Not pictured here; Cory and Shawn fighting, which would have made this the best episode in the entire series.
It’s not rare for a film to be mentioned or used as an example of a story or plot in television. Star Wars, the Star Trek films, Indiana Jones, Scarface; all these and many more are brought up a lot because people watch movies often and these are movies everyone’s seen. Less often though are comics being brought up, as not nearly as many people have read the famous storylines that make some comic franchises truly great, mostly due to how many of them exist and less easily absorbed than films due to format. That’s what makes a particular episode of Disney’s Girl Meets World kind of surprising when it brought up a comic for a major plot point of an episode fans of the original series, Boy Meets World might recall. It was an episode where a new teacher used the X-men in his lesson plan, which in 1997, probably caught a lot of fans who read Marvel Comics off guard. Almost twenty years and another TV show later, it’s DC readers’ turn to be taken for a swerve when Frank Miller’s seminal work The Dark Knight Returns was brought up as a plot point in the episode “Girl Meets The New Teacher”. The episode is purposely meant to be a call back to the aforementioned X-men-related episode, but this time it’s the Dark Knight that’s used in the lesson plan.
Perhaps it might be due to the writers fondness for the comic and felt a need to give Batman the name drop this time, or maybe it’s because that particular comic has gotten a lot of attention since it heavily influences the upcoming depiction of Batman in Batman V. Superman. What really should throw fans for a loop is that this is a show made by Disney, who happens to own DC’s eternal rival for Comic Supremacy, Marvel. Giving DC free publicity is odd to say the least, but maybe none of the higher-ups realized they were giving free publicity to the other company. In any case, the teacher uses the comic to showcase the idea in fiction that people can have the same goal, but their approaches put them at odds with each other and they fight. Superman and Batman in that story both want what’s good for the people, but Batman’s chaotic and unlawful actions in his attempt to punish evil is fundamentally incompatible with Superman’s attempt to keep things peaceful by enforcing order, law and the status quo. In the episode, this is meant as a parallel to the conflict between the principal and the teacher who both have the same goal, educating the children well, but are at odds because their methods are incompatible.
Also it’s a hell of a dark story to bring up in a Disney show. Still, this is the best contribution the series has given to Batman since Boy Meets World gave us Will “Terry McGinnis” Friedle. Check it out if for nothing less than getting to see The Dark Knight Returns being a major plot point in an episode of a TV show.