>>10090133On the surface it seems like a quick cash-in to make the most money out of the last days of the Batman license..but if you look at it, it started over a year before they lost the Bat license, and a lot of those figures aren't just redecoes, they're remolds; they couldn't use the movie cowls or heads so they're retooled(like this DK collection Batman with a new Bruce head.
I think Kenner/Hasbro planned their lines around the big movies first, the animated series second. Aaron Archer said after Batman and Robin they sort of knew they were gonna have a few years without movies. TNBA was a very short run, and for whatever reason they didn't seem to have much faith in STAS or Batman Beyond. They didn't expect a new Batman movie or cartoon anytime soon which was part of the reason they let the license expire.
So tl;dr, I think they were Hasbro's attempt at doing more of their classic Batman lines at a time there was no plain Bruce Wayne-Batman show running, and establishing good relations with Wal-mart as it was expanding. And in part, possibly experimenting with seeing if they could work around the movie licenses by remolding parts as a way to use 4 movies worth of toys longer than a single year.
