Hey guys!
Welcome to top 10 nerd.
I’m your host Kelly Paoli and today we’re taking another look at Red Hood, Jason Todd,
for our top 10 red hood shocking facts part 2.
We covered most of the bases the first time around, so make sure you check out that vid
afterwards to catch up.
But, in the meantime, let’s jump into our list!
10 Other Aliases We’ve talked about Jason as the Red Hood,
but what about the other aliases he’s taken on over the years?
During Countdown, Jason encounters Earth 51’s Batman who gives him the Red Robin costume.
And in Battle for the Cowl, where he donned a version of that Batsuit where he was heavily
armed and wore the cowl that previously belonged to Bat-Devil.
9 Age Since DC likes to relaunch itself so many
damn times, we’ve had a few changes in terms of character ages pop up, including Jason’s.
Post crisis Jason was Robin for three years, he met Batman when he was 12 and died when
he was 15.
Whereas in the new 52m Jason was Robin for just a year, and was 16 when he took up the
mantle and 17 when he died.
And according to both Rebirth and the new 52, his age is roughly between 18-20, making
him underage.
8 Mechanical Capabilities Jason has an affinity for vehicles, and knows
his way around them quite well.
When we’re reintroduced to Jason post crisis, he’s stealing Batman’s tires.
Which even Bats points out would have been difficult, much to his surprise that a young
boy committed the crime.
There’s been other instances of Jason’s competency of cars, especially the bat mobile
- at one point, he develops a scheme in which he infiltrates the bat mobile to pop a bomb
on it while wearing a wet suit while Batman is distracted with the Penguin’s goons in
The Lost Days; the special wet suit being the one way he won’t be detected by the
bat mobile.
And to top it all off, he often rides around on his motorcycle.
7 Demolitions Aside from his mechanical capabilities, Jason
has picked up a few other tricks through his training, including demolitions.
Taught by a world renowned bomb expert in Russian, Jason learnt how to defuse a wide
variety of bombs and explosive devices.
This Russian expert was involved with the mafia, who was part of a plot to distract
British law enforcement with a bomb they were to believe was from an Islamic extremist,
but Jason ends up hunting them down and safely denotes the bombs.
6 Trained across the globe Just like Bats!
Funded by Talia al Ghul’s credit card, that is.
Anyway, he trained with the All-Caste clan of assassins, an ancient clan that actually
predates the League of Assassins, who are located in the Himalayas.
During the Lost Days he spent a ton of time travelling across the world, a lot of it in
several undisclosed locations, but as we mentioned in our last number, he also saved London civilians
when defusing bombs.
He’s fluent in English, French, German, Italian and Russian, although the latter is
his weakest.
5 The Dark Trinity With DC Rebirth came a new Red Hood and the
Outlaws team, Jason joins up with Bizarro and Artemis the fallen Amazon, forming the
Dark Trinity, which is suppose to mirror the iconic DC trinity of Superman, Wonder Woman
and Batman, with Jason being Batman’s foil.
Red Hood and the Outlaws originally debuted during The New 52 in 2011, and featured Arsenal
aka Roy Harper and Starfire, the latter receiving a ton of criticism for her overt sexual depiction,
with some saying rather than being sexually liberated, she came off as a wish fulfillment
sex object.
Neither volume did well critically, but more on that later.
4 Protege Scarlet, otherwise known as Sasha, who was
deformed by Professor Pyg after her father worked for him, and murdered her father while
he was in the hospital after the attack.
Red Hood found her there, and promised her a way she could channel her rage.
This began their relationship as his sidekick.
http://batman.wikia.com/wiki/Scarlet
3 Parents While we talked a little bit about Jason’s
parents in the last video - specifically how he was a bit of a clone of Dick Grayson, and
then when he was redefined his dad became a criminal and his mother a drug addict - but
there’s another parental duo that Jason had in an alternate universe - Kate Kane,
aka Batwoman and Renee Montoya.
They had adopted Jason in DC’s Bombshells, who Kate meets as a young boy during the Spanish
Civili war.
And unfortunately, he too meets an untimely end in this timeline.
2 His Return Was Teased For two years, in the Hush story arc when
Tim Drake is kidnapped by Jason but turns out it’s just Clayface.
Many people saw this retrospectively to be signalling his return.
And in a way, it did.
He would eventually return in Batman: Under the Red Hood.
When Superboy Prime punched reality.
Yes, punched reality, which obviously has more context then him throwing one massive
super punch, but that’s for another video.
Anyway his punch set a ripple in time and space, distorting events in the main universe,
which ultimately resulted in Jason’s resurrection.
Which is no longer cannon, but hey, still hilarious.
1 Problematic Popularity The response of Jason’s appearance in Hush
led to his reintegration into the DC universe.
But his popularity has always been problematic at best, from his early days of being a Dick
Grayson clone put up on the chopping block by editors, to the mixed reception of the
current Red Hood and the Outlaws.
Over the past five years as of August 2017, sales for that title have dropped by 27.2%,
with sales dropping by 72.8% in the past year - which to be fair, had gotten a boost in
general because of the Rebirth launch.
The past six months had dropped by only 12.8%.
Which is better than the stats were in January 2017, where stats for the six months prior
to that dropped by 67.9%.
There we have it friends!
How do you guys feel about Jason Todd?
Love him or hate him or are you somewhere in between?
Let us know in those comments below.
If you liked this video, hit those like and subscribe buttons, and check out a few other
lists on our channel, like the top 10 red hood shocking facts part 1, or the top 10
alternate versions of Wolverine.
In the meantime though, thanks for watching guys.
I’ve been Kelly Paoli and this has been top 10 nerd.
I’ll catch you all in the next one.