Batman Returns/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The guided Batarang, the one Batman uses early in the film. Personally, I never had a problem with such an impossible gadget, it's a comic book movie after all... but why doesn't Batman use it ever again?
    • Because that dog took it.
    • I thought that thing was poorly executed. They should have made it bulkier and faster. As is, it looked like a thin piece of plastic that gently taps criminals on the forehead and into submission.
      • Which is preferable to how otherwise murder-happy the Burton Batman is.
  • When a public zoo becomes condemned, is it customary for the staff to leave the penguins behind to thrive on their own?
    • Considering what a Crapsack World this is, I'm honestly not surprised; maybe the staff were ordered to euthanize the animals but couldn't bring themselves to do it.
      • I wrote a fanfic once that explained what happened after the Gotham police rounded up the child-kidnappers at the Red Triangle Circus (which occurred several years before the events of the movie). The Penguin and what few of his henchpeople were able to escape fled to Canada, where they lived for a time in the Northwest Territories and honed their cold-weather survival skills (which explains why they were able to comfortably inhabit the Arctic World exhibit). After a few years, they came back across the border and bounced around from one American city to another until Penguin had decided that the kidnapping furor had blown over and it was safe to return to Gotham City. According to my Fanon, then, it's possible that they stole some penguins from another zoo somewhere and brought them to Gotham with them.
  • Why does the snow float on water when Baby Oswald gets thrown into the sewer?
    • Ice floats just fine.
      • Ice may float just fine, but what we see in this scene are individual snowflakes, which would melt into the water.
        • Maybe there was a chemical in the water that pevented it from freezing at the usual temperature? So it was cold enough to maintain snow but couldn't freeze normally. We are told that there's toxic waste being produced an the Peguin ends up with a pool of it.
          • We're also told the toxicity levels are Shreck's fault, and if Oswald's a baby, Shreck can't be old enough to have a job, let alone run a company.
          • Not necessarily. Though rare, it is possible for people to own/run a (big) company at a young age. A recent example would be Facebook which was started by a guy in college.
          • Did you not notice that Chip Schreck wasn't exactly 20 even? Or Shreck's white hair? It's more than possible Shreck lead the company then to,he was certainly old enough
    • This troper chalked it up to Special Effect Failure and it was fake snow they used in the scene. Nobody realized it would float till too late to fix.
  • The "Gotham City: 33 Years Later" caption always left me scratching my head. The Penguin is only thirty-three years old? He's deformed, yeah, but not enough to make it undiscernable that he's obviously at least into his mid-forties.
    • He's lived underground most of his life, despite occasional trips to the surface and been exposed to chemicals and deprived of proper nutrition. Him looking much older than he is is no surprise.
  • I realize the answer is "there'd be no movie," but why didn't Penguin's parents just put him up for adoption?
    • They likely (and sadly correctly) assumed no one would want him because of his gross deformities.
      • They were rich, probably well-known people. If Oswald was somehow traced back to them, they would probably be incredibly embarrassed. And when you're a shallow rich asshole character in a movie, embarrassment isn't something you can get over too well.
  • So how did Selina come back from the dead, exactly? Are stray cats magic?
    • She wasn't really dead when she hit the pavement. Almost certainly brain-damaged enough to cause a psychotic break, but miraculously not seriously injured. Happens sometimes: people fall off buildings and don't pick up the horrific injuries you would expect. Just used up one of her nine lives (not magically, just metaphorically).
      • At the end, she takes enough bullets and a stun gun kiss which should kill any normal person they just counted as losing lives. And, of course, she was alive at the end of the movie. She seemed to have some sort of power.
      • People -can- survive high amounts of electricity if lucky and/or in the right situation. Plus, her rubber suit (from the raincoats she cuts up) makes for good insulation.
      • Didn't the awful, awful Catwoman flick pretty much confirm that she's got some sort of magic powers? Michelle Pfeiffer's character was among the photos of the other Catwomen the crazy lady shows to Halle Berry.
        • I could've sworn that the Halle movie was actually just based off of the character of Catwoman. It just made comic book fans freak out because of Halle and they thought it would be about the actual Catwoman
      • For starters, Returns was made well before anyone considered that movie. For a second, I seriously doubt anyone is going to take anything from that movie as canon to Batman Returns, considering that photo and the name are the only things they have in common.
