Oddly enough, and only three years after the Raimi series, Marvel started work on yet another retelling of Spider-Man’s origin, this time with a younger actor and a high school setting, perhaps to capture some of the Twilight dollars. Whether audiences are ready for a reboot with the original still fresh in their memories has yet to be determined, but the attempt to skew the new Spider-Man and X-Men tent poles in the direction of younger viewers might indicate a probably unfounded fear that the mass-market fad for superheroes on-screen is over.
As Spider-Man ignited the hero boom, the green lights flashed on a dozen Hollywood projects.
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Seven actors have played Batman on the big screen, and if you can name all seven without reading any further, your youth has been wasted. Each man has approached the character differently, and each has worn his own distinctive adaptation of Batman’s basic costume, with different colors, ear shapes, cape lengths, and choice of fabrics.
You may think you recognize the Batman costume and assume that it hasn’t changed much since 1939, but you’d be wrong.
In 1939 Batman was drawn as a slim, young-looking man wearing a jet-black cape and cowl. The cowl had stylized vane-like ears, and the ankle-length, scalloped cape appeared to be reinforced with umbrella struts, picked out as thin blue highlights on black. He wore little purple Mickey Mouse gloves and knee-high black riding boots with a pointed cuff. The bat symbol on his chest was a tiny black silhouette, making the yellow utility belt the only touch of bright color.
Ten years later, Batman was a sturdier, more fatherly figure. The highlights on the black cape had taken over, turning the cape and cowl a bright blue. The dark vest and tights became dove gray. Smiling daytime Batman appeared as a friend to children everywhere. This was Batman as Santa Claus. The costume was no longer designed to frighten but to reassure. The only remnant of his past was the permanent shadow around his eyes, which, even at his most kid friendly, never lost their spooky pupil-less demonic glow. You may have noticed, of course, how all the screen Batmen have visible eyes. Obviously, this helps an actor work more effectively behind the mask, but Batman in the comics has always had white slits for eyes, explained by the presence of blank reflecting lenses that protect his eyes and enhance his vision.
As we know from the Silver Age chapters, the Batman concept has been stretched and distorted and taken to places from which it might seem impossible to return or recover, and the magnificent seven movie Batmen have each presented a very different take on how the adventures of the Caped Crusader might look in a world beyond the comics.
Simply entitled Batman, the live-action serial of 1943 starred Lewis Wilson, a conventional low-budget action lead with firm jaw and oil-slick hair. Wilson’s groundbreaking turn offered an exhausting fifteen-chapter glimpse into what life might be like if Bruce Wayne’s war on crime relied on the bare modicum of commitment and an allocated budget of $3.50 a week.
The first actor to play Batman on-screen crept around in a horribly convincing homemade Bat suit, muttering vile racist sentiments under his breath. With episode titles like “A Nipponese Trap,” “Slaves of the Rising Sun,” and “The Doom of the Rising Sun,” it was plain to see what was on the collective mind of America’s entertainment industry. Batman’s comic-book foes had been street hoodlums, gangsters, and madmen. Now America’s enemies were Batman’s enemies too. On first impression, they didn’t have much to fear from Lewis Wilson and his Robin, Douglas Croft, sporting such a distinctive and recognizable haircut that Robin was indistinguishable from his alter ego Dick Grayson.
Wilson’s unimpressive “Bat’s Cave” resembled a serial killer’s converted basement, with an assemblage of high-tech crime-fighting equipment that amounted to a “shabby chic” wooden table and chair of the kind you’d hurry past at a flea market, a telephone, and some artfully placed, thoroughly unconvincing rubber bats on strings. Far from dedicating all of his vast wealth and resources to the fight against crime, Wilson’s Batman seemed to have reluctantly forked out a few quid. His Batmobile was an ordinary convertible with a little trailer attached, while Douglas Croft turned Robin into a spunky twit with an Art Garfunkel do. Everything about this Batman’s mission seemed half-assed, second rate, and ill considered. Barely able to muster the energy to tackle crime, this less than Dynamic Duo waited two days and three serial chapters before responding languidly and with zero conviction to a desperate emergency call. The scenes where they wriggled out of obligations and repeatedly let down Wayne’s long-suffering girlfriend Linda Page were the best parts of an overextended propaganda workout.
