Stan Lee by Adrian Mackinder;

Author:Adrian Mackinder;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literally Figures
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2021-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

A Brave New World

There are two types of people in America. Those who have seen the 1966 Batman television series, and those who haven’t seen television. To say it was one of the biggest television phenomena of the 1960s is an understatement. To say it’s one of the most distinctive TV shows ever made is pretty accurate too. And with good reason. It was – and still is – a singular piece of entertainment. There’s really nothing like it. Batman was so influential it cemented popular perception of the Caped Crusader for decades. It would take over twenty years before Batman was brought back to his darker roots with Tim Burton’s all-conquering 1989 blockbuster.

Burton’s movie owed more to the darker Batman comics of the 1970s by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams, then the adult graphic novels of the 1980s, especially Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. Batman ’89 was a noir-drenched fairy tale of psychosis and revenge, framed by Anton Furst’s Oscar-winning grandiose ‘dark deco’ production design. This is the version of Batman that has endured to this day. Any attempt to brighten up the character or – whisper it – bring back Robin the Boy Wonder tends to be met by a huge outcry from the fans. For 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, director Christopher Nolan challenged himself to see if he could introduce Robin in a way that wouldn’t have fandom spitting feathers. He succeeded, but only by making the character so removed from the comic book version he was barely recognisable. Nolan’s Boy Wonder was John Blake, a young and optimistic orphan turned incorruptible police officer who never lost faith in all that Batman stands for. It is only at the very end of the film, when Blake inherits the keys to the Batcave, that we discover John’s real name is Robin. The reveal is such a stretch from its source material, it illustrates just how wary filmmakers are of re-introducing Batman’s sidekick into the franchise.

But for many years, and for an entire generation, Batman meant only one thing – actors Adam West and Burt Ward, wrapped in unflattering leotards, prancing around vibrant sets in broad daylight, earnestly exchanging puns and quips as they foiled the dastardly plan of whichever faded actor from the Golden Age of Hollywood played the guest villain that week. The show is gloriously camp and over the top, but it works due to the cast playing it completely straight and giving it their all. The witty, tongue-in-cheek scripts came from a team of writers led by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Semple would later work on the screenplays for paranoid political thrillers The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975).

Batman’s rise was meteoric. The same year the TV show launched, a film was released in cinemas, the first full-length, non-serialised theatrical adaptation of the character. At its height, Batman was one of only two prime-time1 shows (the other being soap opera Peyton Place) to be broadcast twice in one week as part of the regular network schedule.

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