In 86 years of costumed crime-fighting, Batman has teamed up with practically every hero in the storied DC Universe. The Dark Knight has befriended and battled Superman, served alongside the world’s finest superheroes on the Justice League, and joined forces with the colorfully clad Wonder Woman and Aquaman as part of the Super Friends. But Batman’s endless crusade against crime often takes place outside of the pages of DC Comics, with intercompany crossovers bringing Batman face-to-face with everyone from Marvel heroes Spider-Man and the Hulk to franchises like Predator, Spawn, Mortal Kombat, Godzilla, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Scooby-Doo, and Looney Tunes.
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But one planned crossover would have brought Gotham City’s most notorious criminal to the city of Townsville. According to The Powerpuff Girls creator Craig McCracken, Warner Bros. objected to having the Mark Hamill-voiced Joker from Batman: The Animated Series appear on the Cartoon Network superhero show.
“When we did the original series I really wanted to do an episode where the Joker came to town and started committing crimes,” McCracken wrote on his Tumblr blog. In “The Joker Comes to Townsville,” the celebrity Clown Prince of Crime would have been welcomed to the once-sleepy city by the starstruck Mayor (Tom Kenny).
Instead of using the Powerpuff Hotline to phone the superheroine trio of Blossom (Cathy Cavadini), Bubbles (Tara Strong), and Buttercup (E.G. Daily), the Mayor “was so excited to have a celebrity villain in town that he actually tried to thwart The Girls from stopping him because the Joker was finally putting Townsville on the map,” McCracken continued. “We wanted to use the Bruce Timm designs from Batman: The Animated Series and get Mark [Hamill] to do the voice. Unfortunately Warner Bros. said no.”
Hamill, a prolific voice actor who went on to play the hypnotic cat villain White Kitty in The Powerpuff Girls, famously portrayed the archnemesis of Kevin Conroy’s Batman across the interconnected DC Animated Universe, which spawned series like Superman, Justice League, Batman Beyond, and Static Shock. (Hamill’s Joker would ultimately appear with the Powerpuff Girls and other Cartoon Network characters in the since-delisted crossover video game MultiVersus.)
Batman: The Animated Series was produced by Warner Bros. Animation but aired on the Fox Kids network. Before Powerpuff Girls producer Hanna-Barbera was absorbed into WBA in 2001, Batman, Robin, and their villains — including the Joker and the Penguin — appeared in Hanna-Barbera productions like 1972’s The New Scooby-Doo Movies and 1984’s SuperFriends: The Legendary Super Powers Show (voiced by Adam West). Conroy and Hamill voiced their respective characters in a 2019 crossover episode of Warner Bros. Animation’s Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?
Powerpuff Girls/DC Crossover
Back in 2017, Superman: The Man of Steel writer-artist John Byrne revealed how a rights issue prevented Superman from appearing alongside the Powerpuff Girls when he and comic creators Mike Allred (iZombie), Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Adam Warren (Empowered), and Kyle Baker (Plastic Man) were hired to produce pinups for 2002’s The Powerpuff Girls #25.
Byrne described the comic book published by DC Comics — also a division of Warner Bros. — as “an unfortunate illustration of just how f—ed up DC can be sometimes.”
“Hearing that I was a fan of The Powerpuff Girls, the editor of their book contacted me about doing a pinup,” Byrne recounted in a 2017 blog post. “I said ‘Sure!’ and suggested a scene of them dreaming about ‘realistic’ versions of themselves teaming with Superman as the Professor read them a Superman comic as a bedtime story.”
“This was approved, and drawn — and then the Higher Ups at DC got a look at it, and killed it, saying that the Powerpuff Girls office did not have the ‘rights’ to use Superman,” he continued. “Think about that.” Ultimately, Byrne’s pinup depicted a Superman-esque version of Professor Utonium.
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