At best, this was the Dynamic Duo as a pair of bored fops indulging in a spot of the latest dress-up-and-fight-crime lark. If only they’d been able to take it all the way and given us a serial based around the lunatic antics of a feckless playboy and his cockeyed work-shy ward. There’s something to be said for a portrayal of Batman and Robin as thrill-crazy dilettante vigilantes, sipping cocktails and tooting cocaine before stretching into the tights and roughing up some Japanese ne’er-do-wells. Batman is a bold step in the direction of a hero for whom crime is less a scourge on society and more a frightful nuisance.
Somewhere during chapter 3, there came the nauseating realization that this was how it would look if Batman was real in 1943: a mad millionaire dressed like a Halloween Mephistopheles, crouched in a leaking cave with a wooden chair, a table, and a ham radio kit to broadcast his anti-Axis propaganda.
Wilson’s awkward clambering gymnastics, miles away from Batman’s effortless comic-book swings and leaps, seemed, as a result, more agonizingly real. His ponderous attempts to haul his bulk up a rope were exhausting to watch and more horribly convincing than any other “realistic” portrayal of Batman to date.
What worked in the comics seemed less convincing through the cruel Cyclops eye of the lens. If Lewis Wilson’s bizarre appearance inspired any terror at all in the criminal classes, it was surely that instinctual dread engendered by the close proximity of the mentally ill, immensely rich, and unstoppably violent. Bruce Wayne was wealthier than any of us could ever dream of being. Who were we to say what was right and wrong in his world?
He even threatened one gullible criminal idiot with his bats. “My little friends,” the Batman hissed as tiny plastic pipistrelles fluttered about his shrieking victim’s head. “They might get hungry” was all the perp needed to hear before he started singing like a canary. Anything could happen.
Lewis Wilson’s cape fastened around the neck over a cloth balaclava hood with curved devil horns and the tunic barely containing his impressive man boobs. This Batman costume was certainly not the result of trial and error and refinement: It was something he found in a party store bargain bucket. In one scene, his gloves disappeared for several minutes with no explanation for their absence—or for the prominent wedding ring on his finger.
Wilson’s chest emblem lacked the distinctive yellow oval that first appeared as part of Carmine Infantino’s New Look redesign for the comics in 1964. Taking its cue from Bob Kane’s simple bat silhouette on gray, Wilson’s costume added white border detailing to the graphic to suggest the skeletal structure of a bat’s wings. This particular touch has never been used again and may be ready for a comeback.
The 1949 serial Batman and Robin, cheaper and seedier yet, featured a remarkably dissolute performance by actor Robert Lowery. Both he and Robin have a thuggish, sozzled, and aggressive air. There was something of late-period Dean Martin in Lowery’s languid routine. With his tousled hair and hooded eyes, his was a grown-up, manly, and possibly alcoholic Batman in early middle age, while Johnny Duncan’s Robin evoked a broken-down rent boy long past his best, delivering each of his lines in a frightening, lobotomized monotone. Bruce Wayne was played as a constantly enervated lush, drifting in and out of scenes so startlingly pedestrian they seemed to share that specific interest in the day-to-day and particular that characterized the cinema of the underground.
This one is notable for brin
ging in Commissioner Gordon (who was Chief Arnold in 1943) and introducing to the mythos the famous Bat signal atop police headquarters, known as the Batman signal in this early incarnation but otherwise undistinguished.
The serial opened unhelpfully with a title sequence that featured Batman and Robin running around in the dark as if both were completely and unutterably lost. It featured interminable tedious car chase sequences through the Warner lots and a recognizably Californian countryside that suggested the forced relocation of Gotham City to the West Coast. Demonstrating some remote-control toys of the kind that can be bought in any High Street toy store, Batman could only look on in horrified wonder. “The possibilities of this thing in criminal hands are appalling,” he snarled as he piloted a toy car around with a joystick. Who dared disagree?
They were described as glamorous figures—“known to his neighbors as a wealthy playboy”—but the evidence of our own eyes forced us into an instantly combative position with the script. There was nothing glamorous about this pair of sinister sleazebags who appeared to have made all their money from exploiting the poor and ignorant.
