NEW YORK, NY.- The story of Batman has been told in comic books and on-screen many times. But if there’s one person who should get the chance to tell it again, it is Bruce Timm.

Timm is a veteran artist, animator and producer who helped create “Batman: The Animated Series,” which made its debut in the Fox Kids programming block in 1992. Following on the heels of Tim Burton’s hit 1989 film, this “Batman” show — often abbreviated as “BTAS”— brought a somber atmosphere and sophisticated storytelling to the adventures of Gotham City’s costume-clad vigilante.

The show dove deep into the colorful rogues’ gallery of its title hero and helped stoke the flames of Bat-fandom when the movie franchise started to run aground. There were more than 100 episodes in its initial Fox Kids run and further installments titled “The New Batman Adventures” that ran on Kids’ WB.

So a few years ago when Timm was asked if he would like to develop a new Batman animated series that would rekindle the spirit of that venerated, foundational show, he knew exactly how he felt.

“I went, ‘Not really,’” Timm said in a recent interview. “I was terrified of it. People love the old show so much that I didn’t want to mess with it. You know, it’s not 1992 again.”

Even so, Timm was eventually persuaded to make “Batman: Caped Crusader,” whose 10-episode first season will be released Aug. 1 on Amazon Prime Video.

“Caped Crusader” takes Batman back to his roots as a Depression-age pulp hero. The series is set in an unspecified era meant to look like the 1930s and ’40s — no cellphones or Bat-computers — when troubled scion Bruce Wayne has barely begun his war on crime.

As Batman, he contends with revamped, period-specific incarnations of classic villains like Catwoman, Two-Face and the Penguin, as well as a Gotham police department plagued with corruption.

For Timm, “Caped Crusader” has allowed him to hew even closer to his original plans for “BTAS,” unhindered by the content restrictions that studios and networks put on children’s television.

“We don’t have to worry about selling toys as much,” he said. “We don’t have to worry about 7- to 11-year-olds being traumatized by it.”

Looking back at some of his original ideas for “BTAS,” Timm said he was hoping its protagonist would more closely resemble the fiction-magazine heroes that had, in turn, inspired Batman, like the Shadow and Doc Savage.

“The thing that those guys all had in common was that they were all very remote — none of them wore their heart on their sleeve,” Timm said. “They cared about people just as Batman does, but they didn’t necessarily show it emotionally. They didn’t crack jokes. They weren’t hugging their teammates.”

Timm said he felt he couldn’t fully realize this on “BTAS,” which was designed with youthful viewers in mind, and where Batman still had chummy relationships with allies like his sidekick, Robin, and his faithful butler, Alfred. Even so, “BTAS” made a lasting impression on its target audience — and on many much older viewers.

Ed Brubaker, a comics author and screenwriter, is an executive producer of “Caped Crusader” and the head writer of its first season. He recalled being in his mid-20s when he saw the “BTAS” episode “Dreams in Darkness.” In that installment, Batman — under the influence of the Scarecrow’s fear toxin — has a frightful vision of his parents’ murders.

“He has this hallucination of his parents walking into a tunnel,” Brubaker said, “and then the tunnel turns into a gun barrel and then blood starts pouring out of it.” Brubaker added that he was “probably high” when he watched it, and thought: “Kids are going to have nightmares.”

“But it was so good,” he said. “And at a time where I was dismissive of superheroes, it made me go, ‘There’s some fun stuff you could still do.’”

The success of “BTAS” allowed Timm and some colleagues to build an expansive cartoon universe around DC’s comic book heroes, including shows like “Superman: The Animated Series,” “Batman Beyond” and “Justice League Unlimited,” as well as several films.

More recently, as Warner Bros. looked to reinvigorate its Bat-franchise with live-action films like “The Batman” (2022) and other TV spinoffs, the studio’s animation division sold “Caped Crusader” to streaming service HBO Max. Matt Reeves, the director and co-writer of “The Batman,” is an executive producer of “Caped Crusader,” along with his frequent collaborator J.J. Abrams. (The live-action Bat-series “The Penguin,” spun off from Reeves’ movie, premieres on Max in September.)

Visually, “Caped Crusader” is steeped in the art deco architecture and fluid Fleischer Studios cartoon style of its predecessor. In its storytelling, the new series is not necessarily concerned with making Batman likable — either to the citizens of Gotham or to its audience — as he pursues his agenda.

“I want him to be weird and creepy, even when he’s Bruce Wayne,” Timm said.

The producers’ search for someone to play that conception of the character led them to Hamish Linklater, a film, TV and stage actor who has proved equally versatile in comedy (“The New Adventures of Old Christine”) and horror (“Midnight Mass”).

Linklater acknowledged the outsize influence of Kevin Conroy, who brought a gravelly somberness to the Bruce Wayne-Batman dyad on “BTAS” and dozens of other Batman animated and video game projects before his death in 2022.

When Linklater was preparing for his “Caped Crusader” audition, he said he was striving to find a unified sound that worked as well for Batman as it did for Bruce Wayne.

“I hadn’t looked at Kevin Conroy in preparation for making the tape,” he said. “But there was a 30-year-old vibration in the back of my head that I was trying to grab ahold of.”

“Caped Crusader” also offers new spins on several of Batman’s best-known adversaries, like Dr. Harleen Quinzel, reimagined as a psychiatrist to Gotham’s elite before she becomes the vengeful Harley Quinn.

Jamie Chung, the “Lovecraft Country” star who plays the character on “Caped Crusader,” said she was surprised she was offered the role.

“In the past, Harley Quinn has been, you know, blond,” Chung said. (Asked if she meant the character was usually depicted as white, Chung, who is Korean American, replied, “You said it, not me.”) When she was approached about the role, Chung said, “I was really taken aback. I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ It’s progressive. It’s modern. It’s different.”

But “Caped Crusader” was nearly smothered in its Batcave when, in August 2022, HBO Max canceled the series along with several animation projects after the Warner Bros. Discovery merger in April of that year.

Although production continued on “Caped Crusader” in the hope that a new home for the show could be found, Timm said the initial cancellation “was not fun for us.”

“Thank God our bosses were like, ‘We’re going to take a gamble,’” he said. “‘We’re not going to halt the production. You guys keep making the show. We’re going to shop it around, and hopefully we’ll find a buyer.’” Amazon’s two-season pickup of “Caped Crusader” was announced in March 2023.

As Timm works on that next season of “Caped Crusader,” he said his focus is on building its Batman character and the Gotham City he inhabits rather than trying to re-create an extended animated universe for the full pantheon of DC characters. “We did that almost 15, 20 years ago,” he said.

“Now everybody’s doing huge, interconnected universes,” he added. “That makes me kind of not want to do it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.