B:TAS reviews: Christmas With the Joker

(1/18/09)

Christmas With the Joker is a shameless, frivolous, exuberant ode to colorful action goofiness. The first Joker episode of the series, the Clown Prince of Crime arrives fully endowed with a gigantic mountainside canon, towering toy robots, a TV studio, and a rocket-propelled Christmas tree. None of these things can arguably be said to exist in any semblance of reality, possibly some kind of campy parallel universe, and whether the episode fails or succeeds depends largely on the viewer's willingness to accept the mad extravaganza that it is.

But unlike Paul Dini, perhaps the writer most attuned to the intricacies of madcap comedy, freelancer Eddie Gorodetsky is unable to decorate his colorful script with character-based ornamentation. Joker has a pre-wired charm and is the main source of the episode's joviality, but the rest of the characters ease into familiar, if not unconvincing Christmastime archetypes, Robin playing the youthful Yuletide-loving counterpart to Batman's hard-nosed Scrooge. The most fruitful thing about this pairing is a sincere allusion to It's a Wonderful Life, nestled in a very telling exchange that does more to illuminate Batman's stolidness than any of his tough-minded order-barking.

The most irksome aspect of the episode, aside from the eye-rolling silliness, is the stultification of the Joker's more fascinating qualities. In Joker’s Wild, he escaped from Arkham on a whim, nary a flying Christmas tree in sight. In Joker's Favor, he psychologically tortured an ordinary citizen, terrorizing him into becoming an integral part of his plans. I am not proposing a universalized depiction of the Joker that adheres to some arbitrary continuity, but without his thematic baggage as a projection of meaningless, unpredictable terror, as a demonic exhibitionist, or as any number of his many incarnations that fashion for him some kind of attractive personality, he is merely a flamboyant purveyor of kitsch. But even though he lacks his defining character traits, his heartless irony manages to rear its ugly head: in spite of the problems of his generic super villainy, his laughter in the face of a weeping Summer Gleason, whose mother is presumably about to die, is emblematic of the clownish sadist we all know and love, even if it is for but a flicker of an instant.

For the sharp-eyed viewer there is some aesthetic pleasure to be found. The AKOM animation certainly doesn’t detract from Ted Blackman’s glorious backgrounds. The Laffco Toy Factory seems to borrow more from German Expressionism than art deco in its grotesque, skewed stature. The time spent on fashioning the pastiche of locales through which to showcase Gotham City's Christmas festivities, all set to an unusual low-key saxophone, is uncharacteristically moody. If Christmas With the Joker is better than a nostalgic curiosity, it is in these fleeting, offhand moments of beauty.