The Batmobile was a cheesy convertible—this one appeared to be bright red in black-and-white—where Batman changed in the backseat as the canvas roof folded into place, and presto! The easily identifiable roadster Bruce and Dick just arrived in became, in the blink of an eye, the wondrous Batmobile! When Batman awkwardly wrestled his clothes off and his bat drag on, the alleged Boy Wonder took the wheel illegally, and when it was the dissolute Robin’s turn to squirm and twist into his togs in the backseat, Batman did the honors up front. This was a legendary partnership, after all.
The villain was the Wizard, a kind of anti-Batman in an executioner’s hood and cape who could have been interesting if they’d paid enough money for anything interesting to happen in the script. But they hadn’t, it didn’t, and he wasn’t.
The second Batman sported an interesting combination of bat and devil motifs, which never seemed to catch on again. Lowery’s horns were sharp and pointed, vicious inverted cones that thrust belligerently from a beaky cloth executioner’s hood. The eye holes were slanted at a curious angle, which gave him the untrustworthy look of Richard Nixon in a gargoyle mask.
His thick belt, lacking the utility pouches that made it functional in an urban combat context, seemed to be there for one reason only, and that was to hold up the heavy woolen underpants he wore to terrify criminals. The belt’s heroic failure to control a rolling gut that Batman’s years of devoted training in martial arts and tai chi had somehow failed to erase became a cruel feature of every scene.
This wrinkled costume he wore would be unable to stop a lit cigarette let alone a slug from a .45. With his pitiful fighting skills, which relied on clumsy haymaker punches and off-balance lunges, Lowery’s Batman could expect a crime-fighting life span of three weeks, with a career ending abruptly the moment any half-trained yellow belt tae kwon do novice punched him in the head.
There was the sense that for Lowery the whole Batman thing had been assembled from a tramp’s jumble, and he was simply doing his not very best with what he had. He was like a man waking from a wonderful dream to find that his incredible technology amounted to a tin can with string, his glorious mansion a wet cardboard box in an alley.
These serials provided the inspiration for the next and most successful iteration of Batman so far when thirty-eight-year-old Adam West was cast as the new-look Batman with twenty-one-year-old Burt Ward as his sidekick, and the Batman concept stretched accommodatingly to include self-mocking burlesque as if to prove it was somehow invulnerable to interpretation.
West wore his costume like Salvador Dalí rocked his mustache. His predecessors had no context for what they were doing, but West had worked it all out and distilled the quintessence of the serials into a thin-lipped, clipped, and stylized performance that was funny for adults to watch and utterly convincing, quintessentially heroic to children. The show was made for color TV, so out went the natural shadows of Batman’s world, and in came the bright palette of a Roy Lichtenstein canvas or an Infantino cover. The blue was bright blue, the gray was light, the yellows were acidic, lysergic sun colors.
The ears on West’s cowl were short and discreet, owing more to comic artist Dick Sprang’s 1950s Batman than to the devil-horned serial heroes and even looking ahead to the Frank Miller Batman. The highlights sometimes seen on the eyebrows of Batman’s hood were drawn as two gull wing arches, giving him a permanently surprised yet severe look. The emblem on his chest, a yellow cardboard oval with a jaunty little black bat, was stuck to his gray spandex tunic with what could have been model glue, as if a ten-year-old boy who was good with his hands had fashioned the outfit for Halloween. He wore a chunky 3-D cartoon of a belt, with useless pouches that opened upside down and were too thin to contain anything bigger than an after-dinner mint, all in blinding yellow.
This Batman’s costume was for display, not for combat. No one had yet thought of making it appear functional. Again, the approach seemed based on a need to create living cartoons, which was the accepted approach to comic-book adaptations and lasted until the superhero movie boom of the twenty-first century.
The fighting hadn’t changed much since the war. West’s and Ward’s Batman and Robin relied on a jump and tussle, rock ’em, sock ’em melee style that was based less on the techniques of ninja shadow assassins than on bar-fighting cowboy action. When the magnificent Bruce Lee appeared in a crossover episode with The Green Hornet, as sidekick Kato, he outclassed everyone on set. It was Lee, of course, who popularized Eastern martial arts and rewrote the rule book for what audiences expected from Hollywood fight scenes.
