Originally published at: Joker 2 is rumored to be a musical with Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn | Boing Boing
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ABC ran with Cop Rock for 11 episodes before finally admitting their mistake.
Here’s hoping that Warner Bros doesn’t have to double down on Joker a few more times before they see the error of their ways.
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Cop Rock does not get enough attention for the window into a bizarre alternate universe of entertainment that it apparently was. It’s one of those things that needs to be preserved because young people will not believe us that it existed.
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You know it’s legit cause the screenplay only has the 2 brads in the hole punches.
Apparently, a musical was the answer we were looking for.
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I mean, I like Lady Gaga… not sure we need a musical about The Joker, though…
Considering their movie about the Joker, who was a cheerful psychopath who saw all of reality as one big joke and punchline all at once, and planned everything around what he found funny was a movie about a sad clown being sad who learns in the end that guns kill people, it’s very likely that their Harley Quinn will be something entirely the opposite of the one fans are familiar with. Probably someone who’se real name is Doris Smalley (because who makes their “super” name sound the same as their real one? Get real nerds!), and her day job will be as a Fed-ex delivery person. Who is sad. And after a whole movie of her being sad, she too will learn the important lesson (after Sad Clown tells her about it) that guns can kill people. Won’t make her happy or anything, just some other people dead.
Okay, I’ve spoiled the whole movie for you, you don’t need to waste money watching it now.
May as well call it Joker 2: Take My Money.
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I don’t think the fanboys are going to like this idea very much.
Well, if they can somehow work in a red hood and some sort of industrial chemical vat accident I know I wouldn’t complain. Much. And if Hollywood and the more mundane audiences want to play around with the Joker mythology in a more Magic Realism style than has been done before, let them – they may come up with something new and interesting for a (checks) 82 year-old character, and that’s always to be encouraged. I just don’t see this one posing much of a challenge to Bats, except maybe good old '66, who’d expect an easily escapable death trap, not a gun going off in his face.
This sounds like a great idea, tbh. People constantly kvetch about how “formulaic” superhero movies are, but there’s an equally-loud contingent that decries any structure that explores more interesting aspects of the characters, and it’s not just the rightwing fanbois. The first film was clearly an homage to King of Comedy (even having DeNiro take Jerry Lewis’s role), so I could see them doing the same with a romantic musical by way of Troma studios or James Gunn. Legion did an amazing job of this and, coincidentally was also largely set in an asylum.
ETA: I mean, if someone deep faked Phoenix and Gaga’s faces onto this and released it as a teaser, a lot of people would totally be fooled.
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I take back what I said.
I just remembered liking this scene in Batman. Maybe Gaga could pull something off like it.
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1966 - Now there was a Batman!
It was a weird show at a weird time. Randy Newman managed to win a Grammy for his contributions, which, honestly… wow.
I was couch surfing a lot in 1990 and didn’t see the original run. What impresses me about the pieces I’ve seen since then is not just that it was a terrible idea that obviously didn’t work (there’s no shortage of those then or now - The Swan, The Magic Hour, everything on Discovery Channel since 2002), but that they took it so seriously. if I squint I can see a similar show being made today, but it would come at you with a nudge and a wink, heavy with situational irony.
Maybe that’s what Phillips has in mind, something like the Clown Prince of Crime does Zoe’s Never Ending Playlist? Who knows, maybe it will work. Or maybe Paddington 2 already did everything that needs to be done with prison musical dance number mashups.
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Yah, it would make a lot more sense now in a media landscape that is so huge and so heterogeneous that you can find all kinds of dark corners with weird and interesting stuff in them. But to do this in 1990 on broadcast network television is bananas. They were really swinging for the fences and I’d love to know how the green light conversations went for it. The distribution on this was so wide that we got it in Canada. There’s big mainstream stuff on the air in the US now that we still can’t get in Canada. But we got Cop Rock in 1990. 
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