The two of them just lounge around Ivy’s beautifully-appointed apartment in men’s shirts and no pants, making dinner together, the way that heterosexual friends do. This, by the way, is an actual screenshot from the actual show during the episode Harley and Ivy, Harley stays over at Ivy’s house and gets “lessons in good old-fashioned female self-esteem” in one of Ivy’s many attempts to get Harley to ditch Mr. But Harley keeps coming back she once forgive him for throwing her out of a high-rise window because he sent her a flower and a get-well card in the hospital.
J” and “Puddin'” to Harley) regularly hits and insults her, and tries to have her killed on more than one occasion. Their relationship is (unsurprisingly, given that they are both psychotic clowns) horrible. The Poison Ivy of Batman: TAS is all 1990s feminism - sexy leotards and punching men and Doing It By Herself, while Harley is just…delightfully unhinged.Ī bit of background, for those of you who don’t know Harley like I know Harley: she’s a former psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum driven mad by the Joker’s machinations who adopts the unhinged persona of a clown and tags along after him - sometimes his girlfriend, sometimes his second banana, sometimes a lackey he kicks around. And you may not have heard of Harley Quinn at all (worse luck you). Save her for later, when we revisit Kill Bill and pair her up with either Lucy Liu or Darryl Hannah (I haven’t decided which yet). If you’re not familiar with the series, you probably know Poison Ivy as Uma Thurman from 1997’s Batman & Robin.
Imagine a cartoon series with a male protagonist that has most of the plot of Thelma & Louise carefully threaded throughout an 85-episode arc, and you’ve landed on the reason that hearing this music still gives me chills. And it had one of the best depictions of female friendship I’ve ever seen. It was cinematic without being pretentious, grounded in rich mythology, witty, tragic, complicated it payed homage to previous incarnations of Batman while developing its own unique interpretation of major characters. It resurrected Mark Hamill’s career, and I will still (loudly, without being asked) explain why his version of the Joker was so much better than Heath Ledger’s with very little prompting at dinner parties. It was a little violent and a little stylized (a lot of the background scenes were painted on black paper the producers called the design Dark Deco) and awash in brilliantly-rendered, nuanced characterization for villains and heroes and even bystanders. I’m going to try very hard to make sure this doesn’t just turn into a bullet-point list of reasons you should watch (or rewatch) Batman: The Animated Series, so I will confine my remarks about the series as a whole to this opening paragraph: it was the greatest animated series in the entire 1990s, a decade bursting and tumefying with great animated series (see also: Gargoyles).