7/2/2023 0 Comments Batman logo pop artIndeed, the cartoonist’s absorption in mass iconography anticipates filmmakers Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg Kane modeled Catwoman on Jean Harlow and got the idea for the Penguin from Kool cigarette ads. gangster flicks of the early ’30s, as well as of the comic strip Dick Tracy and pulp characters such as the Shadow. Kane has acknowledged the influence of the Universal horror and Warner Bros. The character synthesized elements of Zorro, Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes. The original Batman, created for DC Comics by Bob Kane and Bill Finger in the late 1930s, was a formidable mass-culture pastichea nocturnal crime fighter aka the Caped Crusader or the Dark Knight, equipped with a hooded, pointy-eared face-mask- cum-helmet and a secret identity. But the real joke, saved for the episode’s second installment, was the gender-blur gag in which she disguised herself as Batman’s teenage sidekick, Robin (Burt Ward). “You shake a pretty mean cape, Batman!” coos the villain’s female accomplice (future Bond girl Jill St. It opened with footage of the recently closed, Pop-identified New York World’s Fair and featured Batman (Adam West) dancing the “Batusi” at an Upper East Side disco. Guests were transported down First Avenue to the York Cinema for a “live” broadcast complete with commercials, among them one for a breakfast cereal that parodied Grant Wood’s American Gothic and, according to the New York Times, was hailed with cheers: Snap, Crackle, and Pop! (Would that the new DVD box set of the complete Batman TV series included the original commercials.)īatman’s inaugural show, “Hi Diddle Riddle,” was something of a Pop art mise en abyme. Lindsay declared the town “Fun City.” The show’s premiere, on January 12, 1966, was celebrated with a reception at Harlow’s, a fashionable discotheque on East Seventy-Ninth Street. The same month Batman went on the air, New York’s new “movie star” mayor John V. The show, initially broadcast cliff-hanger style on successive evenings, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 PM, lasted only two and a half seasonsjust a speed bump in Batman’s nearly eight-decade careerbut its goofy lèse-majesté besmirched the durable icon forever.Ĭandy colored, broadly acted, and proudly tackymaking use of a theme song by Neal Hefti that, with no lyrics save the show’s name, was a sort of abstract advertising jinglethis aggressively one-dimensional and self-conscious exercise in tinny delirium was predicated on the absurdity of costumed creatures capering about in the “real world.” Many episodes begin by establishing Gotham City by way of an actual Manhattan location, and real New York geography is occasionally acknowledged. Loved and loathed beyond measure, the televised Batman (ABC, 1966–68) arrived sufficiently late in the day to recognize itself as a manufactured craze. ≺ndy Warhol on the TV show Batman, in POPism: The Warhol ’60s (1980)īUT WHAT WAS THE JOKE? And who was the Joker? Tom Wolfe imagining Ken Kesey’s boyhood in post–World War IIĪmerica, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)Ĭamp was really being mass-marketedeveryone was in on the joke now. Ulysses, and Aeneasbut Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman. The myths that actually touched you at that timenot Hercules, Orpheus, Season 2, episode 11, “The Clock King’s Crazy Crimes.” Robin (Burt Ward) and Batman (Adam West). Batman, 1966–68, still from a TV show on ABC.
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