B:TAS reviews: Be A Clown

(9/06/09)

If a child is to appear in Batman, then by golly, he should have a tremendous effect on the story.  For surely, how many of the psychoses experienced by the series’ major characters manifest themselves in childhood.  Did Batman not undergo his most crucial of changes when he was but eight years old?  The title card seems to arouse our curiosity, beckoning us with a potential exploration of the effect a child might have on the most deadly of all of Batman’s rogues.

And it does not take advantage of the opportunity.  Depth and meaning are difficult things to convey in a brief running time with censorship restraints, but Batman: the Animated Series is a hallmark of television for so frequently overcoming such limitations.  And so it is a shame that we must be reminded by outings like these that there was a span of episodes that catered to the most juvenile of viewers, those who could not notice plot deficiencies and hollow characters.  All the while, Jordan, the child who plays a crucial role in Be A Clown, is merely the fuel for a child-in-jeopardy plot.

You see, what the Joker must never be is a clown in the literal sense.  He so often subverts and stretches the boundaries of that label, that to see him here, in all his simple-mindedness, is to witness a gross simplification.  Here is a clown with harmful trinkets.  He fumes when Mayor Hill fails to recognize his uniqueness, and retaliates in one of the most common of all villainous schemes, the planting of explosives.  In addition to your basic clown, the Joker must also never be a hypocrite.  Evidence tells us that despite his silliness, he takes his persona very seriously.

But Dini did not script this one, so am I really to fault the freelancers who scripted it?  Well, admittedly the Joker in all of his many facets and complications did not exist as of this point in the series, but there is room to criticize a story for its bland predictability and overused clichés.  The child in jeopardy is only one of many serious offenses, the most heinous of which is Batman’s fourth-wall breaking.

There was a trend in the early days for Batman to have a special bond with children.  Between Be A Clown and The Underdwellers he has already twice given a thumbs up.  I don’t particularly mind this, but it doesn’t serve a purpose save to make us fawn with affection.  I said it before: Batman’s childhood is an essential part of his being.  To see Batman interact with a child has the potential to unlock concealed character traits or delve into a dark corner of his mind.  Beware the Gray Ghost, it saddens me to say, is the only true exploration of Batman’s relationship to his childhood in the series.  And all the while there is that looming feeling that Joker might have had the best part to play in a tale about a child, a potentiality that was unfortunately neglected.

The Joker, Batman, and a misguided child seem like the elements for something great.  But when mixed together under the helm of Sean Catherine Derek and two freelance writers, the end result is a juvenile abomination.