- Title: Batman: The Animated Series – Pretty Poison
- wiki: link
In honor of Batman‘s 75th Anniversary we turn out attention back to the Dark Knight’s more memorable moments on the big and small screen with another episode from Batman: The Animated Series. “Pretty Poison” introduces us not only to Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing) for the first time but also Gotham’s new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Richard Moll) who is dating Pamela Isley at the beginning of the episode unaware of the woman’s true motives. When Harvey is poisoned at dinner by an unusual toxin derived from an extinct rose, Batman (Kevin Conroy) begins taking a closer look at his friend’s main squeeze.
After doing some snooping Batman discovers Ivy blames Dent for the bulldozing of endangered wildlife for Gotham’s new penitentiary. To get the cure for his friend, and to defeat the super-villain who values plant life more than that of humans, Batman will end up fighting Ivy’s giant flytrap and accidentally setting her arboretum on fire. Overall it’s a solid introduction to the villain, and the arboretum fight sequence would be adapted for the The Adventures of Batman and Robin SNES video game.
Although not as powerful as she has been portrayed at times in the comics, this version of Poison Ivy is cunning, devious, and proves a more-than-capable match for the Dark Knight in her first appearance with an agenda all her own, deep chemical and botanical knowledge, and an immunity to the various poisons she uses on others. The fact of Ivy and Harvey’s short courtship will turn up in later episodes, most notably in “Almost Got ‘Im” where it explains the seething hatred Two-Face has for his ex. The episode also offers a running gag of Bullock (Robert Costanzo) going back for the last donut multiple times over the course of the episode.
