Batman: The Movie
Seeking some undemanding entertainment the other night, I put on my DVD of 1966’s Batman.
As bad as it is, it seems silly to attack this movie too strongly. It is, after all, a comedy. More than that, it’s not even a movie. It was not meant to compete with, say, Torn Curtain. It’s merely product, a brand extension, designed to increase the value of a television show.
The plot, such as it is, makes no sense and wanders all over the place. This shouldn’t be a problem for a comedy (Horsefeathers has no plot whatsoever but is still pretty damn funny) but still it tests the patience of an intelligent viewer. The characterizations are loud, silly, grating, contradictory and unfaithful to the source material.
For those unaware of this unique cultural artifact, the plot goes like this: Catwoman, The Joker, The Penguin and The Riddler have conspired to kidnap Commodore Schmidlapp, who, in addition to running a distillery, is the the inventor of a gizmo that can instantly dehydrate people. The bad guys use the device to turn the UN United World Security Council into piles of colored dust. Before they do that, they spend an entire act screwing around with an attempt to kill Batman by kidnapping Bruce Wayne. Catwoman, who is normally a cat-burglar (hence her name), is here turned into a master of disguise, pretending to be a Russian journalist. The Penguin, normally concerned with bird-related crimes, here pilots a penguin-painted submarine and also briefly becomes a master of disguise. The Riddler, being The Riddler, is compelled to give away all their plans with his clues. The Joker is given nothing to do; in retaliation, Cesar Romero has refused to shave his mustache, clearly visible under his clown-white makeup.
The tone veers from genial camp to bizarre, psychedelic comedy. Adam West, looking like the young Harrison Ford (or maybe Dennis Quaid) plays Batman with a keen edge of ironic seriousness. The villains suffer from the same problem as the heroes in Superfriends; they have no characters to play, only a clutch of symptoms. The Batman of Batman: The Movie is not one to brood in a cave between illegal bursts of vigilante activities; this Batman takes place entirely in broad daylight. Batman holds press conferences at police headquarters, trots down the street in crowded lunch-hour traffic and punches a shark while dangling from a ladder. Far from being the world’s greatest detective, this Batman is an easily-fooled dolt who blunders from clue to clue, solving crimes almost by accident.
The climax of the movie, which involves Batman intoning a solemn prayer for peace and the future while holding a garden hose, is almost worth sitting through the rest of the movie.
This evening, my son Sam (5) found the DVD sitting out and asked to watch it. I warned him that it was not the Batman he’s used to, that there would be no swell animation, that this Batman would not be grumpy and sullen, that he walks around in public in broad daylight, that the whole movie was kind of silly, but he was still game.
Enthralled.
I remember when I was a kid taking Batman seriously, but that was a long time ago (I was exactly the same age as Sam is when it first came on TV). Sam has never shown interest in live-action versions of his favorite cartoon stars; the George Reeves Superman got a thumbs-down, and while he’s curious about Superman Returns, he hasn’t pushed to see it.
Tonight he was so caught up in Batman: The Movie that he needed company while watching it. Not to make sense of the plot (which is impossible anyway) but to verify the fact that it was actually happening. He was transported, stunned, horrified, confused (unsurprisingly), intrigued, and held in the grip of suffocating suspense.
While the tone of blithe camp escaped him (the dehydrated pirates were a source of genuine anxiety), he got the broader jokes, such as when Batman can’t get rid of a large, round bomb on a crowded pier and pines "Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!" or the Bat-copter crashing, fortuitously, atop a mountain of foam rubber. He asked if there were more Batman movies like this one. I said "Sam, there are, literally, dozens of Batman movies like this one," which delivered to his cerebral cortex a vision of heaven. (Why are those episodes not available on DVD? I assume a rights issue, as the characters are owned by WB and the series was produced by Fox.)
Sam disagrees with my assertion that the Joker does nothing ("No! He zaps those guys with the dehydrating gun!") but he does not approve of Cesar Romero at all. He totally bought the obviously-rubber exploding shark, and its cousin the non-exploding exploding octopus. He liked the penguin submarine and all the bat-machines. When asked what his favorite things in the movie were, he correctly answered "Catwoman and the Batmobile."
Mouths of babes.
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost
Clayface vs. Grey Ghost. Clayface is pictured on the right.
After many months of watching Justice League, Sam (5) abruptly asked to watch “some Batman” today. I got out our old DVD sets of Batman: The Animated Series and asked him which episode he’d like to see. Sam decided the way he usually does, by looking at the pictures on the DVD box, and chose “the one with Clayface.” That would be “Feat of Clay,” the two-part episode introducing the new villain.
