Tara Strong Basically Used Her Normal Voice To Play Batgirl In The New Batman Adventures
Batgirl tends to gets the short end of the Bat Stick. Comics-wise, one of her most famous story arcs is ... not particularly fun. Outside of "DC Super Hero Girls," she's rarely front and center in the world of DC animation. Well, except for adaptations of the aforementioned (in)famous story arc which is, again, not particularly fun. Lately, she's even gotten a raw deal in live-action. The character was all set to be portrayed by Leslie Grace ("In the Heights") in a film directed by "Bad Boys for Life" and "Ms. Marvel" veterans Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, only for Warner Bros. Discovery to brutally scrap the whole thing in the middle of post-production as a reported tax write-off. All this is to say, Batgirl deserves better. She deserves someone who cares for her story.
Well, that would be Tara Strong, who began her relationship with the character back in 1997. Strong voiced a young Barbara Gordon and her superhero persona in "The New Batman Adventures" (which is functionally the third season of "Batman: The Animated Series"). She's also Babs in "DC Super Hero Girls" ... and in "The Killing Joke." (There, we finally said the notorious Batgirl story's name out loud. Happy?) The point is, their river runs deep, and Strong attributes that lasting success to how she chose to portray the character.
A bond made from self
During a 2019 interview with Comic Pop at the New York Comic Con, Tara Strong admitted that her vocal performance as Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl, in "The New Batman Adventures" was more or less her own voice. Unlike other roles, where perhaps Strong might affect her tonality to create new sounds, Barbara was simply herself, and that created a deeper bond between actor and role. Strong explained:
"Barbara is actually the closest to my own voice [of anything that I do]. [...] It [wasn't] putting on a voice or stretching myself vocally, it was more just being in all those moments. And I think that's why it rang so true is that I was just Tara in those extraordinary places playing this iconic character. [...] When I was a little girl I collected [the] comics and so it was so cool. [...] You want it to come to life. And I really think Bruce Timm and Paul Dini and Alan Burnett [made that happen]. And so I was just along for that amazing magical journey. [Batgirl is] just a kick ass chick and I'm so honored to have played her. I mean, every time I play her I pinch myself. Every time."
She must have been doing something right because in December 2022, Strong received the Voice Arts Legacy Award for Arts and Entertainment from the Society of Voice Arts & Sciences (SOVAS for short). Sure, she's voiced thousands of other roles both outside and within the framework of DC animation (that's barely an exaggeration, either; IMDb lists Strong as having well over 600 acting credits), and Barbara wasn't even one of her first credits but, hey, we're still talking about her Batgirl in 2023, aren't we? Kudos to Strong, whose self is permanently a part of our collective childhoods.