Holy Movie and TV Show Batman - Batman on TV and Film

The brooding avenger, the superhero without any superpowers, the caped crusader who wears the mask of a playboy and the man himself beneath all the masks - vigilante, detective, hero, specter, a haunted son of murdered parents and a dealer in violence himself - Batman is a troubled figure who has been rendered in various ways in both comic books and on television and film.

Batman's first cinematic appearance, like that of Superman, came in a movie serial. The 1943 fifteen chapter movie serial featured both Batman and Robin and featured a propagandistic period WW2 storyline involving a sinister Japanese scientist. Lewis Wilson played the first Batman and his version of Bruce Wayne helped inspire Tim Burton to cast Michael Keaton in the role -- a move widely derided at the time. And in the first of many changes by which the filmed and television versions of Batman would affect the Batman comics-- the Batcave and its secret entrance as well as a more traditionally British appearance for Alfred, stemmed from this 1943 serial.

With Robert Lowery portraying Batman, the 1949 movie serial produced over half a decade later produced few improvements-- except in the lack of racist stereotyping. Instead production values have been severely diminished resulting in an absurd Batman costume and ridiculously bad sets. Batman even drives Bruce Wayne's Mercury convertible.

After that disastrous outing, Batman went into hibernation for nearly two decades and the results that occured when he was wakened again gave us the campy sixties Batman TV show which ran for three years and even spawned a theatrical film.

Where the 1943 and 1949 serials had, despite their low production values-- taken the concept of Batman seriously; the Batman TV series treated the entire thing as a joke and ripe for parody. Adam West as Batman was an absurd prig, Burt Ward as Robin was a cheesy boy scout, the villains were clowns and the stories little more than comic material meant to end up with a cartoonish fight full of POW's, BAM's, ZAP's and ZOWIE's. Like the comics of the time, the TV series viewed the entire idea of Batman as absurd and hilarious and rendered it as such.

The resulting episodes catered to the ironic sensibility of those television executives and viewers who could not take the premise of a superhero fighting for justice seriously in the first place-- and to very small children. Plots were essentially repetitions of each other with different villains plugged into the mix. The villains themselves were minor repetitions of each other, lacking the depth and detailed backstories that truly set apart the Joker from the Riddler from the Penguin in more than costume and tactics.

In 1966 a filmed version of the series, directed by one of the series directors and with much the same cast which had the villains teaming up to kidnap the members of the UN Security Council by reducing them to their chemical components, was released into theaters.

And then once again Batman slept the sleep of the just for over two more decades until in 1989, Tim Burton was assigned to the task of resurrecting the Caped Crusader. Burton was at that point an extremely unlikely choice to take on the task of a superhero movie. His previous projects like "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" and "Edward Scissorhands" did not seem to particularly lend themselves to a straightforward Batman film. Yet neither would he seem suited for the kind of lighthearted jokey pop art take on Batman perpetrated by the television series. And indeed "Batman" circa 1989 went in a direction of a whole different sort, giving us a decaying Urban environment far closer to Batman's roots fighting corrupt gangsters, while at the same time adding a gothic and freakish air to everything.

Tim Burton's "Batman", much like "Edward Scissorhands", seemed to dwell among remote castles, beneath ruins and archways and his playboy guise is a not particularly plausible thin coating across the tragic loner underneath. While Tim Burton might have remade Batman in his own image- it was also an image far closer to who Batman was than the television series had been.The movie's vision would once again affect the comic books transforming Batman's costume and helping to transform his mood as well.

However Burton increasingly lost all restrain in making the sequel, "Batman Returns" turning what had been a gothic touch into a deformed vision. The usually spiffy and debonair Penguin was rendered as a twisted lunatic freak who feasts on raw fish and human blood, when he chooses. Catwoman is rendered as a borderline psychotic victim of Max Shreck-- formerly intended to be Two Face. While Michelle Pfeiffer's performance, like that of Danny DeVito and Christopher Walken, was excellent -- the character meant to serve as an antagonist and romantic interest for Batman was instead a twisted lunatic.

The stark vision of "Batman Returns" was that of a world of freaks capering about , with Batman as one of them. The movie's approach was to highlight the grotesque, as Tim Burton movies often did, but it was a grotesque vision that failed to be balanced out by a redeeming vision as was the case in the previous film. The end result of "Batman Returns" would further scar the Batman movie franchise when seeing the extreme nature of the portrayal, executives overbalanced in the other direction instead bringing back the camp and jokey version of Batman for the next two films.

