Xenocide
Mr. Freeze's backstory was ruined by Arnold Swartzenegger years ago.

And to be perfectly fair, comic Freeze never had this motivation to begin with. For about 40 years he was just a jackass with a gun that shoots ice. His origin story was basically "Hey look, I made a gun that shoots ice!"

The cartoon came up with the whole dead wife angle, at which point it was very awkwardly shoehorned into the comic book canon, complete with some really forced attempts at convincing us that it had been there all along. This video right here is pretty much the only portrayal of Freeze to get the whole idea right.

Just about the only consistent thing in the Batman comics is that Bane was always meant to be an attack on Mitt Romney.

Bort
I go both ways on this. On the one hand, I like a Victor Fries whose grief is something I can sympathize with. On the other hand, I have trouble reconciling a Victor Fries who was profoundly in love with his wife, with a Victor Fries who goes on mass murder sprees.

I was a big fan of Mr. Freeze's return in "Batman Beyond" because we saw him, for just a minute, being able to understand the harm he's caused others. Even talked a guy out of letting grief ruin his life.

Bort
I guess it comes down to this: Mr. Freeze seeking revenge on those he feels are responsible for Nora's death: good. Mr. Freeze extending the vendetta to Batman, the fuzz, and all of Gotham: bad. This obviously limits the character's reusability, but I'd rather have a good one-shot villain than one who has been reused to the point of uselessness.

Hooker
Killer Moth's new backstory:

Drury Walker was the frontman in a Queen cover band. The band was doing very well until Freddie Mercury died. After then, Wayne Enterprises bought the rights to the entire Queen library, and forbade anyone to cover the band any more. Drury, who had been known to refer to himself as Killer Queen, adopted the persona of Killer Moth to fight Wayne's alter-ego.

Hooker
His BDSM clothes were also eaten by a radioactive moth.

pineapplejuicer
i'm really upset "ICE TO SEE YOU" isn't a linked tag

TypicalEllisProtagonist
Yeah, well, before they rebooted the whole stupid DC universe, somebody had the idea of throwing Nora Fries into a Lazarus Pit and she came back to life as a fire-themed villain named Lazara. I'll take the new version over that any day.

Pompoulus
I don't know about all that but it's kind of sad that his origin story is he threw a chair and missed.

SteamPoweredKleenex
Freeze's backstory only includes Gotham and Batman (like all good villain stories, really) when the hero either gets in the way of his goal or intentionally inserts himself between the villain and the goal. It's the lengths a character goes to that determines if they're a "bad guy" or not.

The old form of just having someone invent a macguffin, make a suit out of it and go nuts on [Hero]man are (hopefully) over, for the most part.

Cherry Pop Culture
Don't forget Mr. Freeze gets his ass kicked by Captain Cold when Freeze went on a crime spree. I'm trying to get into the reboot stuff, but whatever layers the DC characters had seems to be gone. Reverse Flash seems to have been handled the best from what I have read.

This stuff doesn't matter, it'll hit another reboot in 10-15 years anyway

memedumpster
That's a neat story, I really like Big O.

dairyqueenlatifah
So that's why Big O's character designs look just like this show's...

Speaking of which, this begs the question; why can Japan make a fluent, competent cartoon with plenty of in-between animation when they're doing it as an outsourced American project, but all their own cartoons are full of 30 second still frames and three frame per second motion?

Jet Bin Fever
Stars for your story and Big O. I saw every episode of that show.

Screwtape
...because he is unable to dial the numbers as the buttons have been frozen!


IRONIC TWIST!

Caminante Nocturno
Hoist by his own petard!

SteamPoweredKleenex
All Batman & Robin did was give Arnie his most disappointing role in a generation and perhaps make the 1960's Batman TV show look well-written by comparison.

And not every hottie in a movie has to be a good actor/actress with well-written lines, but there's a reason one might re-watch a movie for a performance other than how well someone orgasms.

CornOnTheCabre
I think it's just of a clear example of what people dislike most about the direction DC is headed, more than a specific devotion to the character. It seems like the company absolutely won't be satisfied unless there's some disturbingly reductive, psychosexual origin to every single one of their characters.

personally, I'm waiting for the inevitable "transexual prostitute Mr. Mxyzptlk gets his powers after having his legs hobbled by a furious john" origin issue.

Seven Arts/H8 Red
B:TAS had quite a few villains who didn't amount to much in the comics - Man-Bat, Clayface, Mr. Zero/Freeze - but worked within the confines of that show. Hell, the show even made Clock King work.

Both B:TAS and Batman: The Brave and the Bold have decent continuities. I don't know why DC's "real" continuity doesn't take more cues from those shows. For fuck's sake, there have been eight Clayfaces, and they can't match the B:TAS version.

cognitivedissonance
I'm more concerned that you point to the 60s tv show as a poorly written show. It was one of the best comedies of the period, decades ahead of its time in pacing, ironic delivery and pop cultural impact. If you want to know what Batman comics were like in the 60s, you watch the Batman tv show, it's a straight transliteration.