Supergirl

Tales From 
The Krypto

Supergirl
Directed by Craig Gillespie
USA 2026
DC Studios
UK Cinema Release Print

Warning: Very light spoilers.

Supergirl is a direct follow up to last year’s new Superman movie (reviewed here) and the second film (kinda, it’s complicated) in James Gunn’s rebooted DC Cinematic Universe... which I still think was totally unnecessary and has deprived the world of a third, stand alone Gal Gadot/Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie. So I had every reason to hate this movie going in and... not just for that. 

I mean, as we already discovered from her cameo in the last Superman movie, Kara (aka Supergirl) is a bratty teen with a bad attitude who nobody would really want to hang out with. Added to that, the trailers for this movie were terrible and made me not want to see the movie... I mean, why can nobody cut a trailer which wants you to go see a film anymore? More importantly, to what I finally thought about the movie here... why are trailers not effective at showing the true spirit of the product anymore? Are they deliberately trying to keep people in the dark (frankly, the only time when I wished they’d done that to people was when Takashi Mike’s Audition came out... I’d have much rather gone into that movie thinking it was a standard, romantic comedy but, of course, if I’d thought that then I never would have gone in at all so... it’s a conundrum)?

Anyway, for all the expectations I had of this movie... I actually loved it and, though it has its flaws, it manages to somehow do a tonal tightrope walk and really pulls it off to give a coherent story with characters who grow through their adventures and... yeah, I was certainly entertained. Even though, through pretty much the whole movie, I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak... expecting the director or somebody to screw it up and let everything down. Instead, we have a movie which leads to a quite moving ending. There may even have been a tear in my eye although, to be fair, the air conditioning in the cinema wasn’t great and I could have been responding to something else.

The film tells of a teenage girl called Ruthye, played by Eve Ridley. She sees her whole family slaughtered at the start of the film by this tale’s bad guy Krem... played somewhat charismatically by Matthias Schoenaerts. So she goes to various places on her planet, trying to ‘True Grit’ somebody into accompanying her in her quest for revenge. 

And I’m just going to pause a little here and compliment myself because, as I watched the movie I thought... yeah, revenge for hire just like in True Grit and I wondered if they even realised they were doing this. Well, when I looked up the trivia for the movie after I’d seen the film, it turns out that the original Supergirl comic this film is mostly adapted from is actually confirmed to be based on True Grit so, yay! Go me. 

Anyway, Ruthye stumbles upon Kara, aka Supergirl, played by Milly Alcock, who, like John Wayne before her, is always only a half step away from the next bottle. In fact, it’s mentioned both here and in Superman that she spends lots of time in Red Sun solar systems so she can get drunk on alcohol because, just like Superman, her powers reject intoxication when she is in a Yellow Sun environment. Anyway, she gets roped in by accident when her dog, Krypto (who is used less of a crutch in this movie and more as a catalyst), gets poisoned by Krem and has to stay with a vet as he slowly dies over three days, unless Kara can get the antidote from the bad guys. 

Shenanigans ensue, including a nice turn by Jason Momoa, somehow playing DC character Lobo and retrofitted into the story. Now, I’ve never read a Lobo comic in my life but he was all over the marketing of the DC universe in the 1990s (if I recall correctly) and, if I was being cynical, I’d question why you’d have an 18 rated character like Lobo turning up in a 12A rated movie. But, they somehow make it work and, I have to say, for a 12A movie, they do manage to push the envelope on the brutality of some of the shenanigans. I guess it’s that questionable, modern censorship issue where studios have learned they can go hard on the violence as long as they don’t show any actual blood or if the blood is a different colour. Personally, I’d rather they just raised the age rating and did it all properly but, cynically, the studios are just maximising the box office potential... I get it. I just don’t think it’s the right move. 

And the film works really well... quite surprisingly. There are a few problems, mostly around Kara’s constant and repetitive healing and weakening by red and yellow suns, depending on her situation. And the way her body rejects the Kryptonite in her system with exposure to the yellow sun does, of course, make a mockery of the whole plot because, as I wondered at the start of the movie... why doesn’t she just fly Krypto near to a yellow sun and heal him in minutes? But then we’d have no movie, I guess.

Anyhow, the performances and the well written dialogue really worked in this one and I was really surprised that I was still loving it by the end of the movie. Kara’s back story/origin and how she happens to stumble upon Krypto keeps coming in to give the audience something to believe in, with regards to the main character and, though it maybe does it one time too many, it doesn’t hurt the film so much. Tonally it feels a lot like Marvel’s Captain Marvel movie, to the point when music and song cues are structured to come and go at the same kinds of story beats, to give the longer battle scenes a kind of second wind halfway through, for example.

