Bat In The Sun productions gives us another excellent addition to its Batman fan film portfolio with Batman Legends, a compilation of clips featuring faithful renditions of several scenes including the creation of the Joker, the death of Jason Todd, and Bane’s breaking of the Batman. Also notable was a shot of the original Bob Kane Batman with the wide ears :)
This wonderful fan trailer depicts an alternate future where Dick Grayson, the original Robin, has to come out of retirement to avenge the death of the Batman. They appear to ignore Dick’s time as Nightwing, as well as [his wife!] Barbara’s crippling at the hands of the Joker (although one shot alludes to it). Superman appears to play a minor role as a boy scout blindly following orders, as well as several great appearances by Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Aquaman?, Batgirl, Catwoman, the Riddler, Penguin and of course the Joker. If there was one fan trailer I’d want to see made into a full film, this would definitely be it.
This might be the best fan film to date. The Joker escapes from Arkham and Batman interrogates all the usual suspects for information. The Bat in the Sun film crew’s attention to detail and faithfulness to the source material is outstanding. Except for the alternate logo, which I understand the reason for (see the seekers of the bat logo above), I completely buy this take on the Batman universe. I also appreciate the main actor using more of a Kevin Conroy batvoice rather than the much maligned Christian Bale grunt. My one question is was that bartender supposed to be Black Canary? Seems like the sequence was inserted purely to shoot a strip club scene :)
Poor Batman. He’s great and all, but he’s still only human.
Part 2: Batman meets the Justice League
Another prime example of an animated character’s popularity forcing them back into the official comic book canon is Harlequin. Harleen Quinzel was a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum who was assigned to the Joker. Not only did she fail to reform him, but her deep probing of his mind drove HER insane and she fell madly in love with him.
She was initially written as a desperate, clingy stalker used exclusively for comic relief. However, in recent continuity, she has grudgingly recognized that the Joker never loved her, and has become a thorn in Batman’s side in her own right.
There was once a young engineer who lost everything. With nowhere to turn, he was taken advantage of by some local thieves. They took him along on a break in and tricked him into wearing a red hood, supposedly to conceal his identity. Little did he know that if the police caught them, their plan was to finger the engineer as their ringleader.
Unfortunately for him, the police never arrived. A horrific horned demon in a black cape did instead. As they fled, the engineer fell into a vat of toxic waste. The chemicals bleached his skin, but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to the engineer anymore.
2008′s blockbuster film ‘The Dark Knight’ was preceded by an incredibly complex and pervasive marketing campaign, including some haunting pieces like this one. Note the bat logo formed completely out of H’s and A’s (ha ha’s)
This scene from the infamous All-Star Batman and Robin run shows Batman tending to a severely beaten Catwoman. The horror of the situation is that the realization that the Joker now has a weakness in the young Batman to exploit.
One common trope in the comics is that Batman’s inner monologue is often depicted as being hand written. Before computers were ubiquitous, Batman kept meticulous handwritten logs and journals of his cases, and so the convention of using his ‘diary’ entries as narration has continued to the present day. For all his machismo, his journals often reveal an introspective, tortured emotion under the stoic, confident exterior .
Batman’s greatest challenge has always been the murderous Joker. Both insane and brilliant, the Joker epitomizes the supervillain; the unstoppable criminal that can terrorize an entire city. Moreover, his seemingly random crimes strike a stark contrast to Batman’s calculated sense of order.
Batman started his career content to fight common street crime as an unseen urban legend, but foiling the Joker’s elaborate plans led him to up the ante and become a public defender of the city. However, some surmise that the Joker’s theatrics wouldn’t have surfaced in a world without a Batman. So which came first, the chicken or the egg?
