Review: 'I Am the Night: The Ultimate Unauthorized History of Batman: The Animated Series'

Batman has gone through uncountable on-screen iterations (or, at least, two dozen), and each batfan has their favorite. Personally, I'm a campy Adam West fan. But even I will admit that the best realization of the caped crusader was Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski's. Batman: The Animated Series pleased fans to no end by capturing both the darkness and the fun of the comics, which is something that no other on-screen Bat-property has managed. It was beautifully animated, especially for an after-school cartoon from the nineties. The voice talent was top notch and the stories were often excellent. All the Batman movies or TV shows followed in the Animated Series' wake were merely sucking its fumes.

Review: 'Zowie!: The TV Superhero Craze in '60s Pop Culture'

Crashing into a Gilligan-and-Jeannie-populated TV scene too dumb to fully recognize how dumb it was, Batman dropped a big load of camp--distinct from Gilligan and Jeannie's kitsch--onto TV screens. Whether you were a hyperactive six year old or a hyper-hip sixteen year old, Batman had appeal, doing dual work as a sincere superhero adventure and a genuine and genuinely funny comedy at a time when such things simply didn't exist on American television. 

Review: 'The Comic Book History of Comics'

The history of comics told in comic format is such a simple concept that it seems deceptively obvious, yet there’s little that’s simple about that history and little that’s obvious about The Comic Book History of Comics. Perhaps the most impressive thing about this book (which collects a previously published six-issue comic series) is how much stuff writer Fred Van Lente crams into its 150 pages, tracing the history of storytelling through pictures all the way back to prehistoric cave paintings through the first political cartoons to “The Yellow Kid” to cinematic animation to the superhero era to the congressional inquiry on the effects of comics on juvenile delinquency to the pop-art sixties and finally ending with the underground comics of the seventies. Within this story is genuine drama as Max Fleischer and Walt Disney vie for the crown of animation king and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko clash.

Van Lente’s storytelling has a definite perspective, and one that may rankle comics freaks as he sneers at some of the medium’s more revered figures (Stan Lee; William Gaines) while taking an unfashionably even view of the man who may be its easiest-target villain, noting the numerous accomplishments of Fredric Wertham that have nothing to do with that guy’s dopey crusade against comic books. Most welcome is the isolated profiles of a number of women in the comics industry since women are generally shut out of this story’s primary arch for the usual patriarchal reasons.

Ryan Dunlavey’s artwork is sometimes a bit too cutesy for my tastes, but I liked his outlandish tendency to fuse creators with creations, as when he imagines Disney as a mutant man-faced Mickey Mouse, and there are some clever visual references and in jokes. The cutesiness also gets downright subversive when Dunlavey depicts beheadings, lynchings, and Adam West and Frank Gorshin yucking it up at an orgy.

Review: 'Pop Sixties: Shindig!, Dick Clark, Beach Party, and Photographs from the Donna Loren Archives'

Donna Loren’s resume isn’t super substantial but it does swing. She was a regular on Shindig!, did guest appearances on the sixties’ too coolest series—Batman and The Monkees—, sang fun surf pop tunes, shimmied in goofy beach flicks, and shilled for delicious Dr. Pepper. Her new book Pop Sixties: Shindig!, Dick Clark, Beach Party, and Photographs from the Donna Loren Archives is similarly slight and groovy. She contributes some quotations and photo captions, but her biggest text load is a skimpy eight-page memoir. However, it is a juicy one as she explains how her parents essentially forced her into show business, forced her to get a nose job to look less “ethnic” (ugh), and wouldn’t allow her out of the house without makeup. Loren discusses such semi-dark material with the kind of cheerful you’d expect from a Pepper, though she clearly realizes her upbringing was messed up. She did make the most of it though, and the proof of that is in an abundance of fab B&W and color photos that find her rubbing elbows with The Supremes, Teri Garr, Davy Jones, Adam West, Burt Ward, The Dixie Cups, Brenda Holloway, La La Brooks, Dick Dale, Tina Turner, The Righteous Brothers, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and a bunch of other people cooler than anyone you or I will ever meet. Loren is groovy and photogenic enough on her own to carry the book when she isn’t flanked by her fellow pop stars. I can’t say this skinny 148-page volume exactly justifies its heavy $34.95 cover price, especially since both her Batman and Monkees stints are represented by mere two-page spreads, but it’s definitely fun to flip through. Bobby Sherman contributes the foreword and ace Sunset Strip historian Domenic Priore assists with the history and captions.

