Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is an Eminently Worthy Feature-Length Spin Off of an Utterly Essential Cult Cartoon
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Batman Beyond is a glorious anomaly. In a superhero realm where anything seemingly semi-enjoyed or moderately successful is exploited, recycled and rebooted endlessly the cult science-fiction cartoon went out on top and has never threatened to wear out its welcome.
The stylish futuristic continuation of Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures ran for three critically acclaimed seasons in the late nineties and early oughts and inspired an equally beloved direct-to-video feature in 2000’s Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.
Then came nothing. Batman Beyond is a long-running comic book series but it’s never been resurrected for television or adapted for the big screen, although I have seen scattered rumors of a possible Batman Beyond movie with Michael Keaton as old Bruce Wayne.
As a fan of Batman Beyond, Michael Keaton and Michael Keaton’s interpretation of Batman, I’m excited about the possibility of Keaton stepping back into the role but, considering the fates of Batwoman and The Flash, if Keaton were to return as Batman a third time the actor who plays Terry would probably steal a zeppelin and use to drop an atomic bomb on Manhattan or every print would spontaneously combust in a freak accident.
We can’t just leave well enough alone, can we? In a world where studios throw hundreds of millions of dollars at Zack Snyder to make superhero epic after superhero epic, we’ve got to pick the bones clean of every halfway decent superhero iteration.
And Batman Beyond is more than just halfway decent. It’s iconic. It’s audacious. It’s cult. It’s cyber-punk. It’s one of the ballsiest takes on Batman in his exceedingly eventful eighty-three years of existence.
I have been loving this very modestly read journey through the entirety of a unique and wonderful spin on the Caped Crusader and his terrific teen trainee but like all good things it must come to an end.
I’ve been dazzled by Batman Beyond’s consistency as well as its beauty, darkness and impressive world-building. So I’m not surprised that Return of the Joker not only meets the high standards of Batman Beyond but exceeds them.
Screenwriter Paul Dini and the rest of the usual suspects make the most of the feature form and the freedom to be even darker and more disturbing than a show that’s revered in no small part because it’s way darker and more disturbing than something marketed as a children’s show should be.
Batman Beyond made things hard on itself by setting the action so far in the future that Bruce Wayne’s trusty rogue’s gallery of iconic supervillains—one of the keys to the character’s enduring popularity—are all pretty much dead, feeble, ancient, in prison or otherwise out of action.
So instead of The Riddler, The Penguin or Mr. Freeze, Batman Beyond introduced characters like Inque, Spellbinder and Shriek, who had the disadvantage of not being instantly familiar to generations of comic book fans.
Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker benefits tremendously from being able to use, and use brilliantly, a superhero icon greater than even the playing cards-themed crime family Royal Flush Gang: Mark Hamill’s malevolently majestic Joker.
How? That is an excellent question on the minds of Terry and Bruce Wayne for much of The Return of the Joker. Bruce saw Joker die in front of him yet like Elvis in 1968, Mr. J makes a comeback and decides to take on his old arch-nemesis one last time.
Joker gravitates naturally to The Jokerz, a gang of street hoodlums inspired by his legacy and example whose look combines the Joker’s old school clown aesthetic with the flamboyant fashion of Michael Alig-era club kids and the more rave-friendly component of Juggalo culture.
Joker establishes that he is not to be trifled with when he responds to Jokerz gang member Bonk’s insouciance by killing him. First his gun shoots a little “Bang” flag. Then it shoots a bullet that kills him.
This is the film’s way of saying that it is not fucking around. Shit is real. This is a movie, so the stakes are higher and the developments more dramatic. After years of focussing on the whole crime-fighting thing, Bruce Wayne decides to return to running Wayne enterprises despite his seeming hatred of interacting with other human beings and pretty much all other facets of everyday life.
In an even more uncharacteristic development, Bruce asks for the Batsuit back and relieves Terry of his duties as Batman 2.0, explaining that the job was done and he could retire with honor.
Neither Bruce nor Terry can figure out how it’s possible for the Joker to cheat death and time and return to this sick, sad world like some manner of clown-painted evil Jesus.
This leads to an elaborate flashback that takes us back to the world of Batman: The Animated Series and with it that show’s visual style and some of its most iconic and notorious characters.
With the help of Barbara Gordon (Angie Harmon of Baywatch Nights) we journey back to a particularly traumatic moment in Bruce’s reign as Batman when his sidekick Tim Drake was kidnapped by Joker and Harley Quinn and bombarded with chemicals and brainwashing until he turned into a smaller version of Batman’s greatest nemesis.
To be perfectly honest, this felt a little far fetched. I know it’s the nature of comic books and comic book-derived entertainment to have developments that would feel insultingly preposterous in other contexts but even by the exceedingly lenient standards of comic books and superheroes, this is a little much.
Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker handles the bleary psychodrama, pitch-black comedy and Cronenbergian body horror of Joker’s tragic tale far better than Joker did. It attains new heights of nightmarish, surreal intensity in its flashback sequence, thanks to Hamill’s wonderful performance, at once scary, funny and genuinely unhinged.
Who is the Joker? That is understandably a matter of much conjecture. The suspects include the now very grown up Tim Drake (Dean Stockwell), who is married with children and a good job but is deeply scarred from his time as Bruce Wayne’s boy sidekick.
In Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, as is the show that inspired it, you cannot get close to a man like Bruce Wayne without incurring incredible psychological damage in the process. That was true of Drake. It’s true of Terry as well.
Return of the Joker eventually reveals (SPOILER) that Joker is essentially using Tim Drake’s body as a time share, having corrupted it with his DNA during the long, drawn-out process of torturing and transforming the former Boy Wonder.
Even by comic book standards, that’s a pulpy development but if it lacks a certain realism and verisimilitude, on an allegorical level it resonates.
Return of the Joker took a show that was already dark, twisted, nightmarish and surprisingly emotionally sophisticated and made it even darker and more disturbing.
Would you expect anything less from Batman Beyond? In my considered professional opinion, that cartoon fucking rules.
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