Best Joker's Mask in The Dark Knight Was Based on the Old Batman

With The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan wasted no time in establishing that his interpretation of the Joker would be like nothing we'd ever seen before. In just the first five minutes of the movie, Heath Ledger's character not only pulls off a daring daylight robbery of a mob bank, but simultaneously arranges the deaths of all of his accomplices, and he does it all while wearing a mask from Tim Burton's reimagining of Snow White.
This quickly let us know that the character was a scheming, machine-gun-toting mastermind, which completely set him apart from all the other Jokers that we knew, especially Cesar Romero in the silly '60s Batman TV show. That is, other than the fact that Ledger wore Romero-Joker's mask throughout the entire bank robbery.
All evidence seems to point to the design of Ledger's clown mask being modeled directly on a scene from "The Joker Is Wild," an episode of the Batman TV series that also marked the first appearance of the Joker on the show. In the episode, Adam West's Batman tracks Romero's clown prince of crime to the Gotham opera company, where he's secretly performing an aria from Pagliacci, because back then that was as close as the Joker could get to being an actual killer clown (look it up). As you can see, the similarities between Romero's Pagliacci costume and Ledger's mask are undeniable.
And if anyone out there is wondering why Nolan even bothered referencing an old comedy series that was campier than a Boy Scout jamboree: While it's true that The Dark Knight was basically a superhero version of Michael Mann's Heat, the 1960s series is what has kept Batman alive in the public consciousness for decades, so despite its silliness, it still deserves all the respect it can get. The fact that the man who first brought the Joker to the big screen didn't respect the character enough to even shave off his mustache for the role should really be beside the point.