Farewell, Adam West

You can take your dark Dark Knights and take a holy jump in a bat lake. To many of us, Batman was funny--not the butt of jokes, but the maker of them with a straight-faced brand of comedy that prognosticated the Zucker Brothers and others of their ilk who never mastered the form as Adam West did. Adam West made Batman fun as no other actor who personified the Caped Crusader did, and by embracing that character throughout his career, he endeared himself to fans with humility, honesty, and eternal good humor. That humor will live on even though Adam West has died at the age of 88 after suffering from leukemia. No one will ever fill out the cape and cowl like he did... Pure. West.

Review: 'Hero A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters & Culture of the Swinging Sixties'

Adam West took a lot of guff for turning the Dark Knight into the batusi-ing goof, but for a lot of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies, the camped-up Batman of Bill Dozier’s weekly live-action series was our Batman. And to be fair, Batman had been a pretty campy dude in the funny books since comics-critic Frederic Wertham brought the whip down in the early fifties. But while Batman’s on-page goofiness lost him a fair share of followers, his on-screen goofiness won him a new generation of fanatics weaned on Warhol soup cans, zany Mod fashions, and Beatle wigs. Thus began a new era of vibrant, winking irony former DC Comics editor Michael Eury champions as the Camp Age.

In his delirious new book Hero-A-Go-Go, Eury shows that this era was actually well underway before Batman powed TVs across the globe. The goofy/groovy Teen Titans with their out-of-touch beat-speak and Archie’s caped alter ego Pureheart both debuted in mid-’65. On TV, Underdog blasted off as early as 1964 and Bob Kane himself sent-up the thing he co-created with Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse four years earlier than that.

There was no stopping campy crime fighters after Dozier’s Batman became a sensation in ’66. Soon TV was hosting The Green Hornet, Ralph Bakshi’s inept Mighty Heroes, Mr. Terrific and Mr. Nice, and Monkee Men; comics were home to MAD’s Captain Klutz and DC’s Inferior Five; Jan and Dean were releasing a long playing Batman record; and perhaps more coincidentally, Superman was singing and dancing on Broadway in a show called It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman! Of course, Batman, is the axle on which all this stuff swings, and Hero-A-Go-Go includes an extended look at how that classic came to be.

Eury covers the high-camp comics, cartoons, and other pop-cultural creations that preceded and followed Batman with jolly prose and eyeball-POW-ing images of comics and memorabilia, because you simply cannot wallow in nostalgia with words alone. He also supplements the story with boffo interviews with Bakshi, Lost in Space-star Billy Mumy, It’s a Bird… star Bob Holiday, Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean, and others who helped camp it up in the sixties.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 298

The Date: July 24

The Movie: Batman (1966)

What Is It?: Forget your mumbly, grumbly, brooding, twenty-first century Dark Knights. The real Batman would prefer that you drink your milk, help old ladies cross the street, and pack plenty of shark repellent spray whenever you go swimming. The feature-length spin off of Bill Dozier’s pop-art spoof TV series is like a glorious four-part episode with four times the usual villainy. Joker! Penguin! Riddler! Catwoman! Too bad Julie Newmar couldn’t make the party, since she’s the most purrfect Catwoman and Bat-villain, but Lee Meriwether does do a smashing job in the cat suit.

Why Today?: D.C. Comics declared today Batman Day.