And that’s me done with Supergirl. I didn’t bother staying past the end credits because I read that there were no post or mid credits scenes on this one (which is a shame in this case) so I’ve no idea where the DC Cinematic Universe Mark II is going next. Two relatively good films in a row does not a franchise make (or break, for that matter) so, yeah, I guess we’ll see what happens next. 

Justice League (The Snyder Cut)

Just Ace League

Justice League (The Snyder Cut)
aka Zack Snyder’s Justice League
USA 2021 Directed by Zack Snyder
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilers here.

I’ve already reviewed Justice League once,  back in 2017 when the theatrical cut, which was mostly reshot and retooled by Joss Whedon after Zack Snyder had to drop out for tragic reasons, was released. However, this new version released, due to fan pressure and with a lot of money spent on it, allowing Snyder to reintroduce something approximating his original cut, runs over four hours long and, although the reshoots weren’t extensive, Whedon cut out and reshot so much footage for his ‘rescue version’ (which I reviewed here and didn’t like all that much... it was okay), that there was a lot of original material both left out or existing in alternate forms and that’s why the film deserves both another look and a new, if shorter, review.

So what have we got here? Visually the film looks very different. For starters it’s in a 4:3 classic, old school movie and TV ratio which, frankly, didn’t take long for me to get used to. I suspect the film may even have been shot in this ratio for reducing optically for an original widescreen release as opposed to cropping the footage down here. It looks pretty good, in fact. I don’t know why the director has done this though. I mean, I guess I can see a point for it if he wants to say he was approximating Golden Age comic book panels but, if that was the case, why weren’t his previous two DC Universe films... Man Of Steel (reviewed here)  and Batman VS Superman: Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here) also in that aspect ratio?

Secondly, the colours in this version are quite dark and muted. Not as muted and dark as they possibly are in Snyder’s alternative black and white version of this movie (which I think is only available on the UHD release) but still pretty near to as greyscale as you can get it and still have colour in it for many of the scenes.

There are pluses and minuses here too. Because of Whedon scenes which have been excised, there’s much more continuity with the previous and following films in the DC Universe. Granted, some of my favourite dialogue exchanges and action moments are gone completely but there’s a much more organic feel to the final product and its connective tissue with the other movies. That being said, a lot of the scenes which have changed are put into a completely different order. Early scenes from the first version might turn up three quarters of the way through the film and vice versa. There’s also a really problematic continuity error in this too which I can only suspect comes from the way the story now plays out. It comes when, near the final set piece of the movie, Alfred The Butler (played once again by Jeremy Irons) is introduced by Ben Affleck’s Batman to Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and Aquaman (Jason Momoa)... regardless of the fact that, in the way the film plays out here, he has already met at least two of the team by this point. It felt like a bit of a jarring mis-step, to be honest. When he meets Henry Cavill as Superman, it plays out far more naturally.

The story has been enhanced by not only featuring Steppenwolf but also Darkseid in the film as ‘the big bad super villain’ behind the scenes (much like Thanos was to Phases One and Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe). This all works really well though and, for the most part, the whole storyline involving all the previously unseen elements and the new, enhanced CGI on pretty much everything, is actually a heck of a lot better than the studio cut, I have to say. This version makes a lot more sense and is much more attention grabbing, I thought.

Other things of note are as follows...

Well, it was nice to see more action from one of the Green Lantern Corps but I think the first appearance here of J’onn J’onzz aka Martian Manhunter was problematic at best. Why in heck would he be checking out Lois Lane? His appearance at the end of the film is not something which solves this conundrum either and I think his first transformation to show he was posing as Martha Kent really undermined the scene where Martha and Lois Lane are bonding in grief over Superman’s death.

The scene where the newly formed Justice League bring Superman back from the dead is by an entirely different method and makes much more sense, integrated into the Motherbox plot line in a much more believable way... although it has pretty much the same outcome as it did in the theatrical cut, it has to be said.

The replacement music by Junkie XL is interesting. The director jettison’s Danny Elfman’s original score which had recycled John William’s Superman The Movie theme and Elfman’s  own Batman theme from the Tim Burton films and uses the established leitmotif of the current DC Universe, like Zimmer’s Man Of Steel and Wonder Woman themes, in a much more appropriate manner. Again, the music seems more integrated into the DCU movies as a whole. Alas, it’s only been released as a compromised, electronic download rather than as a proper CD so, I guess I won’t get to hear it as a stand alone listen anytime soon. Which is a shame.

All this adds up to a much more dynamic and satisfying version of Justice League, I have to admit... which was a little surprising. Also, although some of my favourite Wonder Woman/Diana Prince scenes have been excised, there are other scenes with her in and even the ones which did make their way into the theatrical cut, such as her rescue of the school kids in the Old Bailey in London, are much more interestingly handled here and seem like light years away from the Whedon cut. And Snyder even manages to restore the London skyline to something more resembling the real London, in that shot where Gal Gadot is standing by the Scales of Justice, as opposed to the more pastiched caricature of a US guess at the London skyline from the theatrical release... which is kind of nice, actually.

