I respect what it accomplished(especially BTAS which, I guess is the one I’ve seen the most of, with JLU close behind) and I enjoy most of the DCAU shows. There’s a lot of fantastic storytelling, the tone is excellent and appeals to young and old. Something I feel like we lose a lot of the time these days is 'superheroes for everyone". When every Superhero movie and series is PG-13 or R (not that this is necessarily bad) it makes it hard to share your love of the genre with people. This is especially tragic to me as characters like Superman especially are intrinsically appealing to us when we’re younger. This isn’t a problem with the DCAU, which can have fairly mature stories without getting too dark. I remember when Batman The Animated Series came on, three generations of my family could watch it at once and enjoy it.
Some of the voices are just incredible. Andrea Romano is kind of the unsung hero of the DCAU (and so many other shows- I wasn’t a bit surprised to see her name in the credits of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which similarly has superb voice work).
Now the bad:
I don’t particularly care for Superman’s voice. Just a personal preference, I guess, but it’s so different from the Bud Collyer version from the Fleischer shorts that I still have trouble adjusting. STAS is probably my least-watched DCAU show though, so I probably just haven’t had time to adjust to it.
The Justice League/JLU music is significantly cheesier and 90’s Saturday Morning Cartoon feeling than the symphonic scores Batman and Superman had.
Bruce/Barbara. No, a thousand times , no. Dear god why was this okayed by anyone?
The Joel Schumacher caricature in Legends of the Dark Knight feels uncomfortably homophobic by today’s standards -though par for the course for the way a lot of people in the fandom talked about his Batman movies into the mid-2000’s. Batman and Robin wasn’t a great movie, but I feel Schumacher gets far too much hate and that episode didn’t help. I in fact feel it could have emboldened and be seen as legitimizing that line of mockery in regards to his Batman films.
Now the bad, more based on legacy, fandom, and reception:
While I enjoy Harley Quinn’s portrayal within BTAS I don’t really like her outside of it. Part of that is that Arleen Sorkin knew when to tone it down and not be grating which some of the later actors are oblivious to. Part of it is that they’re now pushing Harley as female Deadpool (ironically Deadpool is just a violent, amoral She-Hulk) and using her to steal the spotlight from characters I feel are less popular but more deserving. And a big chunk of it is that I’m disturbed by the number of people that idealize Harley and the Joker’s relationship and even after she’s separated from the Joker it defines her completely and she can’t escape it.
Finally, the near-deification of Conroy and Hamill as Batman and the Joker. They’re great, and they do a great job most of the time. But it gets old hearing the fanboys dragging other actors before or since and saying they’re the “real” voice of the character, especially when there’s a new actor in either of their roles. I get that they’re iconic to a lot of people, but by the same token sometimes it’s just good to hear a fresh take.