Review: 'The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture'

While it’s been socially acceptable for grown men to trade statistics about other grown men playing children’s games for as long as newspapers have had sports sections, the phenomenon of adults collecting toys, dressing up in tights and capes, and reading books intended for kids is much more recent. As is the case with any phenomena, one brave pioneer had to break through that glass ceiling to make “nerd culture” acceptable in the adult world. According to Glen Weldon, that pioneer was Bat Man, and the writer lays out how the Caped Crusader made it OK for grown ups to not put away childish things in his new book The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture.

The Caped Crusade essentially tells two complimentary stories: the basic history of Batman through all his dark and light variations and how those variations sparked the comment and outcry from the people who refused to grow out of their Batman fandom that is a key aspect of what Weldon calls “nerd culture” (as a nerdy nitpicker, myself, I personally prefer “geek culture.” I always considered a “nerd” to be an exceptionally smart book worm, while intelligence is hardly required of the “geeks” who go crazy over comics, cartoons, superheroes, sci-fi, etc.).

While Weldon clearly ranks among the geeks he assays, he maintains a rightfully irreverent attitude toward them. He recognizes that reading “Detective Comics” or watching Burt Ward exclaim “Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods!” is tremendous fun, but it’s ridiculous for adults to fly into outrage—often homophobic or misogynistic outrage— about a TV show, book, or movie that fails to properly “respect” a particular (sorry… not particular; always dark and gritty) iteration of Batman. After all, as Weldon shows with good humor, there have been many Batmen, all have been legit in one way or another, and all have done their part in creating a world in which children from eight to eighty can debate whether Adam West or Christian Bale is the “true” Batman or whether or not Luke Skywalker is actually Rey’s dad or any of the other silly things that make life a little more fun.

Review: 'Batman: The Complete Television Series Blu-ray'

As you may have been able to tell from the bevy of Batman-centric reviews I've been posting here on Psychobabble this month, the Caped Crusader's 75th Anniversary has infected DC, WB, and other holders of Batman properties with a serious case of Batman fever lately. The crown jewel of all these wonderful toys is the release of William Dozier's brilliant live-action series on home video for the very first time. Why Batman: The Complete Television Series is only zapping into shops now is a complicated conundrum worthy of The Riddler, and it's been detailed elsewhere. So let's just skip ahead to how Warner Brothers did with this landmark blu-ray box.

Full disclosure: I have not watched every single one of the 120 episodes it contains. Doing so would mean this review wouldn't get posted until sometime in mid-2015. Based on the ones I've watched so far, the series looks better than it ever did and certainly better than its makers ever intended. You can count the bristles of Cesar Romero's mustache under all that Joker make up. Actually, everyone looks pretty heavily done up here with fake tans that probably registered as a healthy skin tone on crappy 1966 TVs. But obvious facade is a big part of Batman's humor, so it all works toward the show's grand joke. The primary-color palette pops like a bat-punch to the bat-face. Batman and Robin's capes look so silkily tactile you'd swear you could reach through the screen and snatch them off the dynamic duo.

One down note is that there is the occasional missing element, the most glaring of which are the absence of the tag at the end of the "Marsha's Scheme of Diamonds" episode and a brief shot of John Astin in "A Riddling Controversy". Most of the lost bits are bumpers announcing next week's villains that will probably only be lamented by the most hardcore batfans. (*Information about WB's disc replacement program can be found here)

We do get a nice array of extras, including a half-hour doc on Adam West that plays like a mini-"E! True Hollywood Story" ("Hanging with Batman"), a piece about tie-in merchandise with lots of toys and costumes to drool over ("Holy Memorabilia Batman"), a doc on the show's comic-book look and attitude ("Batmania Born"), odd sporadic video commentaries by West cut into the first two episodes of the series, a collection of dopey soundbites from cast and crew members of current TV shows ("Na Na Na Batman"), and a semi-celebrity fan roundtable discussion mediated by Kevin Smith. Funny, relaxed, and informative, that roundtable was my favorite of the lot. "Batmania Born" is the smartest retrospective of the bunch.