With "Batman Returns" seeing a drop off in revenue (not unusual for a sequel during the period), Tim Burton was edged out followed by the departure of Michael Keaton. Joel Schumacher replaced him and his vision of a frenzied neon lit vision of Gotham as a massive nightclub replaced Tim Burton's dour stylized gothic urban dystopia. Starring Val Kilmer as Batman, in place of Michael Keaton and Jim Carrey as the Riddler-- while Tommy Lee Jones mugged for the camera as Two Face-- "Batman Forever" featured ambitious stunts but was increasingly overshadowed by the director's inability to take his own material seriously.

From the production design to the acting to the direction, Joel Schumacher directed a vision of Batman as a ludricious comic book concoction not grounded in any form of reality. Adding to the problem was Val Kilmer's cold and detached performance as Bruce Wayne. Drastic cuts further rendered portions of the movie senseless, including the Batcave funeral vision Bruce Wayne experiences as a child. A tip of the hat to the 60's TV series embodied in Robin's line, "Holey Metal Batman" only further emphasized which direction the movie was aspiring in. Warner Brothers had gained a more family friendly film and a more accessible one to general audiences, but at the cost of draining Batman and Gotham of their iconic qualities.

As with Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher 's second outing in the Batman franchise would see his vision of the franchise spin completely out of control. Where "Batman Forever" had a campy overtone, "Batman and Robin" simply was camp-- so much so it had might have been Adam West in the Batsuit, instead of George Clooney.

Where "Batman Forever" succeeded commercially and failed critically, "Batman and Robin" simply failed in every possible way. The growth of the internet helped lead online campaigns against the movie, notably by Harry Knowles of Aint-It-Cool-News.com. By the time the movie was released, it did so on the heels of all the negative publicity by fans toward the Schumacher revision of Batman. Its cast of Arnold Schwartzenegger as Victor Fries, traditionally one of Gotham's most tragic villains and Uma Thurman as a painfully cartoonish Poison Ivy, along with Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl-- managed to put the nail in the coffin, both aesthetically and financially. The Schumacher era of Batman had overreached itself and self-destructed in a glorious neon haze.

While the Batman film franchise was busy self-destructing, an unexpected revival was taking place in a corner of the Batman universe one would least expect, an animated series. Batman had been seen in cartoons before, but "Batman: The Animated Series" was a stylish noir take on Batman that returned the superhero to his roots without indulging in Burtonesque histrionics. With quality writing and a cinematic attention to detail that captured a world of Gotham as it might have been in a few strokes from classic automobiles to airships and Art Deco architecture, "Batman: The Animated Series" quietly reinvented Batman and passed on some of those reinventions to the comics-- including the character of Harley Quinn.

Batman: The Animated Series' Batman was both the brooding superhero and the outgoing playboy, simplemindedly determined and yet moral and upright. It was a vision of Batman that had room for a laugh but also operated in a dark and dangerous world. It was in short in perfect balance.

This vision of Batman would increasingly be watered down and increasingly replaced with a more cartoonish version aimed purely at kids. The "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker" movie would find a crucial scene involving Robin's role in the death of the Joker cut and rearranged to be more family friendly. But the original episodes themselves would continue to live on gaining a cult following and serving as a demonstration that it was possible to render Batman in a level of work at the highest quality in an animated series.

"Batman Beyond", a spin off dated in the future, much like Fray was to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", managed to be a faithful continuation of the series giving us a look at an aged and gruffly determined Bruce Wayne still soldiering on in a world that seemed to have left Batman behind. "Batman Beyond", with its teenage lead, seemed as much Spider Man meets Batman as anything else, but unlike the more cartoonish succeeding Batman cartoon series, it remained a worthless successor with intelligent storytelling and an intriguing look at a future Gotham.

A cinematic revival for Batman would finally come again in 2005 with the release of "Batman Begins". Christopher Nolan, director of "Memento", took us where no Batman movie ever had, to the very beginning of Batman and his rise as a superhero. With a talented cast, including Michael Caine as a weightier Alfred minus a mustache-- as he was originally rendered in the comics up until the 1940's -- "Batman Begins" like "Batman: The Animated Series" rendered a noir Gotham corrupted by criminals into an urban dystopia, but one whose villains are altogether real and devoid of freakish qualities. Its central villain appears as a man who may lie about his identity, but not disguise it with a mask. The Scarecrow has a limited presence in the film and even his mask is more tool than costume.

With "Batman Begins" the film vision of Batman had come full circle to the more ordinary villains of the Batman serials, devoid of freakish costumes or hideous deformities. A Batman as detective whose costume is not an identity but a means of terrifying superstitious evildoers as he fights his crusade for justice.