YMMV / Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker

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• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Just how evil is this branch of the Jokerz gang? Yes, they do some pretty rotten things with smirks on their faces and were members of the gang in the first place, but Joker is explicitly seen making it clear to them that Resignations Not Accepted, keeping them Locked Out of the Loop about what he plans to do with the technology they're stealing, and it sounds like he tracked them down rather than vice versa, raising the question of how much choice they have about being his henchmen. In the Justice League Unlimited Bad Future, Chucko becomes The Mole helping Terry while the DeeDee twins murder him.
  • Harley as an old lady and a grandmother is open to a lot of interpretation. Word of God confirmed that Ivy was not the mother of her children and the Joker wasn't the father, so that ship is sunk. If she went straight, given her smacking the girls and shouting at them, how did her granddaughters fall under the Joker's influence, let alone become Jokerz gang members? Given they call her by her old nickname, how much did she tell them about her former life?
  • Related, Commissioner Gordon tells Terry they Never Found the Body regarding Harley. Is Barbara completely unaware of her true fate, or did she say it to protect Harley's privacy and allow the latter to live in peace?
  • Did Bruce know or figure out at this juncture that he was Terry's biological father thanks to Amanda Waller's project? Assuming not, then on the surface he was reassuring Terry that he had made the world safer by avenging Warren McGinnis. If so, that lends weight to when he tells Terry he should stop being Batman for a while because he's done the legacy proud and has avenged his father. Taken with the "Epilogue" reveal in light, Bruce is saying, "I'm proud to have you as my son."
  • Was Tim genuinely resentful towards Batman's legacy or was it all implanted into him by Joker. By the end, his change of heart could be the result of Terry saving his life or there was never real resentment at all.
    • Similarly, was Tim's pursuit of a communications engineering career all his own choice, or did the microchip subtly influence Tim to try to pursue a path that would benefit the Joker during his eventual reemergence?
• Awesome Music:
  • The soundtrack has the Humble Brothers Remix of "Crash" by Mephisto Odyssey featuring Static-X.
  • It even includes the music video for the original version of the song as well.
  • Similarly, Kristopher Carter's score is incredible, blending the metal/techno-tinged world of Beyond effortlessly with the traditional orchestral style of BTAS for a greater emotional scope.
• Broken Base: There is a contingent of fans who argue that the Bowdlerized edit is, if not a better film, a far darker and more effective one. Most of this sentiment draws from the fact that editing down to a PG rating meant that the creators had to be far more ingenious with what violence was shown, making use of the Discretion Shot in a way that actually made it artistically better and scarier, much like they had done in previous episodes of B:TAS. On the other hand, it is also admitted that the censored version had some shoddy editing with continuity errors, the dialogue suffers as a result of the Never Say "Die" trope, Bonk's death was more ambiguous and much less shocking, the scene of the Joker stabbing Batman was made much less effective by the replacing of said stabbing with a punch, and Tim being only indirectly responsible for the Joker's death makes it seem like he has been suffering from an ''irrational'' guilt complex his entire life...
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Seeing The Joker finally die, especially after seeing his latest atrocity. Made even better by how he is killed by the very person he tortured and brainwashed.
  • Terry's "The Reason You Suck" Speech towards the Joker which to this day remains one of the most celebrated moments in DCAU history. This can be especially cathartic in light of modern Joker being seen as an overexposed Karma Houdini.
• Complete Monster: The Joker. See DC Animation.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Almost everything the Joker says or does, especially during the flashback scene.
  Joker: If you don't like the movie, I've got slides!
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Jokerz in this movie^note Bonk, Chucko, Ghoul, Dee Dee, and Woof, especially Dee Dee, are all extremely popular among the fandom. This is likely the reason they were included in the Bad Future episode of Justice League Unlimited and occasional comics. Dee Dee understandably get major bonus points from fans due to being ultimately revealed as Harley Quinn's granddaughters.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: A number of fans weren't fond of the mind control DNA chip plot device due to how overly complicated it is, thinking that Tim snapping due to his past torture and becoming the Joker entirely by himself would've been a stronger story.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: There was a deleted scene in which Bruce and Terry go into the abandoned old Arkham Asylum, only to find the hanging corpse of Joker's old body, smiling down, with the words "I KNOW" painted onto the corpse. The scene was deleted because it was seen as being too dark and disturbing for the film. However, many fans wished the scene was kept in, precisely because of how dark and disturbing it is.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The shootout in the nightclub is this, given the Orlando nightclub shooting.