Most of these extras are notable for the participation of Adam West and the absence of his co-stars aside from appearances by Burt Ward and Julie Newmar in "Batmania Born" and very briefly in "Na Na Na Batman". "Hanging with Batman" and "Holy Memorabilia Batman" are marred by a tone too earnest for tributes to a ridiculously fun series. You might want to hit the stop button before a collector starts singing a sappy piano ballad about his toys at the end of "Holy Memorabilia Batman". Unaffected by such matters are a sampling of vintage tidbits that include screen tests and a seven-minute pilot for a "Batgirl" series that didn't happen. Inclusion of the 1974 PSA about the federal equal pay law starring Yvonne Craig and Burt Ward (and an imposter Batman) would have been a really cool addition too. It's not here, but you can always just watch the bad quality version on YouTube.

Finally, we must make mention of the boffo limited edition packaging, which is more notable for a very cool, magnetically sealed box complete with Neal Hefti-theme-song playing button than any of the trinkets inside. The grooviest of these is probably the Hot Wheels Batmobile, but we also get a neat repro set of Topps' 1966 Batman trading cards. A wafer-thin hardcover book of color photos is less impressive, but when all is said and done, Batman: The Complete Television Series blu-ray is not one of the best home video releases of 2014 for the extras and swag. It's the gorgeously restored presentation of one of the best series of the sixties that makes this a must own. You might want to wait for the inevitably cheaper (though currently way overpriced, for some reason), standard packaging release to arrive before spending your bat dollars though.

Review: 'Batman: The Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1966-1967'

Batman has existed in a swarm of guises. He’s been a comic book and a campy live-action TV series and a Saturday morning cartoon and a Mego action figure and more than one movie franchise. One of the guy’s lesser-discussed incarnations is his turn as a newspaper comic strip. Batman first popped up in your local paper in 1943, only lasting there a few years before flapping back to the funny books. He had more success during his return run from 1966 to 1970 thanks to Adam West and Burt Ward.

Cult Club: "Batman" (1966 - 1968)

In this new feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

When The Dark Knight Rises opens next week, you can bet your cowl that the punches won't be punctuated with cartoon Pows, there will be a distinct lack of villainous canted angles, and at Christian Bale's personal request, Robin won't be invited to the grand finale. Not a "Holy this!" or a "Holy that!" to be heard. Even more so than Tim Burton's Batman movies of yore, Chris Nolan and friends have distanced themselves from William Dozier's campy sixties super sitcom as assuredly as possible. With several decades of dark, dark Dark Knights by way of graphic novels such as Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, in which The Joker severs Batgirl’s spine, and hate-fueled Frank Miller's Year One, in which Catwoman is given a fun new back story as a prostitute, Batman had basically cleansed himself of his goofy past with a Brillo pad dipped in lye. The Bat fans who groaned every time Neal Hefti's theme tune started pumping welcomed this return to the superhero’s supposed grizzly, gritty essence.

Those of us who don't feel that ample doses of nihilism and streetwalking are necessary to justify our comic reading may be amenable to the existence of several Batmans. The black armor-clad Dark Knight has his intriguing place as a noir-ish tortured hero/anti-hero willing to cause zillions of dollars in urban damage to bring the baddies to justice and give us our daily dose of existential angst. But so does that milk-drinking square in the grey leotard who always cautions Robin about driving safety and pows us into guffaws whenever he batclimbs up a skyscraper or breaks into an impromptu Batusi.

Even in the sixties, there were Batfans who squirmed at the series that debuted on ABC in January of 1966. Longtime fan and former D.C. Comics editorial director Mike Gold dismissed TV’s Batman as “regrettable” in his introduction to The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. In his afterward to the Batman: Year One graphic novel, Miller grumbled about “Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars like Vincent Price and Cesar Romero… For me, Batman was never funny.” He goes on to recall picking up his first Batman comic at the age of eight and marveling over Gotham City’s “cold shafts of concrete lit by cold moonlight, windswept and bottomless.” Now there was a fun kid.

