The Killed Joke

So there's another Batman movie making the rounds at the moment, the latest DC animated short, based on the comic.

We start with an episode from the animated Batgirl adventures, in which Batgirl faces off against someone who makes her have her very own nearly bad day. (While there are a lot of flak coming at this movie about these 30 minutes, I'm thinking they did this to give her her own Joker conflict. While not at the level of the others, this is still pushing her into this one day that the Joker claims is all we need.) It isn't really needed, but feels so separate that it's easy to consider this something else they did as well as the main event to show off how a more typical adventure might go (sex aside).

Then we are on to the main event. This is pretty much a panel by panel repeat of the comic, and, as the Nostalgia Critic point out, it doesn't really do anything else but translate the comic to the screen. Although not what the fans want, it seems? For me, it shows up the more interesting Joker history (which is so often stated to be fluid that this may as well be the actual one), and that the current day events just aren't that interesting. Joker shoots Barbara (spoilers by the way), tries to make Commish go insane (in a sequence which I feel doesn't translate to the screen well), and then gets captured by Batman again. Yeah, that's so different. Yet considered so seminal that only recently Barbara was restored to the Bat costume (I prefer her as Oracle, I thought she was more interesting then).

As not a hardcore fan, I'm not clamouring for anyone's head over this. However, can we now move on to doing something original and not just dredging up old comics?

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