The Laughing Fish

Back to a classic DC villain for this weeks, Weirdo Wednesday ... or is it Wacked-out Wednesday?  Oh who cares... 😆

This week I wanted to talk about the best Joker episode of, Batman The Animated Series, The Laughing Fish.

Most fans have this episode in their Top 3 or 5 at the worst, it's truly a Joker story at it's core because the whole plot of it is around the fact that his crimes usually only make sense to the Joker himself.

The episode is directly inspired from, Detective Comics #475 and was just part of a much larger story arc for the clown prince of crime and proof that the animated series producers should have gotten more inspiration from classic issues of comics rather than todays Hollywood writers.

Too often on they misused the Joker as little more than a painted up gangster with a nasty sense of humor and that's about it, but this episode got to the core of the character the way he should be portrayed.

This story should have probably should have been a two-part episode, but they stuffed it into one and it felt rushed, but that's not the first time they did that and certainly not the last.

The animated episodes always had the Jokers victims merely drugged instead of dead, so he never really carried the terror that the character should have held.  Heck in the Power Records stories of The Batman they would let the Joker kill people with his toxin, but couldn't let it happen in the Animated Series...

In the story, The Joker poured a special mix of his laughing toxin into Gotham bay and then tried to claim that all the fish with his ghoulish grin were his property, but since fish are a natural resource, they couldn't be patented, but that made no sense to him, it looked like him, he should get all the money from fish products and he was willing to take out any government official that he saw as being in his way.

Harley Quinn was basically comic relief only in this one, since she had a small problem with fish 😫 and gets sick around the thought of eating  them.

The "television commercial" part of the show feels like the writers ripped it directly off the 1989 Batman motion picture of "Joker Products." and makes it just seem like filler for the episode.  This would have been fine for a two-part episode but not just one.

Batman is lured to the Gotham Aquarium to the Joker's trap, as is the stumbling detective Bullock, who Joker ends up using as bait for "his" shark, who he claims to share a grin with.  

The episode has some great Joker moments but also shows that the writers really didn't know what to do with Joker, even when handed the story on a silver platter from the classic comic book issue.  Batman The Animated Series is still the best rendition of the Batman that DC/Warner Bros has put out and still stands the test of time, too bad they didn't do more Joker episodes like this one.