Long before Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan ever thought of bringing the Dark Knight to the silver screen, 20th Century Fox decided to capitalize on the wild success of the ‘60s Batman series with a full-length film. It was shot during the break between the first and second seasons on a budget of $1,377,800, which was pretty paltry even for back then. But hey, just because a movie is made on the cheap doesn’t mean it can’t be good—Psycho, made six years earlier, famously had a budget of just one million dollars. Is this film anywhere near as brilliant as Psycho? Don’t be silly. Is it one heck of a fun ride? You bet your Bat-boots it is!
So the movie
begins with some crazy credits where the main characters are introduced while Random
Man in Trench Coat runs around. And he
never shows up in the movie. That pretty
much sets the tone for the whole film—randomness! Woohoo!
The movie
actually starts with the narrator expositing about the recent disappearance of
a yacht carrying famous British inventor Commodore Schmidlapp (sp?!!) and his most
recent invention. (Yes, the invention
becomes important later on. No, they
don’t feel like telling us what is it right now.) Batman and Robin make use of
a new Bat-vehicle, the Bat-copter, to investigate. This film marks the debut of two new Bat-vehicles—the Bat-boat,
which will be put to good use later, and the Bat-copter, which the Dynamic Duo
uses now to rendezvous with the yacht. (The Bat-cycle appears in this movie as
well, but it already made its first appearance in “The Penguin Goes
Straight/Not Yet He Ain’t” back in Season One.)
I hope you enjoy these vehicles, because this is where the majority of
the film’s budget went.
With the
exposition all done, we arrive at the first of the two iconic scenes that this
movie is remembered for: Batman attempts to lower himself down to the yacht via
the Bat-ladder attached to the Bat-copter (might want to get used to those
prefixes) only for the yacht to vanish into thin air. Batman ends up treading water, and by the
time Robin manages to pull him back up, this happens.
Although this does bring up the question… why does Batman carry all these ocean animal-related sprays in a helicopter? Shouldn’t they be in the Bat-boat where he’d be more likely to actually encounter a shark? What good does it do in a helicopter? Of course, this befuddling Bat-puzzle was solved in 2009 with the release of the Asylum film Mega-Shark versus Giant Octopus.
Oh, and then the
shark blows up. Guess we all know where
Spielberg stole that idea from, the
hack.
A press
conference follows the shark incident, but Batman dodges all questions on the
subject (no wonder he did so well as a politician in Season Two). He won’t even respond to the sexy Russian
girl reporter, so you know the situation is dire. After Chief O’Hara chases out the reporters,
Batman explains that the real yacht must have been hijacked during the shark
incident/distraction, and we learn that Penguin, Joker, Riddler, and Catwoman
are all out of jail. The heroes decide
that the four crooks are in cahoots in a scene so convoluted it makes Ben Gates
look like a preschooler.
 |
| Batman: "Pretty... FISHY what happened to me on that ladder..." Gordon: "You mean where there's a fish there could be a Penguin?" Robin: "But wait! It happened at sea! See? C for Catwoman!" *et cetera* |
We then follow the
sexy Russian girl reporter to a sleezy looking tavern on the waterfront. Turns out the tavern is just a front for the headquarters
of the United Underworld (membership: 4), and the reporter is really Catwoman
in disguise. Much to the disappointment
of fanboys everywhere, Julie Newmar has been temporarily replaced in the role. Most of the sadness should be cured when they
learn that former “Miss America” Lee Meriwether has taken the part—and the
skintight cat suit—instead. In terms of
performance, however… well, we’ll save that for the end.
Inside the HQ,
the four Rogues are not getting on very well, still disappointed as they are by
the failure of what the Riddler calls the “trained exploding shark.” Wait… Penguin trained a shark to blow itself up in
calculated suicide for a greater cause? …I’m
not even touching that one; you guys have fun with it. The Rogues do have Schmidlapp held captive
and clueless, but now they worry that Batman may figure out the secret behind
the disappearing yacht.
Sure enough, at
the exact same time (OMG what a coincidence), the Dynamic Duo discovers a buoy
in the place where the yacht should have been and take their second new
vehicle, the Bat-boat, out to investigate.