Of course, in the sixties, comic books were for kids, and a vocal adult fanbase of the medium would not emerge for a decade or two. The Batman series, however, was embraced by all ages because it was comic booky and TV’s first direct link to the burgeoning pop art movement. A single episode of Dozier’s series was worth its weight in an endcap of Warhol soup cans. There was much for kids to enjoy at face value, with its colorful villains and action-packed punch ups. For adults, Batman was an unprecedented exercise in irony. No weekly series was so self-aware and so funny. Standards for humor change, which is why it isn’t likely many modern viewers will find much to giggle about when Dick Van Dyke flops over his ottoman for the zillionth time. Batman holds up because its humor was so far ahead of its time, seemingly responding to viewer criticisms in the same way current shows often do in the wake of Internet outcry. Batman acknowledged the ridiculousness of Commissioner Gordon not recognizing that the voice of Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred was the same one he heard at the end of the Batphone, the fact that Wayne and Batman never appear in the same place at the same time, and how Batman and Robin managed to escape seemingly inescapable death week after week. Though the series’ formulaic structure would cause it to wear out its welcome before finishing its three-season run of 120 episodes (for its first two seasons, the show ran twice a week),  it largely excused its clichés by acknowledging and poking fun at them.

Batman could be knowing, but its humor was equally dependent on the brilliantly broad comic performances of its cast. West’s humor was almost solely derived from his nearly comatose even-temper in the most ludicrous situations, while his friends and foils contrasted his hurricane eye with whirling lunacy. Stand up comic Frank Gorshin transformed the minor comic book villain The Riddler into one of Batman’s arch and most manic nemeses. As the best of three Catwoman portrayers, Julie Newmar was a master of drawing out the double-meanings in her sexually suggestive, often sadistic (to a captive dynamic duo: “Your eardrums will shatter and your brains will turn into yeccchh”) dialogue. Victor Buono channeled W.C. Fields for his King Tut. On the side of justice, Burt Ward bordered brilliance when lapsing into randy delinquent mode after Catwoman’s assistant slipped him a Mickey in the “That Darn Catwoman”/”Scat Darn Catwoman”, the series’ funniest arc. A great deal of the fun of Batman is watching its great cast have fun.

Batman’s humor—both clownish and ironic—and vivid imagery (the characters and blatantly artificial sets were painted in a primary palette pulled right from the comics) made it a sensation among the psychedelic crowd. The year it debuted, both The Kinks and pop-art champions The Who aligned themselves with the series by covering Hefti’s theme in concert and on disc. The producers did their best to cash in on the Rock-and-Batman connection by enlisting a few agreeable pop stars like Leslie Gore, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Chad and Jeremy to guest star. The older generation got in on the hipness when Sammy Davis, Jr., Edward G. Robinson, and Art Linkletter appeared in the iconic Batclimb gag (while Batman and Robin were taking their sexually suggestive scale up the building of the week, a celebrity would open a window, whom the Dynamic Duo would engage in an awkward, action-halting interview). Some respected sources, such as Variety (which noted the “action, clever sight gags, interesting complications and … all out … batmania” of 1966’s feature-length Batman), got the joke.

The very perks that endeared Batman to its generation of viewers were those that made it a thing of derision among later-day Dark Knight fans. But if we look back on the comics, they were ripe with what we now call camp from the days when Bill Finger and Bob Kane first hatched the Caped Crusader. 1946’s “1001 Umbrellas of the Penguin” finds our fine-feathered fink feigning partnership with the Dynamic Duo to convince his auntie she’d raised him right. In 1952’s “The Joker’s Utility Belt”, the clown prince of crime harrumphs at not being inducted into Gotham Museum’s Comedian Hall of Fame. That latter story was way-out enough to pull the rare feat of directly inspiring an episode of the series (Cesar Romero’s coming out “The Joker Is Wild”). In the years immediately preceding the series, Batman and Robin had taken to time traveling and battling space dinosaurs in the comic, leaving the series looking positively sober in comparison.