The last ten minutes or so are Snyder laying down the threads for what would come in what was to be his proposed continuation of the series. It’s got a lot of stuff going on and seems pretty bleak, it has to be said. It’s also there, I’m sure, just to get the fans ramped up again so he can get to make the next one but, well, it remains to be seen, I think, whether the suits at Warner Brothers are ready to indulge him or not. As it is though, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a much better movie than its predecessor and I certainly found it entertaining. It’s certainly nowhere near the best of the DC superhero movies by a long chalk but it’s pretty good and worth catching up with if superhero movies are your thing. Definitely worth another, augmented glance, for sure.

Batman The Golden Age Vol 2

Dark Knight Rising

Batman The Golden Age Vol 2
by Bob Kane, Bill Finger + Various
DC Comics
ISBN: 978-1401268084

Okay, so following my review of the first year in the career of Gotham’s first knight The Batman and his loyal chum Robin, The Boy Wonder in Batman - The Golden Age Vol 1 (reviewed here), I’ve finally read through the second year from December 1940 through to ‘Fall’ of 1941 in Batman - The Golden Age Vol 2. Now, this one collects the caped crusader’s appearances chronologically in all the issues of Detective Comics (where DC gets its name from), Batman Comic and World’s Finest Comics.

A note on that third title... this issue covers the first three issues of World’s Finest but the first issue was titled World’s Best Comics. Like the title was always known for, it features both Batman and Superman on the cover (and Robin) but, unlike the comic which springs to mind whenever the title is invoked, these weren’t team-up stories between Batman and Superman as they grew to be. Instead, each character set had their own stories within the comic so, yeah, the stories published in this volume are the Batman and Robin stories only, obviously.

Okay, so I talked about, in my last Golden Age Batman review, how Robin and self censorship had brought a more wholesome approach to the stories with the odd slip or pre-Robin appearance re-labelling here and there. This collection continues that approach and there’s not a whole lot to say about it... the stories are quite inconsequential for the most part, asides from the fact that the newly established running villains like The Joker would often return. The tales are short but the majority of them at this point are far less bloodthirsty and certainly far less whimsical than what the strip had quite quickly devolved into towards the end of the first year. That being said, there is still one story where our heroes are transported by a fantastical inventor into the pages of a book of fairy tales to rescue his daughter.

The stories may still be simplistic but the various descriptions and ‘turns of phrases’ employed by the writers at this time are anything but. For example, when Batman and Robin drop some cloth on some bad guys in a warehouse, we are told... “A Niagara of silk engulfs the thieves.” Also, I learned something from the comic in terms of language origins too. I’ve always known of the phrase when something is ‘plummeting’ to the ground but, here in the 1940s, Batman regularly, every other issue, ‘Drops like a plummet’, with plummet as a noun, which obviously extends from the use of ‘plumb bob’, although I’d never put two and two together in my mind before.

Also, the Batman is now, despite the tightrope of atmosphere that the stories tend to walk, commonly being referred to as The Dark Knight on many occasion. That is, when he’s not being described in more flowery language thusly...

“For he, in reality, is that personality known as the ‘eyes of night’... The Batman.”

The artwork is still simplistic and, many times in these early issues, the bat symbol is not always pictured on Batman’s chest in every frame. It’s like the artist just forgets sometimes. It’s also littered with references to contemporary culture but, somehow, they are often somewhat quite guarded and depicted as parodies of the real thing, such as when a cinema is depicted playing “Melody Of 1941” starring Tyrone Taylor and Myrna Rogers.

The Batmobile finally gets defined into the one generally depicted as its earliest incarnation here. For about a half of the year it still normal looking cars in different colours and sometimes open topped, sometimes covered. After a while though, we get that closed top, chunky Batmobile I always liked with the big fins and the Batman mask at the front like a gigantic hood ornament. Still no sign of the Batcave yet, though... Batman has a secret passage to a barn (the Batcave wouldn’t come until 1944, apparently).

Most of the villains are not that memorable and even The Joker is a bit pedestrian in his approach to crime, despite multiple appearances which, at this time, seem mostly saved back for the multi-story Batman issues rather than having him appear in the 'one off' stories in Detective Comics. Hugo Strange is here though and he uses a fear gas completely reminiscent of what the villainous Scarecrow is now famous for. Oddly enough, the Scarecrow’s first appearance, which I think I first read reprinted in a 100 Page Giant of Detective Comics back in the 1970s, is in issue number three of Worlds Finest and in it he absolutely has no ‘fear gas’ at all. It’s obvious by this time, though, that the writers were beginning to think more of recurring villains because he doesn’t meet an untimely demise at the end of the story.