  • What Tim goes through here in the flashback, given that the backstory for Batman: Arkham Knight has Jason Todd go through the same thing and end up assisting the Scarecrow in, what is for all intents and purposes, a terrorist attack on Gotham.
  • Barbara makes a half-joke about the falling out between Batman and Nightwing. When a comic book continuation decided to finally elaborate more details, it was actually even much darker than initially implied.^note it involved Bruce getting Barbara pregnant while she was still in a relationship with Dick. Dick beats up Bruce after learning about this, while around the same time in another part of town, Barbara suffers a miscarriage after trying to stop a crime.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Bruce tries to retire Terry so that the Joker won't go after him, albeit in a gruff way when Terry insists that being Batman makes him a better person and he can't give it up. We find out that in "Epilogue" they had both figured out that Bruce was Terry's biological father, and Bruce was terrified of Joker hurting his biological son.
  • See the cameo bit on the Trivia page? Considering all that's happened between Tim Drake and Stephanie Brown since this film was made, ^note Her "dying", a rocky ending, and only recently coming back... it's nice to see that there's at least one version where the two of them settled down together with their own life.
  • In Harley's later appearances, she practically always outlives the Joker and even manages to, in several of them, become one of the good guys... while still being somewhat an anarchist at heart.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Joker crashes a high-rise party, and escapes because Batman has to save a guest from falling. Sound familiar?
  • In Batman: Arkham Series, Troy Baker is mirroring Tim Drake and Jason Todd, going from voicing Drake in Arkham City to voicing the Joker in Arkham Origins to voicing Todd in Arkham Knight.
  • A former Big Bad who seemingly died has come back to life through nanotechnology attached to another character. Are we talking about the resurrection of The Joker or Liquid Snake/Ocelot?
  • Harley Quinn, of all people, became a mother and eventually even a grandmother? At least in an alternate universe/franchise it looks like.
  • Terry proclaims that he was never a Robin. While he didn't voice them as Robin, Will Friedle, Terry's voice actor, voiced Dick (as Nightwing) in the Batman Unlimited movies and Tim himself (as Red Robin) in Batman Ninja.
  • The comic book Recursive Adaptation drops a small throwaway line about Terry half-jokingly asking if he's going to be in Bruce's will. Certain revelations in the JLU episode "Epilogue" imply that Terry may be more than eligible to inherit Bruce's fortune, among other things.
  • Atypical of the Joker, a smiley face is prominent in the movie, using his new "toy" to try to carve one on Neo Gotham and the microchip containing his DNA happens to have its circuits in the shape of a crooked smiley. More than a decade later Batman would begin an investigation involving another iconic smiley face in The Button.
  • At the end we see Harley Quinn as an old lady, apparently having reformed. Nearly 20 years later, the Old Lady Harley miniseries would also feature her as an old woman, although her she is quite an Action Grandma, living in a Mad Max esque post-apocalyptic world. She also looks a lot more like he original self, and, despite being in her 50s or 60s, is still quite attractive.
  • On the way back to Wayne Manor after Joker's big comeback, Bruce tells Terry to "Shut up and drive!" Who would've guessed that Batman was a Rihanna fan? Especially given his taste in music.
  • Due to the redesigns the Joker received throughout the run of the DCAU, his skin went from chalk-white to having a slight bluish tint here, making him somewhat resemble Kim Possible villain Dr. Drakken, who also ended up facing Will Friedle, as Ron Stoppable. Even better, Drakken’s voice actor John DiMaggio would go on to voice the Joker himself in Batman: Under the Red Hood.
• Inferred Holocaust: On two occasions, Joker uses a gigantic military orbital laser to carve a swathe of destruction through Gotham. Civilian casualties are never mentioned on either occasion, but it's a giant military laser carving through a major city, often going right through buildings. One can only imagine the death toll. The commentary track notes that the laser miraculously avoided hitting a single person.
