10 Harley Quinn Facts That Turned Our Brains Into Pudding

The new season of Harley Quinn is out, so we’ve been looking at Harley all week. That means looking at her show, the bad Suicide Squad movie, the good Suicide Squad movie and Birds of Prey, and of course at the comics and how her role there changed over the years. We’ve also been looking at other Batman villains and at some Harley-adjacent stuff, like her horrifying real-life equivalents from history and under the sea. 

Here's a look back at the facts we learned this week. The links all lead to full articles with much more info, so click every one that interests you, or you’ll have to clean up after the hyenas. 

1. The new Harley Quinn spinoff kind of rips off a YouTube series.

It’s an animated series set in Cheers-type pub where supervillains hang out, an idea previously tried out by the channel How It Should Have Ended. 

2. Harley’s Suicide Squad costume shrank between trailer and movie.

Some fans theorized the studio peeled some of it away using CGI, but no—they’d lengthened it for the trailer using CGI, for modesty’s sake. 

3. The Birds of Prey subtitle was a placeholder joke that somehow stuck. 

4. Harley and Ivy first got together in a tweet.

DC announced they were girlfriends on Twitter. Before that, in comics, all attraction between them was only subtext. 

5. The character was based on Arleen Sorkin’s performance in Days of Our Lives. 

She wore a jester costume in a joke fantasy sequence that played on The Princess Bride, and The Animated Series used this as inspiration for Harley Quinn. 

6. World War II had a real-life suicide squad. 

Yes, it’s really been done, making an expendable unit out of criminals ... except when Germany did it, the unit ended up committing a bunch of war crimes even worse than what the regular Nazis did. 

7. Superman was going to be the villain of The Suicide Squad.

8. She gained so much mainstream fame thanks to the Arkham video games. 

The tinkering they did to her design there led to her new look when DC rebooted their characters. 

9. Then fans revolted over Harley Quinn being too sexy. 

Some people got so angry over her 2011 redesign, they filmed themselves threatening the writer, then sent the videos to him. 

10. Harley fighting a giant starfish like in The Suicide Squad has a parallel from nature. 

The harlequin shrimp dines exclusively on starfish. It keeps its prey alive by force-feeding it, as it slowly eats it alive limb-by-limb.