Joker's Wild

Sadly, too many of the Joker episodes in Batman: The Animated Series just turned out very sloppy and lackluster. And one of the worst offenders in this category is "Joker's Wild," the 41st produced episode and 42nd aired on Nov. 19,1992. (I've noticed that the episodes lately have been aired more closely to their production order. Hopefully this trend will continue and the air date order number will match the production number soon.)

The episode gets off to a pretty decent start, with Summer Gleeson covering the opening of a new casino. When it's revealed to have a Joker motif, she can't stop herself from saying, "Disgusting!" She then tries to recover and asks Bruce Wayne his opinion, who can only say, "No comment." Yes, it is disgusting to base a casino on a sociopath, and yes, Bruce would be too upset by this to be able to say anything nice. I'll add a point for that.

Naturally, the Joker was angered and immediately escaped from Arkham Asylum in one of the laziest escapes I've ever seen. All he basically did was pour water on the floor to make some guards slip down. It appears that one of the guards is letting him go on purpose, but the episode never fully explains why. I guess we could assume that he was working for the owner of the casino, Kaiser, who's plan counted on the Joker escaping, but we're never shown or told that explicitly. They should have had the Joker find out they let him escape. He's (normally) too smart a character to not realize that. I'll take off a point for this.

I'll take off another point for a strange, and rather pointless scene where Bruce Wayne plays blackjack with the Joker and cheats to win. Earlier, the Joker was cheating with a bunch of other people, but for some reason he stopped cheating with Bruce. And why would Bruce cheat in the first place? The whole point of that stupid scene was for Bruce to discover that the real Joker was in the casino, but they could have done that in a lot of better ways.

I'll drop the score to a 3 for the terrible animation and lack of basic English skills. The animators just could not figure out what the Joker was supposed to look like, and a couple of times, they got confused with the black rings around his eyes and drew them as massive eyebrows instead. They also put up a couple of nonsensical signs, one reading "End Stop" and the worst: "Wan the ciringnal Jokernocile." This was supposed to say "Win the original Jokermobile," but apparently nobody at this animation company, Akom, knew any English. Apparently, Bruce Timm was so upset with this episode, he stopped working with Akom completely. So maybe in a way, this episode was good, in that it let the animation finally hit rock bottom, causing the producers to make a concerted effort to improve the animation quality. We'll just have to see how much things really do improve after this.

Now Cameron Kaiser really had a dumb idea. He went bankrupt creating a casino, so he hastily changed it to make it a target for the Joker to destroy, allowing him to recoup his losses on the insurance. First of all, the hasty remodeling had to cost a fortune; and secondly, any competent insurance man would instantly see through the fraud of this. Anyway, once the Joker is discovered in the casino, Kaiser starts frantically stuffing cash in a briefcase. Why? And wasn't he bankrupt? Batman finds Kaiser and opens that case, which suddenly only has files in it. Curse you, Akom! For all this nonsense, I'm going to have to drop the score to a 2.

But like in many Joker episodes, the one redeeming quality was Mark Hamill's performance. Here are his best lines: "I hate it when you make sense!" "Why can't he ever stay dead!" "That's it — chew him up and spit him out!" I'll add a point for this, but I just wish that more Joker episodes would rise to the great voice work and not rely on it to carry everything.

Final score: 3