Much like The Monkees (which I gave a more thorough once over here on Psychobabble last year), Batman is a series that skews hopelessly dated and corny in hindsight. Also like The Monkees, its wit and innovation is unmissable when actually reviewing the series. Something to be remembered, not swept under the Batcape.

June 30, 2009: Pop meets Batman!

As a kid I spent many, many afternoons vegetating in front of the gloriously campy “Batman” series that aired on ABC from 1966 to 1968. Recently rediscovering it on the Internet (the series is unavailable on DVD for an abundance of reasons), I’m blown away by how consistently funny the show remains, especially when compared to the great majority of sitcoms from its era. As a ‘60s pop geek, I’m also thrilled by the number of pop star cameos and guest-star spots during the series’ second season (which was chided for taking the camp too far by critics who didn’t quite get the show).


In the episode “Dizzoner the Penguin”, the Penguin runs against Batman for mayor of Gotham City, and we have an unabashedly cartoonish Paul Revere and the Raiders performing silly dance steps and blasting some instrumental nonsense at Pengy’s rally.

The Raiders were no strangers to television at that time as they were already regularly featured performers on Dick Clark’s Rock & Roll variety show “Where the Action Is”

A few weeks later, Catwoman schemed to steal the mellow singing voices of British folk/pop duo Chad and Jeremy (best known in the States for their 1964 hit “A Summer Song”). The two-episode arch in which they appear (“The Cat’s Meow”/”The Bat’s Kow Tow”) is notable for the absurd claims that Chad and Jeremy were currently the most popular singing duo in the world (Simon and Garfunkel? Peter and Gordon maybe?) and that they had a reputation somewhere along the lines of the Who:


Fortunately, Chad and Jeremy take a break from their chaos and mayhem-making long enough to sing the pleasantly catchy “Teenage Failure”.

The most substantial pop star appearance on “Batman” was that of Leslie Gore, who played Catwoman’s protégé, Pussy Cat, in the “That Darn Catwoman”/”Scat! Darn Catwoman” arch. Gore sings “Maybe Now” for Catwoman’s flyer hat-wearing henchmen…but it’s the scenes that find a drugged and randy Batman and Robin speaking in faux hipster lingo that really make these episodes twin works of genius:

If any group was born to appear on “Batman”, it was The Who, a band that shared the show’s Pop Art panache, irreverently self-mocking humor, and mindless violence. Unfortunately, the pre-Tommy Who received little love in America, so the boys would have to settle for covering Neil Hefti’s indelible theme song on their Ready, Steady, Who E.P. (1966), a throwaway release fueled by Keith Moon’s surf-rock and comic book obsessions.

Eleven years later, The Jam did the same on their debut record, In the City, although this may be more of a tribute to their heroes, the Who, than the program itself.

Sub-Brian Wilson surf popsters Jan and Dean (to whom the Who paid tribute with their cover of “Bucket T” on Ready, Steady, Who), actually recorded an entire tribute album titled Jan and Dean Meet Batman (1966). The song called “Batman” is not a cover of the Hefti piece (although it does quote it), but a new song composed by Jan and Dean full of their trademark castrati harmonies and shameless cheese:


The rest of the album is filled out with ludicrous (and occasionally racially insensitive) spoken-word comedy routines and songs with titles such as “The Joker is Wild”, “Robin the Boy Wonder”, and “A Stench in Time”, which are either detestable or delectable depending on your tolerance for camp cutesiness. An instrumental titled “Mr. Freeze” is pretty slick, though:



Of greater musical value is Batman and Robin: The Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale, a children’s record recorded to cash in on the show’s success that rather bizarrely features jazz legend Sun Ra  and rock legend Al Kooper. Along with some funky jams with titles like “Penguin’s Umbrella”, “The Riddler’s Retreat”, and (once again) “Joker is Wild”, there’s the familiar theme song, although the keening chorus of the original has been replaced with a soulful chant:

For my money, “Robin’s Theme” is the killer cut on this record.