BEFORE: Yesterday was Superman's day, today is Batman Day, two films with Batman taking on the Joker, in fact. So THREE films this week about the Joker - I can't remember how long these films have been on my list, but I put this one on a DVD with "The Lego Batman Movie" which probably came on cable in late 2017. Yesterday's Superman films aired on SYFY Channel in March 2018, as part of a promotion for their TV series "Krypton". Now I think all of these films have probably migrated over to DC's new streaming service, so that's partly why I'm not doing a deeper dive into DC's animated films, because I can't access the newer ones.
Andrea Romano carries over from "Superman: Unbound".
THE PLOT: In the future, the Joker is back with a vengeance, and Gotham's newest Dark Knight needs answers as he stands alone to face the infamous Clown Prince of Crime.
AFTER: Hmm, I was aware of the "Batman Beyond" series, but I never watched much of it, or got very into it. I know it's in a futuristic setting, with Bruce Wayne acting as the older mentor to a new, young tech-savvy Batman, with the secret identity of Terry McGinnis. Maybe watching the show was sort of a pre-requisite for enjoying this film, because I didn't really get much out of it. Still, I had it in my DVD collection, I wanted to watch it, clear it off my list and get it out of the way. So on that front, anyway, mission accomplished.
The story set in the future flashes back, though, to a time in the past (our present, I guess) when Robin was a kid named Tim Drake who had figured out Batman's secret identity and used that knowledge to become the third Robin. The first, Dick Grayson, had aged out of the program and became an adult superhero named Nightwing, and the second was Jason Todd, who ended up getting killed by the Joker (the classic "Death in the Family" storyline) and then brought back via some kind of multiverse transfer or universe re-boot. (He came back calling himself Red Hood, which was Joker's first nom de crime, only then they said it WASN'T Jason Todd, it was Clayface impersonating him, but then some other writer realized it was a good idea to bring back Jason and went and did it anyway. Comic books are very confusing, right?)
When I started reading Batman comics, Jason Todd was Robin, only they'd JUST re-booted the universe so it wasn't the first incarnation of Jason Todd, it was the second. Then the fans apparently hated Jason enough to kill him (via a 900-number call-in poll) and then years later the same fans apparently regretted the fictional blood on their hands and supported his return (even if it wasn't really him at first, but then it was. Or something like that.) But a couple years after Jason Todd's death, that's when the writers introduced Tim Drake - he was young, smart, and he fit into the suit, just like Greg as Johnny Bravo on "The Brady Bunch". I think he eventually broke up with Batman, but then somebody brought him back as "Red Robin", because by that time Damian Wayne (yep, Batman's bastard son...) was the new Robin (#4 or 5, depending on whether you count Stephanie Brown's brief stint as the first female Robin.
But what is future Tim Drake's connection to the Joker? The flashbacks reveal that Drake was caught by the Joker and Harley Quinn, injected with Joker toxin and then dressed up to look like their adopted son. Batman and Batgirl worked together to rescue him, but during the battle a catatonic Tim Drake managed to shoot (and kill?) the Joker. Wow, just think what this kid could accomplish if he were trying...
I guess I just felt I was at a real disadvantage here in the future scenes, outside of the flashback material. There's a whole new set of villains in the "Batman Beyond" storyline, and they have names like Chucko and Bonk, not logical names like Riddler or Catwoman that tell you a bit about what they do. Plus there's some future-ish tech like orbital lasers and satellite jammers, but this is all sort of dicey, predicting what tech's going to be like, even just 30 or 40 years in the future. Like, nobody in futurisitic films ever predicted things like cell phones or Roombas, right?
I've got no major continuity errors or weird plotlines that go nowhere, as with "All-Star Superman", but this film didn't really thrill me either - it's just kind of neutral, right down the middle, neither good nor bad.
Also starring the voices of Will Friedle, Kevin Conroy (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Mark Hamill (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Angie Harmon, Dean Stockwell (last seen in "Once Bitten"), Teri Garr (last seen in "The Conversation"), Arleen Sorkin (last seen in "Comic Book: the Movie"), Tara Strong (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Matthew Valencia, Melissa Joan Hart, Michael Rosenbaum (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Don Harvey (last seen in "Secret in Their Eyes"), Henry Rollins (last seen in "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne"), Frank Welker (last heard in "Mulan II"), Lauren Tom (ditto), Rachael Leigh Cook (last seen in "Get Carter"), Ryan O'Donohue, Vernee Watson-Johnson, Mark Jonathan Davis (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Mary Scheer, Bruce Timm.
RATING: 5 out of 10 joy buzzers
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