They find the buoy, which is equipped with giant projection lenses that
are perfect for mirage-casting. Beneath
is an empty shark cage, where the crooks apparently fed the thing TNT and then
sicced it on Batman. I’m not going to
question it, and neither are you. Let’s
just move on to the Penguin’s submarine… what?
It makes sense! Penguins swim! Now if he had an airplane, I’d call shenanigans.
United
Underworld uses their totally logical submarine to spy on the Caped Crusaders
and, when the time is right, magnetize the buoy. This causes Batman and Robin’s utility belts
to get stuck to the buoy, just as the sub shoots torpedoes at them (le gasp). Batman’s one plan to get out of it fails, and
they are both blown to smithereens. The
end!
Or
so our Rogues think.
 |
| Robin: "Gosh, Batman... the nobility of the almost-human porpoise..." Batman: "True, Robin. It was noble of that animal to hurl himself into the path of that final torpedo. He gave his life for ours." |
Well. I have nothing to say to that. I think I’ll take a “fall off my chair in a
laughing fit” break, so if you’ll excuse me?
I won't be long. Feel free to join me, if you like.
…
There. Don’t you feel better now that all that
laughter isn’t bottled up inside?
Batman
contacts the Navy to see if they sold any pre-atomic submarines to anybody lately. Turns out they did, and the purchaser was
“some chap named P.N. Guin.” Your tax
dollars at work, people. I can just
imagine what this guy is gonna tell us wife when he gets home tonight—“Guess
what, honey! I sold a supervillain the
means to destroy the planet AND got scolded by Batman for it! Hey, are we having meatloaf again?”
Anyway,
next thing we know, a missile shoots out of the water, explodes, and leaves two
riddles in sky writing. (Seriously? After the porpoise, you’re going to question this?) Back at police headquarters, they
solve the riddles to deduce that Joker, Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman are…
working… together… um… didn’t we already deduce that? But hey, we now know that their objective is to take over the world… somehow…
At
the Rogues’ headquarters, the four of them are feuding yet again. Kinda makes you wonder why they decided to
team up in the first place, if they can’t stand being in the same room. Riddler comes up with a plan to have
Catwoman, in her guise as Russian journalist Miss Kitka, kidnap a millionaire,
who will then become bait for a Bat-trap.
Hmmm, I wonder which millionaire will be selected for the job...?
Through her awesome G-rated powers of seduction, Catwoman convinces Bruce that her life is in danger. While purring every other sentence. He arranges a date with Miss Kitka and has Robin and Alfred follow them to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong.
At first, everything goes fine, but then Bruce and Kitka get into a Bad Pick-Up Line Contest (Bruce wins in a landslide: “This curtain which separates our countries is so foolish. If we could just contrive some way of getting more intimately involved with each other…”). Robin decides to have mercy on us and turns off the security camera that they apparently hid in the carriage that the couple is riding in. Bruce then asks if he can see her home, and she accepts.
There are more bad pick-up lines and worse poetry readings (if my date tried to seriously recite Poe at me, I’d be outta there so fast…), and Robin doesn’t wanna see that either and turns off the security camera that they apparently hid in her borrowed penthouse apartment. Stalker much? It’s when Robin isn’t looking that the crooks come flying in on jetpack umbrellas.
Bruce fights the Rogues’ stunt doubles for a little while, but it ends with him (and Kitka, supposedly) being kidnapped. The next morning, the crooks are getting antsy because Batman hasn’t shown up to save the two yet. I WONDER WHY. Bruce decides to take matters into his own hands and tricks the villains into untying him, which leads to another fight scene and one of the thugs getting blown up by an exploding octopus. Sheesh, I hope PETA hasn’t heard about this movie. Exploding sharks, torpedoed porpoises, blasted octopi… what’re they gonna do next? Do battle with swordfish swords and tuna shields?
