I wonder why this was even a thing for all of these. I recognize middle-left and bottom-left from movies which should be a little more lax.
Established tradition. It was already established that he does this, so they continue to the trend. It’d be out of character for him to not do the Joker Grin at all anymore and just wantonly kill people.
In Return of the Joker, the Joker both shot and was shot with a flag gun.
Unless you watched the TV-Censored version where he used a Joker Toxin gun on the guy in the beginning of the movie and slipped on a banana peel and electrocuted himself to death.
In either version, one will still die.
Last commenter missed the point. I’m sure the studios were very happy with this arrangement. It’s a win-win.
The '80s/'90s were a time of deep and powerful moral panics about children’s entertainment. When TMNT came out in the UK, Thatcher (I believe)'s government freaked out about… not the show overtly being an ad for toys, but the word “ninja”. Ninjas are violent murderers! So they became “hero turtles” instead.
Pearl-clutching conservatives are incredibly, unbelievably dense people.… And so by replacing murder with hard-to-articulate horror (it’s creepy because it’s so close to being innocuous), studios completely disarm the pearl-clutchers and their simplistic narratives while retaining (or even strengthening) the emotional/narrative element.
That’s one unfortunate thing about the more laissez-faire approach to content that streaming services have. Often times the streaming services don’t really give a shit what you put in it, so the writers just get carte blanche. They have no restrictions, so they never get creative to work around them.
