The Saddest Moments In These '90s Cartoons

On Batman: The Animated Series, showrunners Paul Dini and Bruce Timm gave one-dimensional comic book villains rich, sad histories, granting them a new lease on life in the process. For example, a few years before they revamped Mr. Freeze, he'd been so forgotten that he appeared in comic book limbo in Animal Man. A few years later, he was being played by Arnold Schwarzenegger at the height of his fame in Batman and Robin.

"Heart of Ice" created a new origin for Mr. Freeze and a sympathetic motive for his crimes. Once, he was an ordinary scientist named Victor Fries who'd put his deathly ill wife, Nora, in cryogenic stasis until he could find a cure. But when his boss cut the funding for Victor's experiments and tried to unplug Norah's stasis tube, Victor fought back ... only for a security guard to toss him into a desk full of chemicals, making it impossible for him to survive outside a subzero environment. 

Later, Batman prevents a vengeful Freeze from killing Boyle, but the episode's ending is more tragic than triumphant, with Freeze in a refrigerated jail cell, mourning over a snow globe of Norah. It's the one moment of open grief we see from him, and Michael Ansara's robotically distorted performance is all the more powerful for portraying Freeze as a literally cold-hearted man who's so emotionally broken that he can't show any emotion at all.