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SYFY WIRE Podcast

Batman Beyond's spin-off, The Zeta Project, is the best cartoon you forgot

By Dany Roth
zeta project

Now that the DCEU is expanding and making movies no one expected, there's a lot of talk from fans about a Batman Beyond movie. But for all the love that take on the Dark Knight gets, the show's spin-off has been all but forgotten.

On April 8, 2000, Batman Beyond aired an episode called "Zeta" that featured a killer robot with a conscience. Terry let that killer robot go and, lo and behold, that robot got a show of his own the following year.

The Zeta Project is Short Circuit meets The Fugitive. It's about a robot, Zeta, and his human friend, Ros, on the run from secret agents as they search for evidence that proves it's within Zeta's design to be peaceful. It stars Diedrich Bader in the title role, a man who would also go on to play Batman himself in Batman: The Brave and the Bold

The Zeta Project was a big part of the push towards animated series telling ongoing, serialized stories. It ran for two seasons and was canceled mostly because of a conflict over where that story should go next. While the show is available on DVD as of 2017, the strange thing is that it isn't a part of DC's streaming service. The author of the new comic, Queen of Bad Dreams, Danny Lore, joins Every Day Animation to talk about what makes The Zeta Project great and why it deserves to be remembered just as well as Batman Beyond is.

And if you're keeping up, get ready for an episode we suspect everyone has been waiting for. Creator of the Maven of the Eventide YouTube series, Elisa Hansen, is joining the podcast to talk about the only cartoon to ever give Batman: The Animated Series a run for its money: Gargoyles. We'll see you fellow Gargoyles fans tomorrow after the sun goes down.

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