I think what he was expecting after a not having seen the show since he was 3 years old was a plot where Clayface wants to do something bad and Batman has to stop him. Instead, this is what he got:
Lucius Fox, an employee of Wayne Enterprises, goes to meet Bruce Wayne in the middle of the night in an abandoned tramway station. Lucius, it seems, has some information on a crooked industrialist named Daggett that he’s turning over to Bruce so that Bruce can give it to the district attorney (which would be Harvey Dent, but that’s another story). Bruce Wayne, however, turns out not to be Bruce Wayne but rather an actor impersonating Bruce Wayne, on the behalf of some gangsters working for this Daggett fellow, who want Lucius dead. This actor turns out to be a Lon-Chaney-style “Man of 1000 Faces” named Matt Hagen. Hagen was in an accident years earlier and sold his soul to this Daggett creep in exchange for a miraculous makeup compound that gives Hagen the ability to fix his scarred face enough to keep working in movies. Trouble is, the makeup is addictive and makes your skin fall apart if you stop using it (a plot that WB would use again, to little effect, in their movie Catwoman, which might as well not have been based on a comic book at all for all it resembled the DC character). Meanwhile, Daggett has gotten tired of Hagen’s unpredictability and puts a hit on him. Daggett’s hit men could easily shoot Hagen, but they decide at the last minute to, instead, dump a beaker full of this magic makeup gunk on his face. The gunk soaks into his skin and affects him on a cellular level, turning Hagen into the hideous Clayface, a monster with the ability to mold his features into any form.
And that’s just Part One.
Setting aside thedarkness of tone and the ugly, brutal quality of the violence, Sam was utterly baffled as to what was going on. As well he might be. He kept turning to me and saying “What’s going on? Where’s Clayface?” (Clayface, indeed, does not even put in an appearance until well into Part Two.) Once Clayface appeared and Batman started pursuing him, he was still confused. “Wait, why is Batman after Clayface? What did Clayface do to Batman?” (Imagine: he’s five years old, yet he already grasps the notion of “probable cause.” A costumed vigilante can’t just pursue a shape-shifting monster merely on a hunch, there are rules!) I tried to explain as simply as I could what was going on, how Batman (that is, Bruce Wayne) isn’t after Clayface per se, he’s after whoever tried to kill Lucius Fox, and that leads him to Hagen (but not before a couple of dead-ends and having to spend the night in jail), and Hagen, after a great deal of angst, embraces his new-found powers as Clayface and uses them, not to commit crimes, but to get even with Daggett, the corrupt industrialist who made him this way. So Batman, by the end of the show, isn’t even fighting Clayface, but trying to help him reintegrate his fractured personality, an issue close to the heart of the 1992 Batman.
It’s impressive how much these early episodes of Batman TAS were real detective shows; there are gangsters and murderers and briefcases full of incriminating evidence and surprising amount of innuendo, references to things unsaid and shady, mysterious moral zones. Characters sometimes have complex, perverse or contridictory motives; you have to really pay attention to follow the plot, even as an adult. Also impressive, after watching so much Justice League, is how dark and painterly the animation is (that is to say, it looks like the Fleischer Superman shorts). Justice League looks like a kids’ show in comparison.
But the darkness and complexity of the plot was a little too much for my little guy to soak in and he needed a pallette-cleanser. He chose “Beware the Grey Ghost,” an episode where Batman teams up with the actor who used to play Bruce Wayne’s favorite costumed crime-fighter, the Grey Ghost, to solve a series of mysterious Grey-Ghost-inspired bombings taking place in Gotham.
This, especially after the scary, sophisticated Clayface two-parter, was right up Sam’s alley. Bruce Wayne watched superhero shows with his dad when he was a kid! Sam was right there. He completely understood who the Grey Ghost was and what he meant to Batman, and it was revealed that Batman has a secret cache of Grey Ghost toys and action figures, you could see the Batman universe snap into sharp focus for him. And when Batman teams up with his childhood hero in order to solve a crime, it was wish-fulfillment on a meta-level.
For Sam’s 45-year-old dad, there was great humor in the episode as well, since Adam West voiced the part of the Grey Ghost and the mad bomber turned out to be a demented toy-collecting manchild played, both in looks and voice, by series producer Bruce W. Timm.
For a bedtime story, it was the new issue of Justice League Unlimited, where B’wana Beast saves the day by punching a giant bee. That was one he could easily wrap his mind around.
