EARTH — As civilization continues to decline, experts have now pinpointed the exact moment humanity reached its tipping point: January 16, 1999, when Batman: The Animated Series ended its run.
"The data doesn't lie. It's the objective truth that when Kevin Conroy landed the role of Batman for the animated series in 1992 that was the exact moment when human civilization reached its highest aspirations in art and culture," said polymath genius Conrad Leopold Winston from his top-secret hi-tech lab staffed by a team of crack experts working around the clock to understand and prevent the demise of our species.
"Apathy will set in as humanity begins to realize that nothing it can come up with will ever approach the glory that is Batman: The Animated Series. We are fated to see civilization collapse as everyone stops trying. We can only look back with nostalgia. Humanity has no future," he added with a sigh.
"It was a banger," added fellow expert Gordon Cornellius Augustus while looking at still frames from the show with his electron microscope. "Absolutely everything lined up on this one. The show was sophisticated, despite the trappings of ostensibly being a simple after-school cartoon that caused children to procrastinate on their homework. Its mature tone and film noir aesthetics combined with stellar orchestrated music and expert-level writing which always remained faithful to the source material made Batman: The Animated Series stand out."
Gordon continued to rave about the show for several minutes fighting back the tears of despair.
"When Kevin Conroy brilliantly decided in the five minutes before his audition, having little prior knowledge of the character, to give a dual-voiced performance that would cue the audience into the idea that Batman was the authentic pained soul while billionaire Bruce Wayne was the facade, that is when all the high aspirations of humanity for art and culture finally culminated into the greatest thing that humanity can ever produce."
At publishing time, this team of experts also discovered that human civilization almost collapsed once before in the 1940s but that the release of The Lord of the Rings in 1953 staved off our extinction for another 40 years or so.
Citing concerns about stiff competition from Amazon and an impossible-to-please Gen Z, Santa has announced he's hanging up the hat for good.
