A new short from Cartoon Network’s Justice League Action is the most Mark Hamill you’re going to get in your face until Star Wars: The Last Jedi — and certainly more Hamill than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The veteran actor stars not just as himself, but also as the two supervillains who kidnap him, and one more surprise guest.
Indeed there is no voiced role in this short that isn’t voiced by Hamill. Combine that with the particular twist of how he frees himself from his captors, a reference to Corvette Summer and just a hint of Star Wars music, and you’ve got two and a half minutes of one well-played in-joke.
As a very long time Batman: The Animated Series fan, it was only about a decade ago that I could tell someone that Luke Skywalker was the voice of the Joker and they’d be surprised and incredulous. Since then, that particular piece of trivia was blown wide open by the popularity of the Arkham games.
But still less well known is Hamill’s stint as the villain the Trickster in 1990’s live-action The Flash series, which he reprised in both Cartoon Network’s Justice League Unlimited and the current CW Flash series. It was the connections he made with Warner Bros. on The Flash that got him meetings with the makers of Batman: The Animated Series, who were courting Tim Curry for the role of the Joker.
Curry’s take felt off for them, and since Hamill had been begging for a regular villain role after playing evil billionaire Ferris Boyle in Mr. Freeze’s origin episode, they let him audition for the Clown Prince of Crime.
The rest is history — a history where we get this weird-ass short.