Bruce tries to rescue Miss Kitka, but she has mysteriously vanished, so he goes home alone and continues the investigation from there. The crooks, meanwhile, are cooking up a Plan C to obliterate Bats. It’s also here that we finally discover what Commodore Schmidlapp’s all-important invention is—a Total Dehydrator that sucks all the moisture out of the human body (in this case, the bodies of Penguin’s five Human Guinea Pigs) and reduces humans to dust. Why anyone would think such an invention would lead to anything BUT utter chaos is anyone's guess. Batman and Robin arrive at the tavern not long afterwards and find not the dehydrated henchmen but a giant bomb. And this, of course, leads to the film’s other famous sequence—the running-around-the-dock-trying-to-dispose-of-the-bomb-but-constantly-encountering-people-too-stupid-and-or-ignorant-to-get-out-of-the-way scene. We got your standard nuns, young lovers, a mother and baby, wooden ducks…
 |
| Batman: "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!" |
The bomb goes off, but Batman manages to toss it just in time. While he and Robin are despairing over the lack of clues, the Penguin approaches them in a very bad Schmidlapp disguise. To prove his identity, they rip off the disguise and… no. No, they don’t. They take him to the Batcave to examine his retinal eye patterns. Makes total sense. Once there, the Penguin rehydrates his pirates and sics them on our intrepid investigators. Unfortunately, using heavy water—officially known as deuterium oxide, or so says my trusty wiki search—to rehydrate the pirates makes them highly unstable, and the moment they get punched they are reduced to… antimatter. *sigh* Okay, look.
As its name
suggests, antimatter is the exact opposite of matter. For every matter particle, there is a
matching antimatter particle. There is
very, very little antimatter floating around our universe, largely because putting
matter and antimatter together will result in an earth-shattering kaboom. So if those pirates really did turn into
antimatter, they would not be safely whisked away to an antimatter universe (or
whatever happened to them—it’s rather eerily left vague), they would blow up
and take the Batcave with them. I’m also
fairly certain you can’t destabilize a person’s entire system quite that badly
just by replacing all the regular water with deuterium oxide. Granted, it would suck to be them, and they’d
all die within days if not hours due to the deuterium futzing around with their
biochemistry, but they would not spontaneously combust.
Yes, that’s right folks, I defended exploding marine animals, jetpack umbrellas, and pointless eye exams, but the moment they start mucking about with something vaguely resembling actual science, I feel the need to get up on a Bat-soapbox and rant. And I might as well get this out of the way, while we’re still in rant mode.
The human body is mostly water. Therefore, there should be a much bigger water tank on the Total Dehydrator to make it capable of holding all of the water from a bunch of grown men. I think the movie shows like half a cup for each of them or something. That is not healthy.
Anyway, after the non-fight, Batman plays along with Penguin’s charade, pretending that “Schmidlapp” was under the influence of hypnosis when he brought the pirates to the Cave and rehydrated them. They start the drive back to the city, and Penguin knocks them both out with Penguin-gas and steals the car. Thankfully, Batman and Robin took their Anti-Penguin Gas Pills and are ready and raring to go with the help of the Bat-cycle, which is conveniently placed right where they need it. They go riding off to the Bat-copter, which they use to track the Batmobile and, therefore, Penguin.
Riddler, meanwhile, can’t resist the urge to send up another riddle-bearing Polaris missile. By the craziest of coincidences (yeah, there’s a lot of that in this movie), the missile just happens to hit the Bat-copter, which is sent spinning out of the sky and causes the Rogues to yet again believe they have done in the Dynamic Duo. You’d think they’d get a clue by now, but nope! Our heroes have landed on a bed of foam rubber at a foam rubber wholesalers’ convention. Is there really that big of a fanbase for foam rubber that they need an entire convention devoted to it?
The two riddles left by the Polaris missile lead our heroes to the United
Meanwhile, United Underworld sneaks in through the back door of the U.W.O. Building just as Penguin arrives independently. They meet up and go after the Security Council, where everyone is yelling at each other in their native tongues and getting nothing at all accomplished. Political commentary! None of the Council members notice as the Joker begins to dehydrate them, one by one, and the Rogues manage to get away from Batman by threatening to kill Miss Kitka if he doesn’t let them go.