  • We learn that Shreck is a Corrupt Corporate Executive because he plans to build a power plant that actually intentionally drains power from Gotham City instead of generating it. What would Shreck gain from this at all? He can't really do much with the energy he's just "stockpiling somewhere", and when people start realizing there's a power shortage they're going to blame the power plant, even if they don't catch on to the plan.
    • For the Evulz, really.
      • One of Tim Burton's biographers theorizes that Shreck intended to "corner the market" on electricity (in Gotham, anyway) and sell it to the people at artificially high rates (since the stockpiling would enable him to claim that some of the power was unaccounted for).
      • Isn't this similar to what Enron would later do in real life?
        • This is precisely what Enron did. However, the actual "power draining" portion of the plan is not, as far as this troper is aware, illegal, but their accounting practices. So, as long as he buried the terms of what the plant would actually do in Techno Babble double talk, he'd have no reason to worry about it, making his attempted murder of Selena a bit unusual.
  • One plot point that makes no sense at all when Fridge Logic is applied to it is that people would actually believe that Batman would push the Ice Princess off a building. It certainly looked bad....but wasn't it completely out of character for Batman? Yes, he kills - but he only kills people who reasonably deserve it, and no one can claim that that girl deserved to die by any stretch of the imagination. And even if, by some perverse logic, Batman did think she deserved to die, why would a guy who's a known recluse and has been known to employ smoke bombs to mask his exit from a crowded area commit such a heinous crime in a place where he knew everyone would be able to see him? Considering all of this, it wouldn't be hard to arrive at the conclusion that Batman was probably framed.
  • For someone who's allegedly lived almost all of his life in a sewer, The Penguin seems suspiciously well-educated. He knows what the Reichstag fire was, to cite a prominent example.
    • He didn't live in a sewer, even primarily. He worked for the Red Triangle Circus for many years, and he could have gotten his fellow performers to bring him newspapers and library books.
  • So, did The Penguin actually think the first-born sons of Gotham would just jump into a pool of raw sewage to their deaths because he was holding a cute umbrella?!
    • Well, it's either that or try to make a break for it - and considering some of the firearms the Red Triangle Gang had in their arsenal, that would not have been a good idea.
    • I always thought that he was just going to hypnotize the kids with the umbrella.
  • This is more of a Batman Forever headscratcher, but since it doesn't have its own page- why is everyone completely okay with Batman again by the beginning of Forever? The only person who could have spoken for him being innocent to his kidnap and murder charge was the Ice Princess, unfortunately said murder victim.
    • Odds are that what was left of the Red Triangle Gang, was rounded up and testified against the penguin as well as most of the other crimes they helped him commit. Penguin died so they weren't afraid of his wrath anymore.
    • Plus, when Penguin sent some of the gang members out to kidnap the first-born kids and Batman stopped them, it's implied that he took them to the police, so odds are Batman was able to clear his name.
      • Peter David's novelization of Forever features a flashback scene where Batman meets Harvey Dent for the first time. Dent suggests Batman turn himself in for the events of Returns, and Batman comments "If you're referring to that business with The Penguin, his gang can tell you everything you need to know." before telling Dent where to find them. So, at least in the book, it was addressed.
  • How in the holy hell did the Penguin get his hands on the plans for the Batmobile? There was no internet at the time, and even if there was, Batman would presumably be way too smart to put the plans on it.
    • For that matter, how weak is the Batmobile's floor that Batman can punch his way through it?
      • It's not weak at all. He's just the goddamn Batman.
    • Penguin probably got the blueprints while searching through the public records.
  • How did Batman find out about the rocket-armed penguins? The Penguin sends them out, then Alfred tells Batman, "the penguins are converging on Gotham Square," which as far as I can tell is the first either of them even know about them!
  • Why on earth does the police open fire on sight at Penguin after his bombed speech? Yes, he lost his temper and shot at the crowd, plenty of reason for an arrest, but since when have police officers tried to shoot a limping man in the back?
  • After the fight between them after the Ice Princess incident, why does Batman just leave Catwoman where she is instead of trying to get her arrested?
    • Tim Burton in recent years has revealed that he actually has a lot of disdain for comic books and comic book fans. So the likely explanation is that a lot of the bad/nonsensical writing in these movies, like that, is Burton's condescending/insulting view of how comic book writing works. ("Catwoman and Batman have a thing, so obviously Batman just lets Catwoman get away all the time.")
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