RE: DC's Animated The Dark Knight Returns Part 1

Well, DC just blew it again. Much like they did in a recent comic version of the killing of Bruce Wayne's parents, they showed the wrong movie sign outside the theater - Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro, from 1939.

I had already pointed this out on my old Toonpro site as well as a few other comics sites, yet DC still went and made the same huge Power error again. To explain more fully:

Batman is already known for first appearing as an adult superhero in 1939. His parents demise is therefore a FLASHBACK to about 20 years previous to that date. The only Mark of Zorro movie that existed close to that time period was the silent 1920 version, starring Douglas Fairbanks, and hardly the Tyrone Power talkie of an entire two decades later.

Speaking of time frames, DC also seems clueless about the fact that even their repeated wrongly-referenced Power version of Zorro was not from 1939, anyway - it was 1940.

Maybe they were further confused by another "outlaw hero" - Jesse James - portrayed by Power, in 1939. (BTW, ironically Fairbanks died in 1939.)

So DC has a lot of cleaning up and correcting to do - and I'd better not see that Power name there in any such future old Zorro movie references, when it should always read FAIRBANKS!

Nice catch, Ed.

Of course, the 1939 version of Batman was from Earth-2, an Earth where all fictional events happened 20 or 30 years earlier than on Earth-1. So maybe their movie industry was similarly time-shifted? In that case, the Fairbanks Zorro came out around the turn of the century, and the Power Zorro did come out in time for Dr. and Mrs. Wayne to attend it.

Now, what Earth the events of The Dark Knight Returns happened on, that's anybody's guess. If it was Earth-Miller, where Detroit was still making cars with tailfins well into the 1990s, then all bets are off as to when the various versions of Zorro appeared!