Like their title character with her bats and mallets, the writers of Harley Quinn regularly take big swings, and sometimes miss. Whether it’s the Joker telling one of his goons “women aren’t funny” or Harley failing to recruit muscle for a well-planned job when a male D-lister villain like Kite Man (Matt Oberg) can easily find support, the writers are scathing. Episodes alternate between largely standalone stories (like Harley trying to keep Robin from being her nemesis) and deeper ones that get to the show’s core premise about the challenges of reinvention, and the pervasive nature of sexism. The show is filled with blunt, hilarious talk about sex and relationships that makes it resemble female-focused sitcoms like Broad City and Don’t Trust the B- in Apartment 23. While these deep references to Batman canon are likely to engage longtime fans, Harley Quinn isn’t just drawing inspiration from animation and comics. If she had a hammer… oh, she does Warner Bros. The episode “You’re A Damn Good Cop, Jim Gordon,” where the show’s extremely beleaguered version of Commissioner James Gordon (Christopher Meloni of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) adopts Clayface’s lost hand, is a goofy spin on the emotional The New Batman Adventures episode “Growing Pains.” In the particularly absurd episode “A High Bar,” Harley Quinn and Ivy crash the Penguin’s nephew’s bar mitzvah, and Ivy infects some teenage boys with a serum that turns them into trees in a reference to the B:TAS episode “Eternal Youth.” When another villain monologues, Clayface can’t help but offer notes. Asked to do something simple like impersonating a guard, he tries to develop an elaborate backstory for his new character. Tudyk also gets to bring his own spin to the shapeshifting Clayface, whose background as an actor is mined for endless gags. While this Joker has the same over-the-top flair as his 1990s counterpart, he’s much more prone to spectacularly killing people by melting their faces off with acid, or blowing them up in exaggerated bursts of gore and organs. Tudyk’s Joker is a clear tribute to Mark Hamill’s iconic version of the character, played with just a little more cruelty and spite, since the writers no longer need to pull punches for a young audience. Harley Quinn is full of warped references to B:TAS and its successor, The New Batman Adventures. She sets out to assemble a crew and pull off enough big heists to earn herself a spot alongside the Joker and the rest of the Justice League’s greatest villains in the Legion of Doom. Smoove of Curb Your Enthusiasm), Harley changes her look to be more in line with her Suicide Squad costume, and vows to prove she doesn’t need the Joker by relentlessly trying to be just like him. Moving into the apartment Ivy shares with her Audrey II-like plant creation Frank (J.B. Sisters are doing it covered in gore Warner Bros. When Batman (Diedrich Baker, serving the same “straight man in a mad world” role he had in Batman: The Brave and the Bold) interrupts their latest heist, the Joker escapes without Harley, and she spends a year waiting for him in Arkham until Ivy breaks them both out. That dynamic is at the core of Harley Quinn, which opens with Harley (Kaley Cuoco of The Big Bang Theory), dressed in her classic Batman: The Animated Series costume, being used and abused by the Joker (Alan Tudyk of Firefly and Doom Patrol). But DC Universe’s foul-mouthed, over-the-top new animated series Harley Quinn, which kicks off its 13-episode first season on November 29, owes the most to the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Harley and Ivy.” The episode cast the two Batman supervillains as friends and roommates, with Poison Ivy trying to persuade Harley to end her abusive relationship with the Joker and become her own woman. Harley has found footing in Batman comics and other media since then, including the 2016 Suicide Squad film. But easily the most successful of the new characters was Harley Quinn, an acrobatic Arkham psychiatrist turned girlfriend and accomplice to the Joker. B:TAS also introduced a host of new characters, including police officer Renée Montoya and Batman inspiration The Grey Ghost. The 1990s show Batman: The Animated Series rewrote the Batman canon, dramatically changing the backstories of several villains and solidifying the noir and gothic style that came to define Gotham for a generation of fans.
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