Well friends, I haven’t talked about Kevin Conroy but you know my feelings on Batman: The Animated Series. What’s the best way to say ‘thank you’ to a guy you never met for a childhood you never had? I don’t know the answer to that, so I purposefully held off on talking about Kevin Conroy. I didn’t feel there was anything I could say that could do my feelings justice. Then came Mark Hamill.
Mark, of course, was the Joker to Kevin’s Batman. He had many more eloquent things to say on the passing of Kevin Conroy, but what better way to celebrate his life than to see Mark perform ‘Batman’s Eulogy’ live on stage? Take a look:
Why was it so hard to lose Conroy? I think this Substack author put it best: “When our childhood heroes die, it reminds us that we too will die. That we are no longer children and in many cases no longer young. Our heroes are those whose attributes we admire because we wish they were our own. As children we must live vicariously through others because we have had no life to speak of, but our childhood imaginings shape who we become, and our heroes offer us templates to follow. When they die, we realise that they are also human with faults and frailties. The illusion is shattered, a hero is just another person. It is doubly sad.”
We miss Kevin Conroy because we’re grateful for him for showing us the way, even if we didn’t quite understand what he was doing at the time. Thank you Kevin, for being the Batman who made me believe in myself. And thank you, Mark Hamill, for being the amazing yin to Conroy’s yang. We’ll never see a combo like that again.
