Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

Last week in the comments section, Simon DelMonte said, “The streaming services can make me nuts sometimes. Last month, The Practice [sic] left Prime. This week, The Practice [sic] is back on Prime. Just when I had moved on.”

This wasn’t the first time The Practice left a streaming service. Disney-owned Hulu carried it for a while, and then—despite the fact that The Practice has been a Disney property since 2019—it vanished like it was serial killer George Vogelman in a nun’s habit.

“I will probably finish season seven, still have not decided about the Alan Shore Year,” added Simon.

The James Spader/Sharon Stone/Betty White/William Shatner season rejuvenated The Practice in my opinion. Except for the Tzi Ma episode, a clunker of an episode I found to be racist (a lot of the Asian American writers I followed at the time—partially because I’m Asian just like them—hated the episode even more than I did), I liked that final season way more than the seasons where Bobby Donnell and his associates defended some serial killer in court and then uttered a non-comedic version of The Wire’s “What the fuck did I do?” running joke while the serial killer ruined their lives.

I skipped the Sharon Stone arc when it first aired on ABC in 2003, so instead of going to Prime to watch it, I went to Amazon’s physical media section to see if Shout! Studios’s DVDs of The Practice are still in print. I found out that Shout!’s box set of The Practice’s final season is still available, and it’s only $9.

The $9 box set was an instant buy, and now it’s the only season of The Practice I have on DVD. It can now sit next to my box set of the first season of Boston Legal, the mostly comedic Practice spinoff that’s [Pete Holmes as John Malkovich as Batman voice] be-tter, stron-ger. It’s Bat. Man.

Like I’ve said many times before, physical media is better than streaming. It eliminates the problem of “I wanted to watch on that streamer some classic serialized arc I never watched, but I didn’t have time to squeeze it into my watchlist, so then I later went back to the streamer to if see that arc was still there, and the entire series was deleted.”

That shit happened to me last week while I was trying to finish watching for the first time Mr. Robot’s third and penultimate season. Mr. Robot was on Tubi. I had two more episodes to go in the season, but then Tubi yanked Mr. Robot from its library. I was ultimately able to finish the season, but it’s just frustrating, especially because—despite posting a regularly updated list of movies and shows that it will remove—Tubi doesn’t divulge on the “Leaving Soon” list the dates for when things will leave.

While Mr. Robot is nowhere to be found on streaming right now, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, one of many Warner Bros. Animation shows Tubi added to its library in March, is still on Tubi. (It’s also on HBO Max, which I don’t have. Tubi’s acquisition of vintage Looney Tunes shorts and past Warner Bros. Animation shows like Taz-Mania has turned Tubi into a more satisfying place to rewatch old Warner Bros. Animation projects than HBO Max.)

I’m currently contemplating buying the Mr. Robot complete series box set just to watch Mr. Robot’s final season, while that wasn’t the case with The Brave and the Bold: I snapped up The Brave and the Bold’s third and final season on Blu-ray without hesitation when its box set was part of Movie Zyng’s Warner Archive “Get 4 Blu-rays for $54” sale in March.

Like The Practice and Mr. Robot, The Brave and the Bold always bounces from streamer to streamer. It’s kind of hard to keep up with it.

The Brave and the Bold Blu-ray box set means I no longer have to watch the final season on Tubi, which is bound to yank the series right away. I didn’t watch a lot of The Brave and the Bold when it first aired on Cartoon Network—I caught only a handful of episodes and skipped the rest of the series for the silliest reasons (I didn’t like the typeface that was used in the opening title sequence, and I wished Todd Klein designed the logo that closed out the sequence)—so now I’m watching a bunch of first-and-second-season episodes for the first time before the series leaves Tubi.

Showrun by Black animator James Tucker (who happened to start out as an animation posing artist for Taz-Mania), The Brave and the Bold is a solid superhero team-up show, and it’s why the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Andy Sturmer’s Brave and the Bold main title theme. It’s reminiscent of Doug Katsaros’s main title theme from the animated version of The Tick.

While Townsend Coleman was childlike as the Tick and Adam West portrayed Batman as a deadpan goofball who wasn’t aware how goofy he looked when he did things like running around a pier with a lit bomb above his head, Diedrich Bader played Batman as more of a straight man surrounded by goofy or inexperienced superheroes.

