Batman vs. Two-Face (2017)

Director: Rick Morales

Cast: Adam West, Burt Ward, William Shatner, Julie Newmar

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I was right on top of getting this when it came out on disc.

Did I Like It: The one missing element of 1966 Batman TV series was its treatment of that singular villain in the Rogue’s Gallery, Two-Face. Harlan Ellison wrote a treatment for an eventual episode to feature the great bifurcated one*, and the name bandied about for the role was none other than a famous-but-not-quite-that-famous Clint Eastwood. Had NBC picked up the show, we might very well have seen that come to pass.

But forget all that. Eastwood’s not the man to play the role against West and Ward. If nothing else, putting James T. Kirk in his prime against the Caped Crusader was the best possible casting move in any direct-to-DVD animated film I could ever imagine.

…as I type that, it feels like damning the film with faint praise, but I assure you, it isn’t.

This film extends everything that worked (and a few of the things that didn’t work out so hot; sorry, Burt Ward) about Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016). It also manages to make more extensive use of Jeff Bergman’s narrator, doing his best impression of the late producer William Dozier. The manic humor may be diminished ever so slightly as the regular rogue’s gallery becoming supporting characters and the story desperately tries to give Harvey (Shatner) some pathos to play.

But these are extraordinarily minor complaints for a film which easily clears its modest goals. There was no reason to expect any more time spent with Adam West as Batman, to say nothing of seeing that version of the character venturing into previously untouched material. Were Mr. West still with us, I would have been up for a new bright, campy adventure with those two every year or so.

*It was produced as a comic book, that I had to spend a minute search for and plan on re-reading as soon as possible. It’s pretty unrelated to the story presented in this film, otherwise Ellison. just might have sued the production into oblivion.

Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016)

Director: Rick Morales

Cast: Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar, Steven Weber

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, man. I was there with bells on when the movie had a limited run with Fathom. I was 100% the audience for this film.

Did I Like It: And it mostly meets expectations. The animation style is by and large fine, but I do think there was some unnecessary liberties taken with some of the locations. It would have been far more enjoyable to have the backgrounds look exactly like Bruce Wayne’s den, the Batcave, and Commissioner Gordon’s office, than the slightly more expansive environments we’re treated to here. I also didn’t need even an oblique exploration of just what occurs to get Bruce Wayne (West) and Dick Grayson (Ward) into costume as they slide down the bat-poles.

I’d hate to get entirely nitpicky about the whole affair, but the voicework is occasionally great, an occasionally not-so-great. West certainly sounds much older than he did in the 60s, but as I am currently older now than Bruce Wayne is traditionally depicted, there was a certain simple pleasure in being able to look upon the Dark Knight as a grown-up again. Julie Newmar doesn’t sound as if she’s aged a day since she last meow-ed her way through an episode of the TV show, which is worth the price of viewing the film itself. Burt Ward is… well, he’s playing a 16-year-old boy, and there’s never a moment where I wasn’t aware he was a man in his 70s. To have a man in his 70s play a 16-year-old boy is probably an unfair expectation for someone. Then again, it wasn’t like we bought him as a teenager in the 60s, either…

Filling in for deceased cast members, things get a bit brighter. Jeff Bergman channels both Cesar Romero’s Joker and narrator William Dozier nearly perfectly, although the narrator is tragically underused. Steven Weber and Lynne Marie Stewart are so perfect as Alfred and Aunt Harriet that it’s downright spooky. Wally Wingert intermittently imitates Frank Gorshin quite well, but unfortunately only illuminates just what a simmering explosion of crazy Gorshin was.

But why no Batgirl? Yes, Yvonne Craig had passed away, but everybody else is here? Why does Barbara Gordon always get the short shrift in DC movies? I just don’t get it.

The plot is epic enough to justify the runtime, but isn’t quite the comic scenario they cooked up for Batman (1966).

I might have some minor quibbles with the film, but any time spent with the Bright Knight is time well spent, especially because we aren’t going to get any more.

Batman (1966)

Director: Leslie H. Martinson

Cast: Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, man... Many, many times. Before it was released on DVD, I made do with a WGN broadcast of the film I had recorded in the summer of 1989. That screening truncated the beginning and cut entirely the scene where Batman (West) calls the Pentagon.

I had no idea what I was missing.

Did I Like It: At various times, it has been more than a little bit fashionable for Batman fans to look down their noses on the Adam West iteration of the character. There are few elements of Batman fandom—with the possible exception that every film Ben Affleck has appeared in is a criminally under-appreciated gem—that annoy me more. Adam West’s hero isn’t tortured, and he always plays fair. He is a hipster adventurer, and anyone who says the mythos of the Caped Crusader doesn’t have room for that particular hue doesn’t understand the sheer adaptability of the character which has made him a mainstay of the superhero genre for 80-plus years.

He’s also deeply, unalterably, perhaps even insanely funny. There’s room for that, too, and tragically, that is the part that Clooney’s effort in Batman & Robin (1997) never utilized. If Clooney forced himself to read every translation on an elevator button before pressing “up,” he might be the version of the hero we all were clamoring for in the forthcoming Flashpoint, but alas.

I don’t even mean to only say that West is funny relative to the rest of the Batman canon. He is supremely funny in the context of screen comedians at large. I would put the “somedays you just can’t get rid of a bomb” up there with the greatest of all time.

The film’s sense of adventure is—and someone is going to shake their head when I type this, I just know it—far greater than any other live-action feature-length version of the character. Keaton and his successors restricted themselves to a very limited stretch of Gotham (those parts which could easily fit into a backlot), Bale upgraded to a city which felt like a real place (largely, because it was), and Affleck was mostly fixated on his mother (which is saying a lot for the character), West’s Batman reckons with a world writ large, that is still somehow brought to life on nothing more than a TV budget. The film reached for a wider canvas, and therefore could underwrite expenses for the associated TV show, amplifying its scope in the process. We’d have been stuck with just a Batmobile on the show if this film hadn’t seen fit to place their characters in a larger world.

If you’re a Batman fan and not an unapologetic fan of this film, then you’re lying about one of those things. I don’t make the rules; I just enforce them.