Review: Batman: The Animated Series 1.37: The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne

The problem with this episode was that the cameos from the Joker, the Penguin and Twoface felt frankly gratuitous. None of them actually did anything particularly interesting, they just sort of stood around, exhibiting their most obvious and identifiable traits. Like we were supposed to say, "oh, that Joker, he's such a kook. And look! The Penguin! He's such a pompous fool! And Twoface! HE sure does like to flip a coin!"

Also, none of these characters semm to have any understanding of the value of money. In the first scene, and for no discernable reason, a group of hoodlums just leave a huge bag of money lying on the side of the road. I mean, sure, Batman was standing around near them, but he was distracted, which is why they were able to get away. Surely they could have managed to pick up a bag - how long does that take? Three seconds?

And then later on in the epsiode, the Penguin, the Joker and Twoface are all bidding against each other in an auction to determine who will learn the true identity of Batman. At first, they bid against each other, "one million!" "no, two!" Then the Joker has a better idea - pooling all their money together, so that they can all learn the secret! So instead of just paying him two million, they end up paying him fifty million! That makes so much sense! I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure that generally if every single person at an auction decides not to bid against each other and to pool all their resources together, you can actually just, you know, not bid anything more! You raised it to two million then decided to stop bidding? So why are you paying his fifty million? It makes no fucking sense! I mean, okay, I can understand the Joker inventing such a fucking stupid idea, because he's the Joker, and I can maybe buy Twoface doing it if his coin tells him to, but the Penguin? What the fuck, dude? When did you become retarded?

Apart from this idiocy with money though the episode is pretty good. I do really like the plan Batman uses to trick everyone into thinking Doctor Strange was full of shit. Not the Robin dressing up plan, the other one. The switching the tapes one. That one was pretty clever.