Holy Syndicated Nostalgia Batman, we're coming to DVD!

The teevee version never ever mentioned why Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson were doing it. Just some rich guy and his 'ward' (?!?) who decided to go out, swing on ropes, and biff and boff bad guys.

Funny, during those years in the summer we went up to my grandmother's cottage where my mother and her two younger siblings had spent summertimes in the 1940s-50s, and they had bushel baskets full of old Superman and Batman comics from those years, dating back to the debut isssues in 1938-40.

The early issues of Batman (the first decade or so) were dark, dark stuff. Pulp noir, I guess. It was quite a difference between the wisecracking campy Batman on teevee and the dark and brooding vigilante lurking in the shadows in the old comics.

 

Giggity

 

I caught the syndication in the afternoons (4:30 probably) each afternoon after school. That made my afternoon.

I was old enough to know that this:



and this:



gave me a tingling. Mmmmmm, Damn.

Funny enough, when I was in the Navy, one of the ships on the waterfront had a captain named Adam West; they got special permission to paint the Bat Symbol on the flight deck hanger door.

 

I remember the 60s show had a brief resurgence in the late 1980s, when the first Burton movie came out. A local station would run the two-parters back-to-back at 6 and 6:30. I watched most of the run over the course of a summer. Great fun.
It's amazing how the entire Batman franchise -- comics, cartoons, movies, the works -- has been fighting an uphill battle to shake off the TV series for almost 50 years now. Almost every new creative team tries to "go darker" and "take Batman back to his roots." The only bat-bombs these days are likely to be strapped to the current Robin's nutsack.

 

Well, the Burton/Schumacher series really wasn't very much different in tone than the teevee series.

 

The first two were a little bit darker. Not nearly to the Nolan/Bale level, but moreso than the TV series. Batman roasts a guy with the Batmobile's jet engine in "Batman Returns," and Nicholson's Joker was definitely more murderous and menacing than Cesar Romero's.
The Schumacher ones, though ... yeah, those were ridiculous.

 

These guys, of course, could fuck up a two-car funeral.

 

Pat Hingle's Commissioner Gordon, of course, was pretty much a complete gump in the Burton/Schumacher series.

Revamping Gordon into somebody competent and reasonably courageous in his own right was one of the significant changes in the Nolanverse.

Of course, without a 'Robin' as Batman's action sidekick, Gordon had to kind of assume that role.

 

Very happy to see this news.y dad was a boy during the series' original run, and he introduced me to it in the late '80s when I was a boy and hyped for the first "Batman." I recall it aired on The Family Channel then. There's plenty of room in my heart for both camp Batman and The Dark Knight.

 

At least they knew their own limitations. A lot of people in their position might have resented Batman.

 

Not sure how the TV series can even be compared to either of the movie series aside from the characters. It was intended all along as a parody.

The Batman movie -- the 60s version -- is hilarious.

 

I'm feeling a stirring in my utility belt.