The last new episode of Batman went out on March 14, 1968, and guest-starred Zsa Zsa Gabor as an evil beautician. American boys were dying in Vietnam and on TV, students were rioting in Paris, and high camp just wasn’t funny anymore. Even the introduction of Yvonne Craig as the shapely motorbike-riding Batgirl couldn’t keep a fickle audience interested.
When the first intense flush of Batmania was revealed to be little more than a passing craze, audiences lost interest. Sales of the comic books, which had spiked at the height of the show’s popularity, slumped once more, causing editor Julius Schwartz to change tack and commission a series of more somber character-based stories from writer Gardner Fox. The TV Batgirl was added to the DC universe too, then crippled by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in The Killing Joke. Today she’s still in a wheelchair and, in the guise of Oracle, works with Batman as an online information broker. A character born to camp in one medium was transplanted to richer soil where she grew into a fascinating and complex living fiction.
So indelibly was Adam West’s deadpan comedic Batman embedded in popular consciousness, it would take another twenty-two years—a whole generation—before audiences were ready to accept a different, darker take on the character that brought him closer to his roots.
Tim Burton’s film Batman came as a revelation to audiences trained to expect the BIFF! BANG! POW! of the TV show. The idea of a grim, Gothic Batman was hardly new to fans of his comic-book adventures but it came as a pleasant revelation to an audience whose idea of Batman was rooted in the sixties series. Suddenly it was okay to like Batman without buying into kitsch or nostalgia.
West was a knowing cartoon, accepting with the same poker-faced assurance everything that came his way, from the “Batusi” dance to Bat-Shark Repellent Gas. Sixties iconoclasm saw the crime fighter as an establishment joke from an era of kitsch and self-deceit. In antiauthoritarian times, the superhero was one more uptight Republican patsy to be mocked, but by 1989, he was the only thing that stood between us and chaos. The Batman of 1989 could at last be returned to the vice-haunted alleys and rooftops where he belonged, handed back to the shadows as an outlaw, an antiestablishment self-made hero.
The foundation of Tim Burton’s Batman was sunk in Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Nicholson had made a career playing extreme character roles, and his Jok
er was a study in excess, combining his turn as Ken Kesey’s gaggle-eyed revolutionary Randall McMurphy from the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with his performance as Jack Torrance in The Shining and his “horny Devil” in The Witches of Eastwick.
Nicholson’s Joker makeup vied with that of female lead Kim Basinger for garishness and seemed made for remorseless HDTV scrutiny in later decades. As snoopy reporter Vicki Vale, Batman’s very own Lois Lane, the undeniably attractive Basinger became another tragic victim of late-eighties cosmetic artistry and was painted to look like she’d followed the Joker’s dip into the chemical vat with a matte orange neon lipstick and foundation so thick you could bury your dead in her face.
Burton’s wisdom in casting Michael Keaton, an actor more renowned for his comedy roles, as Batman was soon apparent when he played the part absolutely straight, while adding to Bruce Wayne a quirky and offbeat vulnerability expressed as a distracted childlike engagement with the world. This otherworldly Bruce came across as a genuine trauma survivor and drew sympathy for a character hitherto portrayed as a one-dimensional playboy.
For the first time, the familiar costume was designed with at least one eye on its appropriateness in the area of urban vigilantism. Keaton’s Bat suit replaced the flimsy cloth of old with molded black rubber that showed the new influence of punk and the S/M clubs on Tim Burton’s brand of Goth fairy tale. The overpants were gone, and black dominated the look rather than the gray and blue of the comics. Barely able to move in the heavily protective suit, Keaton resorted to quick turns, snapping his entire body around to bring to the fight scenes a staccato rhythm that more closely approximated real martial arts kicks and blocks. The rough-and-tumble of Adam West, the have-a-go playground brawling of the serials, was replaced by more convincing nods toward the precision moves of Jeet Kune Do and karate. By 1990, audiences were familiar with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan movies, and Batman’s fighting style had to move with the times.
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