What could this device's backstory possibly be? Was there a crime wave of ninjas flipping about with exposed penises in the months that led up to this? Imagine the headlines: "Penis-Flipping Ninja Crime Wave Baffles Police." And this is the less weird option, since the alternative is that Batman was constructing his Batarangs and Batmobiles and Bat Grappling Hooks and randomly thought to himself, "I can handle crime, but what if I can't handle crime's dong?"

Warner Bros.
Ha! "Handling dong."

Moments later, newspaper photographer and screeching damsel Vicki Vale tries to distract the Joker by kissing him. She macks his big purple jacket in a way that's not erotic or distracting, but makes everyone in the cast feel terrible for her.

Warner Bros.
"Lint gets me so hot."

Vicki Vale has been kidnapped by Batman or the Joker at least four times in this movie already, depending on how you count. When you spend your life being dragged around by costumed psychopaths, awkwardly smooching someone's jacket is as close to a master plan as you're going to get. And then she drops down, and the Joker thinks, "Five minutes ago she hated me. This is going so much better than I expected."

Warner Bros.
Spoiler: His balls are about to match that tie color.

Surprise! It's the old "Think you're going to get a b*****b from a lady who loathes you but she's actually setting you up to take a punch from Batman" gag! Oldest trick in the book! How is it possible for the Joker to get so distracted that he doesn't notice a fully-armored, wounded Batman limping up next to him? I don't want to pretend that I've had sex multiple times before and am some kind of romantic master, but I feel like I'd know if Batman was within arm's length of me, even if I was getting to second-and-a-half base with Kim Basinger. And Jack Nicholson had already been having sex with the only other lady in Gotham, so it's not like he was so sex-starved that a little clumsy attention from a woman was going to upend his plans.

And before you argue that Batman is known for his stealth, let me counter with every other Batman-related scene in the movie, in which he fought evil by walking up next to it and watching it fall down. If Batman suddenly decided that maybe he needed to try out this whole "stealth" thing that the League of Shadows would always go on about, he certainly picked a weird opportunity to do so.

The best part about the Penguin in Batman Returns is that he's adaptable. When he was thrown into the sewer by his family, he ended up leading a group of killer clowns. When his mayoral campaign got squashed, he stole all of the firstborn kids in Gotham. And when that went sideways, he militarized an army of penguins to blow up the city. You can mock the Penguin because he's marshmallow butter stuffed into some full-body pantyhose, but you have to admit that he's far better at improvising than anyone short of the heroes from Fast & Furious.

Warner Bros.
Somehow not the craziest scene in this movie.

His problem was in the presentation of those plans. When he tried to team up with Catwoman, his pitch was made entirely of grunts and double entendres. During his rallying speech to his penguin army, he finished it off with a cry to blow the "erogenous zones" of Gotham's kids "sky high." Even in the context of Batman Returns -- a movie that's more about superhero crotches than anything Joel Schumacher was ever involved with -- it's a bizarre closer.

There is a legion of better options for the end of this speech. "Let's blow this city up!" would've worked. "I want to see Gotham burn in a gonad-less fire," is also a superior choice. I understand that sexual frustration causes people to do crazy things, like grow goatees or read Bret Easton Ellis, but what does Penguin hope to accomplish by shouting, "On a side note, this is mostly about a mushroom cloud of tiny privates"?

Warner Bros.
"Their nads will rain from the sky!"

It's not going to make much of a difference to the penguins who are sitting there being yelled at. When the Penguin is killed, the birds take him in a funeral march and ease him into the water. There's a deeper connection there that transcends genitals. But despite the kinship between flightless bird and DeVito, a penguin is going to hear that speech and continue to think "I'm a penguin. Where is food? Where is food? What's on my back? I'm a penguin."

Warner Bros.
"I'm a penguin. I can totally see the outline of his half-chub in that onesie. I'm a penguin."

Batman Forever is a great time capsule for 1995. We had high enough hopes for Val Kilmer to make him our most popular superhero, Chris O' Donnell hadn't yet been lost to the Bermuda Triangle, Jim Carrey was attached to anything that required a funny voice, and we had just figured out how to harness Tommy Lee Jones. In hindsight, it's baffling to think that when Batman Returns underperformed, they made Batman Forever as a way to fix the Batman series. They created that movie with the thought process of "Now this, THIS will save us."

Warner Bros.
That's a safe bet if I ever saw one.

If you haven't seen it in a while, the Riddler creates a machine that broadcasts your wildest unconscious fantasies, and shows it off at a party for the rich people of Gotham. Now, when we hear "wildest unconscious fantasies," one might assume you'll get a montage of innocent dreams of wealth and status. One woman tries it and finds herself covered in nice jewelry. That's pleasant. Of course Bruce Wayne tries it and sees stuff about bats and his dead parents, because he can't be trusted to do anything properly. But overall, what could go wrong?

Warner Bros.
Him. He could go wrong.

The first guy who goes in imagines himself on a tropical beach. Two women come to his side and offer him a drink and some kisses.

Warner Bros.
"HEY, EVERYBODY, WE'RE ALL GONNA GET LEI'D!"

The audience reacts happily to this, and even Val Kilmer can almost be bothered to form an expression about it.

Warner Bros.
Asian Joseph Gordon-Levitt is similarly amused.

