Joker's Bad Day Animated Series Joker Origin
Why the Joker works better when he'south mysterious
A rundown of the diverse attempts to explain the Clown Prince of Criminal offence
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Even though he was originally created in 1940 past Bill Finger, Bob Kane, and Jerry Robinson, the Joker is somehow one of the well-nigh popular popular culture characters of the 21st century. In Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, for example, the Clown Prince of Criminal offence (every bit played by Heath Ledger) has nearly every bit much screen fourth dimension equally Batman — the film's ostensible protagonist. Something about the Joker seems to fascinate, yr afterwards yr — perhaps because he rarely pulls the same flim-flam twice. Every bit decades have gone past, the Joker has changed from a common cold mass killer to a goofy trickster to a philosophy-spewing chaos agent, and dorsum again.
His latest version, co-ordinate to recent rumors, is a prequel movie directed past Todd Phillips (and possibly produced by Martin Scorsese) that will purportedly explain the Joker's origin story — Joker Begins, if you lot volition. You can certainly see the logic at work: Later years equally a moribund pop civilization holding, Batman's fortunes were massively revived when Nolan delved deep into his backstory in 2005's Batman Begins. The problem is that the Joker is non a fauna of logic. He scoffs at rationality and laughs at well-laid plans. In fact, sometimes the Joker works best when we know very petty most him at all.
Credit: Everett Collection; DC Comics
The Nighttime Knight
Take The Dark Knight , which is probably the about famous Joker story these days; Ledger'due south personification of the clown as a anarchy theory-spouting fine art-punk has been seared into the 21st-century zeitgeist. Part of the Joker's power in The Dark Knight draws from his refusal to truthfully explain his own backstory. Over the grade of the moving-picture show, he offers two.v explanations for "how I got these scars." In one story, the Joker gave himself those scars in order to delight his married woman who had been disfigured by the mob. In another, he was scarred by his father when he tried to intervene in a domestic dispute between his parents. Plain both of them can't be truthful, and the strong implication is that neither is.
This is ane of the picture's essential subtexts: The Joker is pretty much always lying. At 1 point, he famously asks Ii-Face, "Practise I look like a man with a plan?" Of course he doesn't, with his constant cackles and his nurse disguise (another flake of obfuscation), simply in fact, the unabridged moving-picture show is the Joker'south plan. He plots his schemes (from the opening banking concern robbery to the ultimate corruption of Harvey Dent) downward to the last meticulous detail, merely not even Batman tin predict their course. It's impossible to approximate where the Joker's going when you don't even know where he came from, and that'due south just the way he likes it.
Batman: The Animated Series
Mark Hamill's depiction of the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series is another 1 of the character'due south near famous modern incarnations. Amazingly, even though every other villain gets their ain introductory episode, over the course of 85 episodes at that place is never even an attempt to explain where the Joker came from. He only pops up immediately in the show's second episode as if he had always been there. Perchance he had been; in the episode "Zatanna," a flashback to Batman's youthful training features the magician Zatanna trying to predict his future with cards and drawing but a Joker. One of the Joker's defining features in the show is his ability to escape expiry, fifty-fifty in situations where he obviously couldn't have survived. Part of that comes from the cartoon format, of course (and WB's particular legacy of drawing characters evading certain death) but information technology also paints the Joker equally an elemental strength of abuse and devastation, the specter that will forever haunt Batman'southward quest for justice. Explaining how he got that way is beside the bespeak.
Batman (1989)
One adaptation where the Joker did become a definite backstory, of grade, is the original 1989 Tim Burton film. There, Jack Nicholson'south Joker was also the aforementioned man who originally killed Bruce Wayne's parents. Like Ledger, Nicholson makes the Joker the most compelling part of the movie, but in his instance giving the grapheme a definite backstory only works because it ties him closer to Batman. Two of the nigh important elements of the Joker are his mystery and his Manichaean struggle with Batman; sometimes one has to be sacrificed to strengthen the other.
The Killing Joke
When it comes to comics, the Joker's backstory got its nearly famous handling in The Killing Joke , a 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland that went on to strongly influence both aforementioned film adaptations (and was recently adapted into an animated film featuring the voices of the Batman: The Animated Series team). In that comic, Moore built upon a 1951 issue of Detective Comics suggesting the Joker was originally a criminal named the Ruby Hood who tried to rob a chemical plant. When Batman showed up to end him, the Scarlet Hood jumped in a chemic vat to escape, leading to the permanent scarring of his body and listen.
The Killing Joke presents this story equally a flashback alongside the present-day story of the Joker trying to drive Commissioner Gordon insane by kidnapping him and torturing his daughter Barbara (a.k.a. Batgirl). The Joker's whole argument in this story is that all it takes is "ane bad twenty-four hour period" for anyone to get as insane every bit him. For a comic that eventually became one of DC's near canonized stories, Moore and Bolland play fast and loose with reality (the ending seems to suggest Batman killing the Joker). Then the indicate of those flashbacks is non to give the Joker a definite backstory so much every bit it is to suggest that the Joker could have been anyone. All it takes is ane bad day.
Zero Year
This Red Hood origin was recently updated by writer Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo in their much-acclaimed Batman run. In their story line Zero Year, Snyder and Capullo wound the clock back to Batman's first days in Gotham, later he had started law-breaking-fighting merely before he fully donned the cape and cowl. Equally Bruce runs around Gotham in disguises figuring out how to fight crime, he runs up against the Red Hood Gang and its mysterious leader, whose confront is entirely covered by a massive helmet. Despite this peek at his pre-scar days, Joker retains his air of mystery; after the climactic confrontation with Crimson Hood at the chemic institute, Bruce realizes the man he thought was leading the gang had been killed and replaced some unknown time agone. This isn't a definite origin for the Joker so much as it is a test-run for his eternal struggle with Batman, both of them learning the ropes as they work their way to their last transformation. As this Ruddy Hood tells Batman while dangling over the fateful chemical vat: "Information technology's just just beginning."
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Joker's Bad Day Animated Series Joker Origin
Source: https://ew.com/movies/2017/08/31/joker-origin-stories-mysterious/
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