Back on the sub, the Rogues celebrate their victory, right up until they notice the Bat-Boat is following. They send up a homing missile to blow them up, and now that there are no porpoises around to save their butts, Batman actually has to do something and jams the signal himself. They then up the ante by shooting bat-charges at their foes with the Bat-Charge Launcher. (Well, what else would you shoot bat-charges with???) The submarine is forced to surface, Batman and Robin climb aboard, and the last fight scene of the film ensues. It’s during this scene that the production values really make themselves known. I’m not sure how well this will show up in a screencap, but I’m posting it anyway.
See that little white bit I circled? That’s where the waves are washing up against the backdrop. On the other hand, who’s paying attention to the wall when there’s a groovy pool party going on in the foreground?!!
This dude.
Turns out the water was actually pretty shallow, and when he went flying into the drink, he hit his head on the bottom and nearly drowned. He recovered just fine, but still. Don’t let a kid in short pants push you into shallow water, is all I’m saying.
The only person not participating in the fight is Catwoman. Because women, of course, are completely worthless on the battlefield, she just runs around randomly pushing people off the sub whenever she can sneak up behind them. When the fight turns in the heroes’ favor, she flees below deck only to end up tripping, which causes the mask to fall off and—GASP—reveal that she and Miss Kitka are one and the same!! Batman is heartbroken and—wait. Wasn’t Bruce Wayne in love with Kitka? Why should Batman be broken up about it? I don’t think he ever met Miss Kitka! Way to give away your secret identity, knucklehead. But turnabout is fair play—Batman couldn’t figure out who Catwoman really is, and she can’t figure out who Batman really is, either.
All is well until Schmidlapp comes in and trips right into the dehydrated Security Council, sneezing all over them.
Gesundheit.
Batman and Robin take the mixed up dust and try to sort it out and rehydrate the men while the world anxiously awaits the results. No point in keeping you all in suspense—they succeed, and the public is so happy that they begin cheering before the announcement of their victory is actually made.
 |
| Like a full second after this picture, the intercom comes on: "Success! Success!" |
This film was released in July 1966, and as you can guess it was absolutely NOT supposed to be taken seriously by anyone over the age of twelve. That's why I spent so little time actually criticizing this movie: because the whole thing is one big punchline that was never supposed to stand up to scrutiny. It's silly on purpose. Apparently, quite a few people agree with me, since it's gotten good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and such. I have to admit, though, that if I had to choose between watching this movie and watching some of the better episodes of the series, I’d have to go with the episodes.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the film was hilarious. The dialogue must be heard to be believed, and it does capture the essence of the series as well as the Silver Age comics. Most of the cast give their usual spot-on performances, but Lee Meriwether is definitely my least favorite of the show’s Catwomen—not because she’s bad, mind you, because she really isn’t. But after the powerhouse performance we got from Julie Newmar in Season One (not to mention Eartha Kitt’s equally-powerhouse-but-completely-different performance in Season Three), Meriwether falls a bit flat. She just doesn’t have enough of Newmar’s playfulness and/or Kitt’s edge (and purr!) to keep up with her peers.
No, my main
problem is that it kind of gets repetitive after a while. The whole thing can be summed up as “villains
act villainous, think they’ve killed the heroes, discover they haven’t, rinse
and repeat”—which, to be fair, is generally the plot of the episodes, but each
pair of episodes is only an hour long compared to the movie’s 105 minutes. And really, that’s all this movie is: four
episodes of the series strung together except with fewer fight scenes. That, as opposed to the obvious stunt doubles
and crazy leaps in logic (both of which I find amusing), is my main beef with this
movie. There isn’t really any justification for its existence. Then again, there’s no justification for the
existence of “Achy Breaky Heart” either, but I enjoy that too (in a completely
different way). The formula that worked
so well for the show doesn’t translate well to the big screen. But as long as you can shut off your brain
and just accept it for the goofy camp fest that it is, you should have no
trouble enjoying yourself.
So yeah, not the
best Batman movie ever but awesome nonetheless, especially considering it would
go on to be ripped off by the likes of Asylum. You can’t argue with a
legacy like that.
Next Time: They can dance, they can fly, and
they can reach to the sky, but if somebody doesn’t teach them what the word
“flight” actually means, Gonzo’s gonna have to start smacking people.
Images from Batman: The Movie and Mega-Shark versus Giant Octopus (by way of Bad Movie Beatdown)
No comments:
Post a Comment