For my readers who wonder if I’m ever going to write about a movie made for grownups again, go see the hugely entertaining, compulsively watchable Notes on a Scandal. It features a deft, accomplished script by Patrick Marber, a thunderous, tumultuous score by Philip Glass and a couple of stunning, detailed, utterly lived-in performances from Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.
Justice League part 2 — Green Lantern is a job
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Left to right: Alan Scott, Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, Arkkis Chummuck — all entirely different people.
I was in New York recently, having dinner after a show (as one does) with some friends. At the table were the Magazine Editor, the Famous Actor, the Rock Star and the Primatologist. Conversation turned to Justice League. (Conversation has, no doubt, been edited to be more self-serving.)
TODD. My son has turned me into a geek.
PRIMATOLOGIST. (apres spit-take) Turned you into one?!
TODD. Hey, before Sam started watching Justice League, I had never heard of Arkkis Chummuck. Now I know who Arkkis Chummuck is.
ACTOR. Who is Arkkis Chummuck?
TODD. Arkkis Chummuck is a Green Lantern that Hal Jordan was teamed up with for a while. Arkkis is from a planet of werewolf-looking creatures who practice cannabalism. And Hal Jordan kind of held Arkkis Chummuck at arm’s length, thinking that he was some kind of a savage for his cannibalistic ways. But as we get to know Arkkis and his culture, we come to learn that there are deep, spiritual aspects to their practices that Hal simply didn’t bother to think about because of Arkkis’s appearance and habits. So Hal —
EDITOR. Wait — what do you mean he’s “teamed up” with Arkkis Chummuck?
TODD. Hal Jordan is only one Green Lantern. The Green Lantern Corps, you see, is based on a planet called Oa, where the the Oans have the magic Power Battery, which happens to look like a green lantern. And that’s where the Green Lantern Corps is based. Hal Jordan is only one of, I think, 36,000 Green Lanterns, and each Green Lantern polices a certain zone of the universe. Hal Jordan was only the Green Lantern of the zone that includes Earth, since that’s where the intelligent life is in our sector of the universe. If you —
ROCK STAR. And who is the “Jon Stewart” guy?
TODD. He —
ACTOR. There’s a Green Lantern named Jon Stewart?!
TODD. He — yes, he spells it with the “h” —
EDITOR. I wonder if Jon Stewart named himself after —
TODD. John Stewart was an “angry black guy” living in Detroit in the late sixties, and Hal Jordan got teamed up with him —
PRIMATOLOGIST. Wait, why did Earth get two Green Lanterns?
TODD. John Stewart was being trained as Hal Jordan’s backup. And in the Justice League cartoon, John is still from a bad neighborhood in Detroit but they made him a marine —
ACTOR. Wait, so “Green Lantern” isn’t a guy —
TODD. No, although there is a Green Lantern named Guy Gardner, redhead with a bowl haircut who nobody likes —
ROCK STAR. And isn’t one like a cartoonist or something?
TODD. That’s Kyle Rayner —
ACTOR. — “Green Lantern” is a, an office. A position.
TODD. That’s exactly right. “Green Lantern” is a job. So when people say they don’t like Green Lantern, it’s like saying they don’t —
EDITOR. I had no idea —
PRIMATOLOGIST. Are there any female Green Lanterns?
TODD. Are there? Why, one of the most important Green Lanterns is Katma Tui, a dark-red-skinned alien who trained John Stewart —
ROCK STAR. But the whole thing with the, you know, the color yellow —
TODD. Ah, yes. But, according to one story, you see, the power ring is not vulnerable to the color yellow — rather, the Guardians merely tell Green Lantern that his ring has a flaw, because otherwise he would eventually be driven mad with power. But the important thing is, people, they — all these Green Lanterns are entirely different people. Hal Jordan is a test pilot and John Stewart is a marine and Kyle Rayner is a cartoonist and they’ve all been given this responsibility and they all respond differently to the job. It’s like the word “Policeman.” You have all kinds of different policemen and all kinds of different stories you can tell about policemen. You have Hill Street Blues and Dirty Harry. Or “Lawyer.” Or “Doctor.” So that’s why Green Lantern, a character I’d never even thought about, suddenly has become, I don’t know, vital and interesting to me, just that one twist — Batman is a guy, Superman is a guy, but Green Lantern is a job. And I think he’s the only one who is a job, I —
Statement
My heartfelt thanks to Mr. JAMES URBANIAK and Ms. NINA HELLMAN helping out last night at CAROUSEL for the presentation of the new chapter of FEEDER BIRDS, and to Mr. R. SIKORYAK for continuing to encourage me to pursue this seemingly foolish endeavor. The show went quite well, and swiftly, with much laughter and insights from all the folks presenting things.
