Long-time Joker voice actor Mark Hamill has revealed that he felt the Arkaham video games opened up a “whole-new” Joker.
On X (formerly Twitter), Hamill briefly talked about how the video games allowed him to be a different version of the Clown Prince of Crime. The games were not bound by the television censors or the Standards and Practices Department. It allowed him to deliver a more mature and gritty take on the character that he’d already spent decades voicing up until that point.
12 years & a day ago today.
Freed from the constraints of television’s Standards & Practices Dept. (TV censors) & aimed at a more mature audience, the Arkham trilogy was dark, gritty & extremely violent. This was a whole new Joker for me.🦇vs 🃏 https://t.co/bn2GXuDxQ3
— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) October 19, 2023
Arkham‘s Effect on Mark Hamill
This news comes on the 12th anniversary of Batman: Arkham City, to many fans still one of the best superhero games ever. City and its predecessor, Arkham Asylum, took the Batman source material and elevated it for a wider audience. It also featured the Joker at his most grotesque, particularly in Arkham City. In that game, Joker was dying after being exposed to too much Venom toxin in the previous game. In the end, Joker surprisingly actually died due to being so consumed with hurting Batman, that he neglected to take the cure to save himself.
Rocksteady’s follow-up, Arkham Knight took the Joker to new depths again, despite being dead. In this story, he exists purely as a mental hallucination for Batman, who had been infected with Joker’s blood. This version of the villain was even more violent and horrific. This culminated in a flashback sequence where players saw, in vivid, graphic detail, the Joker torturing and shooting Jason Todd point-blank in the head. The violence and subject material was so gruesome that it earned Arkham Knight a Mature rating.
Since then, Mark Hamill has been further able to depict Joker in more intense, adult situations. Most recently, he and Kevin Conroy starred in the mature Batman: The Killing Joke animated feature that showed a much more adult take on the characters, even more so than its graphic novel source material. However, the Arkham trilogy of video games certainly opened the doors to Hamill’s more adult version of the character.
Source: X.com
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