Quote Originally Posted by daredevil1 View Post
It was pretty lifeless and had no depth or characterization. Everyone is just kind of the stereotypical version of themselves. Of course, Batman sometimes gets overrated beyond anything it deserves for having false depth, but at least we had the illusion of getting in the characters' heads. I always roll my eyes when people complain endlessly about Spider-Man TAS and overpraise the DCAU... if you want characterization, Spider-Man had it in overabundance. People complain about the animation in that one- but the DCAU had horrible animation sometimes. The non-TMS episodes of this are pretty stinky. I would've liked to get into Clark and the villains' heads more. But season 2 had so much random crap like the Prometheon or the non-Phantom Zone criminals or the Chthulu thing, and they were all boring to the extreme. They should've either completely leaned in to the Silver Age elements and gone bonkers, or, made every episode darker and pushed the envelope like Legacy. It's too much of a half-and-half like "here's Mxyzptlk, give us nerd points for honoring tradition" while at the same time kind of half-rolling their eyes at it and trying to make it "grounded" as if their take was so much more reasonable. Batman really grated when it did this too.
In anticipation of No Way Home, I rewatched the Fox Kids Spider-man animated series. I'll agree with you that it definitely had plenty of characterization, but it was kind of told in a silly, on-the-nose way. The storytelling in DCAU is a bit more, I dunno, skillful?

I would also say that the fact that STAS was a mixed bag of Silver Age, dark, etc., was a good thing. The weaknesses of the show are in spite of this, not because of it.