Kenner Batman: The Dark Knight Collection Sky Escape Joker Kenner, 1990
Day #2,833: March 13, 2025
Sky Escape Joker Uses Whirling Copter Pack to Escape from Trouble!
Batman: The Dark Knight Collection Action Figure
Item No.: Asst. ??? No. 63140 Manufacturer:Kenner Includes:Backpack, really long pistol Action Feature:Drip in ice water and face changes color Retail:$5.99 Availability: ca. September 1990 Other: Kenner returns to DC in 1990... and leaves again at the end of the decade
Back in 1989, Toy Biz really whiffed Batman - their toy line (partially made of Kenner molds) was in such short supply there were apologies in the newspaper. Kenner stepped up and quickly took the license over again the following year with The Dark Knight Collection, which lacked knee joints but brought out the "wonderful toys" with releases like Sky Escape Joker. Toy Biz made nice-looking figures, but they didn't do much. A squirting lapel here, a batarang belt there, it was OK but lacked the level of action that you got out of some of Kenner's figures. Are they better? I thought so... even if the Toy Biz Joker, this Joker, and The Super Powers Collection Joker all clearly came from the same basic sculpt.
Kenner made some changes with a new color costume, new legs with new copyright information and no knees, and a new head sculpt. The head didn't look much like Jack Nicholson from the then-new Tim Burton movie, but it did look more than a bit like Caesar Romero's Joker from the Batman reruns of the 1966 show that were being played in syndication in those days. Jack Nicholson's likeness could be seen on the cardback - not shown here, it was lost a long time ago - so kids or adult collectors would get the idea. It was around this time that I - as a kid - noticed a big increase in adult collectors scooping up scarce figures and flipping them at flea markets, meaning you had to be vigilant if you wanted to get Kenner's then-new action figure line. I got this one at Lionel PlayWorld in 1990, a now defunct toy store chain that, around three years later, would be completely gone.
The figure looks like a great example of what Kenner did best. Your figure had five points of articulation. One hand was useless - like most old Kenner Star Wars figures - while the other was perfectly sculpted to fit a small long pistol that is similar to one from the 1989 movie. It's also one of the tiniest accessories in the entire line. While Joker had an orange, blue, and red helicopter backpack you could spin via a wheel on the back, every figure in this line had something big. Maybe it was a grappling hook backpack, or pop-out wings, or a mechanism adapted from Silverhawks. Kenner used and reused a lot of parts in its tooling library to get these figures to store shelves surprisingly quickly given that they didn't even have the license when Bat-Mania hit the USA a year earlier.
The figure itself is pretty great. The head sculpt has a big smile, bright green hair, wild eyes, and a creepy make-up grin. The face could turn orange when chilled, too - another added play feature - but the backpack was probably what kids played with the most. And they'd lose the gun. My assumption is that the accessories were all tertiary, what people really wanted was just the figure and Kenner could have just sold him sans gear and done just fine.
I remember these figures being really hot stuff when they first came out, with older fans praising them and younger fans getting them to bash around with their Turtles or other similarly sized toys as they would slowly shove smaller-scale humanoids like Dino-Riders, G.I. Joe, or GoBots to the garage sale. Kenner's decade with Batman and DC Comics characters was incredible - there were so many play features, wacky costumes, exclusive repaints, and other nonsense that sold well. It's a quarter century later I remain shocked Kenner (later Hasbro) ceded the license to Mattel and haven't gone back for it again. The figures were a little expensive for the time, but the figure is still sturdy, colorful, and looks great after 35 years. You definitely got your money's worth with these guys, and it looks like Spin Master is trying to do 1990s-style Kenner figures again today, at toy prices, for Target as an exclusive. I hope they keep it up, because there's probably bottomless demand for this kind of figure - if not literally this exact figure - in the 2025 marketplace.
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