And shes about as useful in a fight as Tuxedo Kamen

Yes, he was, in fact he bolstered the golden age comics to record sales! And painted a bullseye right on the franchise for Frederic Wertham, but that’s a different issue. But I think that might be a shift in culture, given the uninspiring dross considered children’s entertainment otherwise. A better question might be “Is Robin still popular?” and I think the muddy nature of DC’s treatment of Robin since the 90s might make answering that question a bit of a stray (multiple Robins, some of them Red Robins, some of them dead Robins, others were Bats…). I know Solkir is a bigger fan of Dick Grayson than Bruce Wayne, but that’s a matter of personality.

I find myself trawling other fandoms for examples. it might be better to look at Robin in the Teen Titans television program for the proof, or more topically, the Scouts themselves: teenagers. Kids want to be teens and adults, adults want to be teens and adults, teens want to be adults and might deign to be teenagers if well enough written. But no one wants to be kids. Except… when they do. Harry Potter, for example. Even if they don’t want to be Harry, Hermione or Ron in particular, the idea of being an 11 year old at Hogwarts is appealing in a way that sells multi-billion dollar franchises.

I think it might be better not to say that no one wants to be kids than that no one wants the personality cliches associated with kids. No one wants to be the neko princess in Sailor Moon chasing balls and shrieking, or the golly-gee-whiz blue ranger. Alternately: no one wants to be the younger characters, because of the inherent power dynamic involved in age, and the character complexity often sacrificed on younger characters. See Joey Todesco’s look back on Rugrats: The Movie. Nobody “wants” to be a baby but you’d rather be watching them than Dill, the even younger and much less interesting baby brother. The guiding thread between these two is writers using age as a guideline or worse, an excuse, to write a worse character, or a bigger cliche, and that will always tell.

I think, in the end, the only kids who want to be golly-gee-whiz are the kids living in a culture where they were told that that’s what kids were supposed to be like: the 30s, buying Batman comics in record numbers. And the issue is that, like so many other cliches, the writers haven’t changed their pens since the thirties, and were in a real deep rut in the 80s and 90s. Thank god that’s over but it’s never over yet.

All of that said, I wonder if maybe, whatever the wiser plan, the producers introduced IT in this episode not to catch a new audience but to offset the darker moments in the episode itself. The silence was very effective. Sometimes it can pay to point to a previous scene and say “But look! It’s a six-year-old dressed like a cat!”

The next episode is really good too.
one of my favorites