy of this gallery)

Although the team was tailoring these stories to kids, they’re stories about people first. The results are often funny, but they aren’t always, and the writers themselves felt the impact when they hit those notes right. “I was looking at the last pass of the final script just bawling my eyes out,” Slack said about the Terra arc. “I mean, she’s just lost.”

In later seasons, with the cast more established in viewers’ minds, the writers ventured a little more into origins and backgrounds. There was even character development. “Once we reached a certain point with a character,” Slack explained, “[Glen] was always careful that we didn’t just put them back to the same place before a certain episode … I credit Glen with making sure the characters grew in subtle ways over time.”

At the same time, the team didn’t stray from its rules: iconic characters dealing with relatable situations. Cyborg confronts the accident that left him part robot, but the focus is on how he feels about himself in the present, and about how those feelings connect to real life. When Raven’s father (a demon) takes over the world, it’s ultimately about dealing with bad parents. The ethos of the Teen Titans project stayed the same.

In Slack’s words:

I think the whole story of Raven became a metaphor about the fear of growing up, among other things. … I think Raven’s fear was centered around this fear that she would grow up to be like her father. And I think that is a metaphor that does resonate quite strongly for a lot of people. Most of us, no matter how much we love our parents, wouldn’t choose to be just like them. And unfortunately, someone with a bad parent carries that sense of legacy. That fear that you will grow up to be like them. … [S]ometimes your parent is someone who you want to grow up to be — and other times, that parent may just be someone who helped to bring you into this world. And sometimes your family are your friends... the people who take care of you… not necessarily anyone you are biologically connected to. That may be too philosophical for a kids’ cartoon show. But it’s there anyway!

There’s a history of kids’ TV that fights the censors — Batman: The Animated Series, for one. Crossing those lines wasn’t really the goal of the Teen Titans group: this was always a kids’ show. It was just supposed to be a good kids’ show.

The writers wanted each episode to work as a story about compelling characters. Their scripts ended up resonating past the 6–11 group because that plan succeeded.

“We work very closely with our Standards and Practices guys. It’s not an adversarial relationship,” Slack said in 2005. “We don’t want to do anything that will upset kids or parents. But at the same time, we want to do the coolest episodes possible.”

2 – Newsbits

• We lost Kent Melton (68), the famous maquette sculptor known for his work on The Incredibles, Coraline, Mulan and many more.

• A Portuguese film called The Girl with the Occupied Eyes is set to premiere in March. It adapts a children’s book by André Carrilho, who directs the animated version. The trailer is super impressive — we’ll be paying attention to this one.

• Australia’s Glitch Productions is prepping another nine episodes of The Amazing Digital Circus, and Cartoon Brew has the story.

• Another Cartoon Brew highlight: a seriously reported dive into Ukraine’s animation scene, two years after the start of Russia’s invasion. “I’m still holding on to my desire to grow in animation,” artist Anna Dudko said.

• In France, the César for animated feature went to Chicken for Linda! (also the top-prize winner at Annecy 2023). Mathilde Bédouet’s Summer 96 won among shorts.

• As we’ve mentioned, Discotek Media is bringing the Japanese series Chie the Brat (by Isao Takahata) stateside for the first time. Now, it’s available for preorder.

• In India, Ujwal Nair is touring his new animated musical Lucky Dog, which has a fun, cartoony look. AnimationXpress shared a trailer, an interview and concept art.

• An item from America: a look behind the scenes of Across the Spider-Verse’s visual effects.

• Submissions are now open for the Animasyros festival in Greece until early June.

• Lastly, we wrote about the story behind Professor Balthazar, the Yugoslavian cartoon series that helped to inspire Craig McCracken’s Wander Over Yonder.

See you again soon!

1. From a 2003 article by CBR, cited a few times. We also looked at the press kit, and at a series of now-offline interviews hosted on the fansite titanstower.com. You can find archived links (which may be broken in email, but work on our website) here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

2. In his interview for the press kit, Murakami spoke more about the backstory and flashback thing. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I didn’t get caught up in origin stories too much. You never questioned why the Three Stooges had different jobs all the time or how Speed Racer got to drive the car. They just did. Once the story gets going, you get so involved that the backstory just did not seem that important.”