But is there a time limit on this machine? Because if not, then there certainly needs to be. Or some kind of fail-safe that shuts down at the first hint of nipple. As the second-smartest dude in Gotham, the Riddler has to realize that there's going to be some weird s**t rolling around in the heads of the city's most affluent. It would be a massive oversight to think that light petting is as far as a machine that shows your most insane fantasies is going to go. That machine isn't going to make it through two users before it just devolves into broadcasting the rawest, most bizarre DC-Comic-related porn imaginable. The lives of countless millionaires are going to be ruined when it's revealed that their shared deepest desire is to bareback Commissioner Gordon in a Bat suit.

Or that might be Riddler's ultimate plan. Capture Wayne's girlfriend, stop Batman, blah blah whatever? All that stuff is secondary. The real goal is to make sure that everyone knows that the CEO of GothCorp wants a threesome with Man-Bat and Clayface on top of the Bat signal.

Instead, he thrusts her into the car like his next step is dropping her into a well. As with every entry on this list, there are countless ways that this plan could've been improved, and Alfred making sure that no one was watching when he lugged a blacked-out lady to the backseat is in all of them.

They're standing in plain sight. I don't need Alfred to have the senses or strength of Batman. I don't need him to be inventing contingency plans to take down the Justice League and arguing with tiny fanboys from alternate universes. I just need him to be a little more aware of his surroundings when he's in the employ of Batman. I don't know how it was when Bruce Wayne was off ninja-ing it up in the mountains and you had the whole mansion to yourself, Alfred, but times have changed. You can't just go toting comatose women around without looking both ways.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros.
"Oh, don't worry. I've known her since she was a little girl."

And no, it doesn't help that he turns around and offers a wry British witticism. Gotham City works in mysterious ways, but I doubt that two people are going to watch Bruce Wayne's butler abduct the city's unconscious Assistant DA and not call every cop that the city has. If the house hadn't burned down, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises would've been solely about Bruce's attempts to learn how to make tea for himself.

Actually, that's preferable to what we got in The Dark Knight Rises, because in that movie Bruce did find himself Alfred-less, and that was when ...

... smile sheepishly at each other, look at pictures of Bruce's dead non-girlfriend ...

Warner Bros.

... and then have sex on the floor. If you ever wondered what an indie romance movie would be like if the first and third act were about getting your back broken by a terrorist, your dreams come true in the middle of The Dark Knight Rises.

Warner Bros.
It's like Garden State for caped manchildren.

This is a very optimistic view of how a guy in his late 30s / early 40s who sews his own animal costumes would pop his cherry. All first times are awkward, and anyone who tells you otherwise currently makes their living as a youth pastor. But as I said, the "MY PARENTS ARE DEEEAAAAAD!" thing has been stewing inside of Bruce Wayne for three-plus decades at this point. That's awkwardness on a level that you can only comprehend when your coping mechanism is putting on body armor and tackling Two-Face. That's why Talia won't even look Bruce Wayne in the face for a while after they get done with what must have been four minutes of growling and dark, gritty reboot humps.

Warner Bros.
"Are you into bat stuff?"
"Not without lube."
"I think you misheard me."

The only time Harley ever receives any kind of affection is from Batman himself. In "Harley's Holiday," after Batman shows her general benevolence for an episode, she kisses him hard.

Warner Bros.

It goes on for so long that there's an extended shot of Robin looking on, befuddled by what must be the closest thing that he's ever seen to normal human affection.

Warner Bros.
"Hey, I've done that plenty of times ... Girls from Metropolis; you wouldn't know them."

Batman, obviously pleased with himself, even flirts back with her before walking away and never speaking of it again. After years of putting on tights and getting chased by Catwoman, this is Batman's Can't Hardly Wait moment, when "Ocean Avenue" swells and he knows that it's all going to be uphill from here.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros.
"I don't stick it in crazy, and you are literally certified."

Now, the Arkham game universe and the Batman: TAS universe are obviously different timelines, but one thing that doesn't change between the two is Joker and Harley Quinn's symbiotic relationship. Until you get to Arkham City, in which Harley Quinn reveals that she was trying to get pregnant.

Cracked has written before that Arkham City allows you to simulate what it would be like to beat up a pregnant clown woman, but if she was going to try to get pregnant, she picked the worst time for it. At the end of Arkham Asylum, the Joker is left battered by explodey punches and Titan formula. A main plot point in Arkham City is that he is dying due to the poison in his blood, which means that if Harley and Joker decided to have a baby, they did so when the Joker was the weakest and most diseased that he'd ever been. It took the looming presence of a painful death and near-decrepitude for the Joker to actually "ride his Harley."

Poor Harley Quinn. She deserves better. Fan fiction, ho!

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Did you know that cats modeled their "meow" after the cries of human babies, just because they knew us humans care about that noise? Did you know that dogs can read your mind (emotionally), and live in constant suspicion that you know where the good food is (which you totally do)? In the next LIVE episode of the Cracked Podcast, host Jack O'Brien leads Cracked's team of pet-loving/fearing comedians through all the ways our dogs and cats are more powerful, creepy, and awesome than we ever could have imagined. Jack will be joined by Carmen Angelica, Dan O'Brien, Alex Schmidt, and Jake Weisman at the UCB Sunset Theatre on Wednesday, March 9, at 7 p.m. Purchase your tickets here!