Each Brave and the Bold episode paired Bats up with another DC hero who was either a newer DC character like the Jaime Reyes version of Blue Beetle or one of the heroes Bats teamed up with in the 1967-83 incarnation of the Brave and the Bold comic that inspired Tucker’s series. (This was different from the Dark Knight’s preference to work alone and only occasionally team up with Robin, who was otherwise too busy with his studies at Gotham State University, on the legendary Batman: The Animated Series.)

Bader’s Batman voice (think “Kevin Conroy meets Val Kilmer”) was basically the same voice Bader came up with for the Searcher, the motorcycle-riding crimefighter he perfectly played in the first half of Danger Theatre before he played Oswald on The Drew Carey Show.

The half-hour Danger Theatre was Penelope Spheeris and Street Hawk co-creator Robert Wolterstorff’s short-lived 1993 Fox parody of the wheel series format, which was popularized in the ’70s by The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie. Hosted by Robert Vaughn, who played an incompetent version of himself, and archived in its entirety on YouTube by Danger Theatre fans who held onto their tapes of Spheeris and Wolterstorff’s show, Danger Theatre also featured another Batman in its second half.

West starred as the inept captain of “the TP Unit” in Tropical Punch, a Danger Theatre segment that parodied Hawaii Five-O. (The greatest thing West starred in that wasn’t Batman-related was Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel’s unsold—and extremely quotable—1991 Lookwell pilot about a ’70s cop show star who suddenly wants to solve real-life crimes and gets his acting class students involved in helping him take down the leader of a stolen car ring. Tropical Punch was no Lookwell simply because it wasn’t written by O’Brien and Smigel.)

The accident-prone Searcher—the funniest character on Danger Theatre—was a slapstick version of the bounty hunter Lorenzo Lamas portrayed on Renegade.

Meanwhile, Bader’s Batman was much more competent than the Searcher. For instance, he finally tracked down his parents’ killer in “Chill of the Night!”—one of the few serious Brave and the Bold episodes and a loose, Paul Dini-scripted adaptation of both the 1948 DC story about Batman’s confrontation with his parents’ killer and 1980’s The Untold Legend of the Batman.

Because Bader’s take on Batman wasn’t campy like West’s take on Batman was (“Batman was one of the rare times I actually got to play the straight man,” recalled Bader to interviewer Will Harris in 2012), the majority of the humor on The Brave and the Bold stemmed from either the mistakes of the supervillains (when they were outwitted by Batman) or the dialogue from Batman’s partner-of-the-week. His most entertaining partner was the extroverted Aquaman, who was voiced by John DiMaggio as if a young Robert Goulet somehow landed the role of Aquaman in 1959.

Bader currently voices an adult animated version of Batman on HBO Max’s Harley Quinn, a show I haven’t watched yet even though I have its first season on DVD. His Searcher voice fit right in with the lighthearted Silver Age tone of The Brave and the Bold, the type of show where Catwoman and the Huntress dropped musical double entendres about the Flash and his rogues’ gallery.

I haven’t gotten to “The Mask of Matches Malone!” yet. That was the too-hot-for-a-kids’-network episode where Catwoman and the Birds of Prey broke into song. But I did watch for the first time “Joker: The Vile and the Villainous!” on Blu-ray. In that episode, which was told from the point of view of the Joker and his partner-of-the-week, the late Tim Conway voiced the Weeper, a failed supervillain the Joker (voiced by Jeff Bennett, who voiced Johnny Bravo) looks up to and takes under his wing.

Conway would have been perfect as a klutzy supervillain on the late ’60s Batman. “The Vile and the Villainous!” imagined a universe where Conway was a Batman guest star when he wasn’t busy trying to get Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner (who happened to lose the role of Batman to West), and the rest of the cast of The Carol Burnett Show to corpse in front of the cameras at Stage 33 in Television City.

Director Andy Muschietti and Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn screenwriter Christina Hodson—whose screenplay for Bumblebee is my favorite screenplay for a Transformers movie—are currently at work on reviving the Brave and the Bold brand for a live-action DCU movie that will pair Batman up with Damian Wayne, his son. That’s why it’s the perfect time for me to watch a bunch of Brave and the Bold episodes for the first time.

Will the DCU’s The Brave and the Bold be a mess like Muschietti and Hodson’s version of The Flash often was—Ezra Miller was the least appealing Barry Allen I ever saw—or will it be more of a winner like Tucker’s The Brave and the Bold often was?

Tune in three years from now! Same Bat-time! Same Bat-channel!