I myself don’t perform much in public any more so it was especially gratifying to have complete strangers come up to me after the show to tell me they liked the piece.
The Bentfootes, while not exactly finished, is in a much more polished, presentable shape than it was two weeks ago, as well as being 10 minutes shorter and at least 10 percent funnier. We had some (very) small screenings for friends, and Venture Bros fans would have delighted to watch JAMES “DOC VENTURE” URBANIAK and STEVEN “DR. ORPHEUS” RATTAZZI playing a giddy, slap-happy version of Ebert and Roeper on our editor’s living room couch.
The editor of The Bentfootes, by the way, is a hugely talented young man named CONNOR KALISTA. Remember that name; this time next year I won’t be able to afford him.
For those of you who could not attend Carousel, here are some of my favorite panels from last night’s chapter. As you can see, I enjoy drawing foliage.
Take the Marvel challenge!
My son Sam (5) has quite suddenly made a dramatic shift from DC to Marvel. Interest in Batman and Superman has dropped precipitously, interest in Iron Man and Hulk has increased exponentially. More to the point from a marketing point of view, he has immediately and instinctively assessed Marvel’s presence as a “brand,” and refers to Marvel characters not as “superheroes,” but “Marvel superheroes.” As in, he goes up to other kids at school and asks if they want to “play Marvel superheroes.”
One result is that he has gone from drawing pictures of the Justice League to drawing pictures of, well, everyone in the Marvel universe. All in the same drawing, as though trying to catch up after years of neglect.
Below is one of his latests efforts. Test your Marvel knowledge! How many of these characters can you name?
click on images to enlarge
THE ANSWERS:
Robolizard has done a heroic job with some tough material. The ones he missed are all pretty much the ones I missed too. Luckily I had the artist available to interpret for me.
Here is the complete set:
1. Mr. Fantastic
2. Silver Surfer
3. Spider-Man
4. Ant-Man
5. Nightcrawler
6. Daredevil (complete with endearing backwards 5-year-old double-D)
7. The Hulk
8. Black Panther
9. Iron Man (would be easier to identify if Sam had had access to the correct shade of red)
10. Lightspeed (who is Lightspeed? She is a member of Power Pack, of course, why do you ask? She is identifiable by her rainbow trail that she leaves whenever she zips from place to place.)
11. Rogue (probably the toughest one here. Sam had trouble getting across the idea of the white streak in her hair.)
12. Wolverine
13. Human Torch (Johnny Storm, that is — everyone knows the original Human Torch has no face.)
14. The Thing
15. The Wasp
16. Elektra (I know, I know, she’s topless — how advanced my son is! — but he got her little strappy things right.)
17. She-Hulk.
Congratulations to all our — well, our player!
J.S. Bach: The Early Years of Struggle
“Hey, ‘Mr. Counterpoint’ in there, you want to knock it
off already? You’re giving your mother a headache!”
If Sir Isaac Newton Had Been Born A Cat
click for readable view
Deadgirl
A while back, I was up for a gig writing an X-Men spinoff. The gig didn’t happen, but I spent a year researching the X-Men universe anyway.
My favorite tributary of the X-Men river was X-Statix, which managed to have an involving story, evocative characters, biting satire and high-spirited parody all at the same time. And one of the many, many great characters from X-Statix was Deadgirl. Both utterly ridiculous and unexpectedly moving, Deadgirl brought the whole title to a new level.
Now she has her own graphic novel, X-Statix presents Deadgirl, in which she teams up with Dr. Strange to defeat a team of killed-off Marvel characters (including lame-os like Mysterio and Kraven) who keep coming back from hell to wreak havoc on Earth.
Again, the artistic team hits the pitch-perfect balance of silliness, adventure, drama and parody, creating an effect not unlike that of The Venture Bros. In fact, Venture Bros came to mind almost immediately as we are introduced to Dr. Strange, who is found in his study simultaneously conjuring the netherworld and complaining about his hemorroids, all in the ultra-po-faced style of Mike and Laura Allred’s illustrations. I immediately thought of Dr. Orpheus, and another brick in the Venture Bros wall of cultural influences fell into place. It made me wonder if the Deadgirl team had seen the last season of VB and decided to take the idea back to its source.
Anyway, the book’s a hoot.
