Batman: Still Any Good?

The summer of 1989. Stock, Aitken and Waterman are dominating the radio courtesy of all-pervadingly massive hits for Jason Donovan, Sonia and Kylie Minogue, while the very top of the pop charts offers two very different glimpses of the future – at one extreme the excitingly unpolished dub dance sounds of thrillingly unlikely chart-topper Back To Life (However Do You Want Me?) by Soul II Soul Featuring Caron Wheeler, and at the other Jive Bunny And The Mastermixers’ inaugural cut-and-shut medley evoking an exasperatingly unspecific ‘era’ pandering to precisely the wrong kind of nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ Swing The Mood, although sadly not at such an extremity that it toppled over the sodding White Cliffs of Dover, with the shoddily animated ‘jive’-prone lagomorph scoring a further two chart-toppers at the behest of those two backroom boy blokes called ‘Ian’ and ‘Ian’ before the year was out, only one of which subsequently had to be re-edited to remove a convicted Yewtree. Over on the television, it’s all change for current affairs as Robin Day prepares to step down as host of Question Time a couple of days after John Craven presents his final ‘…and finally’ for the subsequently truncatedly-titled John Craven’s Newsround, while perhaps more importantly for anyone looking for a diversion on those long hot interminable summer evenings, ITV are throwing all of their promotional weight behind high concept disastrously unpopular primetime game show Interceptor (which there’s more about here). Over at the cinema, all eyes – literally; it will remain the biggest box office draw for almost the entire summer – are on Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, while excitement is running rampant over the fact that ‘they’ are doing ‘a second one’ of both Back To The Future and Ghostbusters, fuelled in no small part by the arrival of a new magazine called Empire that talks about films in a manner that the sort of punter who spent several minutes deliberating over whether it was worth the inflated outlay on a bag of Butterkist at their local one-screen Cannon cinema might actually want to read about them. To pretty much everyone apart from that serious-looking boy in your class who was always ostentatiously slash mock-casually brandishing a Graphic Novel behind his copy of Tricolore, Batman essentially meant the mid-sixties Adam West series, which was still being afforded daily airings by TV-am after it had proved an unexpected ratings winner during emergency industrial action deployment eighteen months previously. Nobody was expecting a brand new wildly acclaimed Batman movie accompanied by a baffling tie-in single by Prince to appear from nowhere and demand everyone’s attention in a blur of cheap bootleg t-shirts sourced from ‘the market’, but that’s exactly what happened and for more or less the rest of 1989, it was all that anyone talked about. Even The Interceptor was heard to remark to ‘Mikey’ that he liked it.

Although Jive Bunny have recently seen fit to inflict the three disc retrospective Jive Bunny Gold on nobody in particular, a good deal has changed since then, and coincidentally enough the latest issue of Empire has the hotly anticipated The Fantastic Four: First Steps on the cover (and there’s more about that here and here). Tim Burton’s 1989 interpretation of Batman – himself rebooted numerous times since then, with nobody ever quite seeming to agree on a worthy successor to Michael Keaton’s uncomfortable-looking Bat-Mantle – was a phenomenal success and did a great deal to convince the film industry that not just superhero movies but action movies in general could aspire towards being both a resounding commercial and critical success, but the double-edged problem with this sort of achievement is that it presents something to be built on, and that’s certainly what many others have tried and mostly succeeded – you can’t avoid a qualification when the likes of Madame Web are part of the equation – in doing since then. From Blade to Deadpool And Wolverine, dozens upon dozens of directors have taken what Tim Burton did and added to it. So how – with apologies to Richard Donner, Mario Puzo and Christopher Reeve – does the one that originally sent up the Bat-Signal stand up now?

Some of you will no doubt be surprised to find me talking about a film featuring a DC character – after all, you might just have got the impression from a certain podcast here that I am very much Team Marvel – but when Christopher Webb and Robert Johnson invited me to make a guest appearance on Still Any Good?, Batman really did seem like the obvious choice. After all = as you’ll find out – I hadn’t actually seen it since 1989. As well as revisiting that selfsame summer when I somehow got caught up enough in the excitement to momentarily forget my resentment that nobody was doing a film about Black Widow and queue up for the first showing at my local cinema, and indeed what else I was up to around that time – with a conspicuous lack of acknowledgement of Jive Bunny – there’s also room for discussion of where and why I first heard Theme From ‘A Summer Place’, whether Tim Burton had closely studied the Uptown Girl video, why I shunned the first television showing of Batman in favour of what was on Channel 4, why BBC2’s The Late Show was incapable of not saying ‘aaaaaaahhhhhh!’ and if big-screen Batman could do with more Bat-Mite before we answer that unavoidable and ominous question – is Batman still any good?

Download

The Late Show: Batman Special (BBC2, 1989).

Buy A Book!

I can’t promise there’s very much about Batman in it, but you can certainly find more about the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. It is probably not a good idea to use a bootleg Batman mug sourced from ‘the market’.

Further Listening

If your idea of a secretive shadowy masked vigilante is more Matt Murdock and Marc Spector than Bruce Wayne, you can find my Marvel Cinematic Universe podcast It’s Good, Except It Sucks here.