• Ink-Suit Actor: The elder Tim Drake looks like a slightly burlier version of Dean Stockwell.
• Just Here for Godzilla: There are a some people who view the film only for the flashback sequence featuring the Joker's death and the events leading up to it.
• Memetic Mutation: Oh, what the heck, I'll laugh anyway! HA HA HA HA HA HAA!^note The Joker's reaction to learning Batman's secret identity during the flashback sequence.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The movie gives the Clown Prince of Crime a rather infamous line-crossing moment: he kidnapped then-Robin Tim Drake, tortured and mind raped him for three weeks, mutilated him, "fixed" him up as Joker Jr., implanted a microchip doctored with the Joker's DNA into his body, and invited Batman over to see his work in detail (which included a home video of the boy's torture labeled as "Our Family Memories"). He then reveals that he's learned Batman's secret identity, mocks him for it (and for not having the balls to kill him after all this), and knifes him before he tosses "J.J." a spear gun to finish him off with. Also worth mentioning that this particular MEH crossing is the first and only instance where Batman tries to kill the Clown Prince of Crime with his bare hands, and that Mark Hamill, who had been voicing the Joker for years at this point, felt uneasy with the role this time.
  • Even for the Joker, the events of Return of the Joker were extreme. Not even Harley Quinn gets a pass after helping with that. In fact, Paul Dini as he recounts in the DVD commentary argued against her dying, even drawing a picture of himself crying about it, while Bruce Timm believed that it had to show her chance at redemption was over and the Bat-family trying to help her was futile. Although she survives anyways, thanks to her quasi-superpowered vitality after Poison Ivy made her nervous system immune to all poisons back in Batman: The Animated Series.
  • Jordan Pryce crosses it by working with the Jokerz to sabotage Bruce's return to his company and showing No Sympathy about Bruce dying in a "home accident". Fortunately, karma hits him in the end.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The film will forever be remembered for two controversial death scenes (Bonk's and the Joker's), which were first heavily altered along with other scenes before it was released in 2000, in an attempt to tone down the violence due to being pressured by criticism from Warner Bros. executives; and then eventually brought back in 2002 when the Bowdlerised version didn't help matters but only caused unrest among many Batman fans that lasted for over a year.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 versions had bad music, bad graphics, clunky controls, repetitive boring gameplay, broken combat, and can be started and finished within a half hour- 'seriously'- which is why it was given lowest scores from GameRankings and Metacritic. The Game Boy Color version fared a little better, however, but some reviews are mixed.
• Signature Scene: The flashback sequence showing how the Joker died is easily the most well-known part of the movie, to the point where some people only know about the movie because of it.
• Spiritual Adaptation: In an Adaptation Distillation kind of way, the flashback sequence is a great A Death in the Family, since it hits the major beats of the Joker horribly disfiguring and traumatizing a Robin, pushing Batman to become darker and more isolated, while avoiding the story's less well-remembered parts (like the Joker becoming the ambassador of Iran. Yes, really).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Compared to most of its contemporaries, and especially much of the DC Animated Universe's catalog, the film's Animation Bump from the series makes it one of the DCAU's most visually impressive entries. In fact, in the DVD commentary, the creators constantly pointed out that while they knew the animation was done by a Japanese company, they did not expect the high quality of the end result.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • There's a consensus that the control chip was a unnecessary plot point that took focus away from Tim's torture and any possible psychological development. A surprising number of people believe it would have been better to have Tim simply succumbing to his programming again and becoming a Joker imitator instead of being technologically taken over by the Joker himself (although it is also acknowledged this could have only taken place in the uncensored version given the mentioned controversy).
    • Then again, others think such a twist would have made the story too depressing.
  • It might have been interesting to see Ghoul and Chucko out of their masks during the nightclub fight to give a further idea of what kind of people the Jokerz had.
  • A somewhat meta example, but Harley is revealed to still be alive at the end, which is about three decades after the Tim Drake incident. Even though there's enough material here for a whole miniseries or the like, It's never been detailed or brought up again.
• The Woobie: Poor, poor Tim Drake went through mental and physical torture on his last outing as a superhero, and to make matters worse, he later became a vessel for the Joker.

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