27 Years Ago, Batman’s Coolest Animated Series Revealed the Future (But It Ended In Another Show)

27 years ago this week, Batman’s coolest animated series ever first made its debut, but it never got to end under traditional circumstances. Instead, you actually have to watch another show entirely to see the true finale for Batman Beyond. Heading into the 2000s, the tone and appetites of those watching cartoons began to change. Batman: The Animated Series was a massively popular take on the classic DC Comics superhero, but it still needed a bit of zazz in order to keep the franchise relevant for a whole new generation of fans.

27 years ago, on January 10, 1999, Batman Beyond made its debut with the WB Network, and launched the DC hero into a whole new vision of the future. This new take on the hero was cooler than ever seen with the classic take on Batman. A new, much younger person donned the mask, new technologies gave him a slicker look, and he had a whole new rogues gallery boosted by wild future technology. But it never got a traditional series finale as you’d expect. Fans would find out years later that an episode of Justice League Unlimited would have the real end of the story.

Batman Beyond Takes Batman Into the Future

Created by Paul Dini, Bruce Timm, and Alan Burnett, Batman Beyond serves as an official sequel to Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures. Taking place many years into the future of those shows, it’s revealed that Bruce Wayne (the late Kevin Conroy) continued to fight criminals as Batman well into old age. But when his body is no longer able to keep up, he retires and cuts himself off from all his former hero allies and friends. Soon enough he runs into Terry McGinnis (Will Friedle), and McGinnis discovers that this old Wayne was once Batman.

Urging Wayne to take up the mantle in his stead, Terry McGinnis becomes a new version of Batman for the future age. Bruce Wayne mentors and advises the young hero as he starts his journey to take on a new generation of criminals (many of which are inspired by classic villains of the past), and the two of them form an unlikely duo that fought crime across three full seasons of the series and a direct to home video movie, Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (which saw the return of the classic Batman villain).

Batman Beyond helped to craft what turned out to be an extended DC Animated universe for Warner Bros. Television Animation, but never quite got to have an officially stamped ending. Its final episode instead was focused on a returning Zeta (star of The Zeta Project spinoff animated series), and McGinnis himself didn’t get a proper ending to his story until years later. Fans would end up being surprised at Justice League Unlimited as it would have an official finale episode for Batman Beyond four years after the end of the main TV series.

How Does Batman Beyond Actually End?

Terry did live on beyond the end of Batman Beyond as the DC Animated Universe continued to connect through future projects. First seen in Static Shock when that hero is sent into the future, Justice League Unlimited then took it even further a few years later with “The Once and Future Thing,” which revealed an even newer look at DC’s future. This included Terry once more, but also included an older version of Static, a new Justice League, and other surprising faces.

This was already a cool enough surprise, but then the episode “Epilogue” gave fans all of the final answers to the lingering Batman Beyond questions. It’s an episode that combs through Batman’s animated history to then bring it all full circle for Terry himself. Years after the events of Batman Beyond, an older version of Terry confronts a much older version of Amanda Waller, and discovers that he’s not a clone of Bruce Wayne (as originally suspected), but is instead Bruce’s biological son through the injection of Bruce’s DNA into Terry’s father as part of a larger Cadmus experiment to create a new Batman.

This reveal finally puts Terry’s mind at ease as he discovers he wasn’t just a Bruce Wayne clone bred to be Batman, but instead has made the choices he has all on his own. It’s then he purposes to his girlfriend from the original series, Dana, and heads into the future. It’s such a cool ending that could only come years after Batman Beyond’s final episode, but many fans of that classic might have missed out if they didn’t continue to keep track of DC’s animated shows.

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