Something else I noticed was, despite having Robin and all the ‘wholesome’ baggage that was ushered into the comic with him... and the fact that it’s quite often stated that “The Batman and Robin do not kill”, I did notice a few deaths here and there that each of these heroes have caused as an immediate consequence of their actions. For example, in Detective Comics Issue 55, Batman quite happily punches enemy agents off the roof of their dirigible to drop to their death below (presumably by dropping like a plummet, as is indicated so many times in the stories this year).

So, yeah, the tales covered in Batman The Golden Age Vol 2 don't make for the most memorable period for Batman and is not often as surreal or dark edged as the interesting ones from his 1939 beginnings... the stories are mostly flat and simplistic and the artwork is... well it’s not as bad as many of the comics at the time but it’s similarly not often anything to write home about. I get the feeling the writers and artists are just coasting on their good sales but I suspect the next couple of volumes of this will make an interesting contrast, as more regular characters and hopefully more convoluted plot lines may surface. We shall see, I guess.

Green Lantern/Green Arrow

Green Titans

Green Lantern/Green Arrow -
Hard-Travelling Heroes
By Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams
DC ISBN: 9781401280420

“In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power… Green Lantern’s light.”
Green Lantern

One of those fragmented, early childhood memories I have is from the very early seventies. I would have been maybe two or three years old but I was already into comics, especially the American superhero stuff which was a lot more intriguing than some of the British comics at the time (unless you were really into Disney). Note to parents: if you want to start your kids reading early so they are way more advanced than the other readers in class, give them comics like Superman and Batman and they’ll soon want to know what’s being said when these characters take on monsters from space and such like in the colourful drawings.

I remember I used to regularly stay with my nan and uncle for a few hours one evening a week in the early 1970s and my uncle would always be reading at least three science fiction novels at any one time plus there would be one or two comics laying around. These were mostly DC comics (although I remember those non-coded drug issues of Spider-Man turning up) which he would either pick up with the novels from a cornucopia of sci-fi, crime and sleazy novels called Comyn’s Books* in Tottenham (if I remember the name correctly... now sadly long gone) or from one of the nearby news stands or possibly the only other news stand I knew that sold American comics at The Angel, Edmonton (that news stand is also now, alas, long deceased).

Anyway, I remember one of the titles he used to read was definitely this Green Lantern/Green Arrow run of comics from 1970 and I can just about remember flicking through the first issue, number 76, and taking in the pictures. Of course, I didn’t know how important this run would become in the history of comics at the time, nor how influential but, I did love the artwork by Neal Adams (who didn’t) and I kinda knew it was very different to a lot of the other DC comics at the time because the two heroes featured on that classic cover of Green Arrow destroying Green Lantern’s power charger (yeah, like a lot of comic covers in the day, that didn't actually happen in the issue itself) were to be found inside constantly at loggerheads with each other in this and later issues. I knew something was going down here but I was too young to know what.

Of course I’ve caught up with the odd back issue of this relatively small run of about 13 issues (and short story appearances in The Flash) in the intervening decades but, somehow, not most of them and this beautiful deluxe edition hardback from DC (also available now in paperback) finally allowed me to catch up with these guys in a complete reprint of this important run of comics. Why is it important? Well… at the time it was…

The Silver Age Green Lantern, despite being mentioned in Donovan’s groovy hit song Sunshine Superman, was a failing character by this time in that sales had really hit a dip and cancellation was looming. So editor Julius Schwartz gave the character to comic book writer extraordinaire (as he would certainly be known by some after this take on the character) Dennis O’Neil, who writes not one but two introductions to this collected edition, to see if he could do something to turn around the fortunes of this ailing character. And he certainly did… taking on the political and social issues of the day and giving Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) a counter balance in the form of Oliver Queen (Green Arrow… who somehow seems to be known as just Arrow these days in TV land). The whole point was to keep away from the cosmic adventures (that didn’t quite happen but even the stories set on other worlds were metaphors for what was going on in the then and now, such as overpopulation) and to send the two emerald avengers on a road trip around America to argue out and find compromise on the issues of the day. This was no longer going to be a world of black and white problems with easy solutions… this was going to be a world of barely discernible greys when one or the other of the two title characters, sometimes both, would end up being shown that they were making bad judgements and, sometimes, they would fail to get the happy resolution they might be expected to get in any other DC superhero title at the time.

So the banner with the distinctive masthead I loved as a toddler came into being on the first issue of this legendary run, Issue 76, for the first story No Evil Shall Escape My Sight. This one starts off with an absolutely beautiful Neal Adams splash page of Green Lantern flying towards the reader over the top of some traffic in a busy New York City street while various credits are rendered in funky lettering and integrated onto the side and back of a truck. This is gorgeous stuff and demonstrated why Neal Adams was so highly regarded as an artist in his day and is still considered as very influential with his mix of realistic drawing style combined with dynamic layout design.

O’Neil’s story quickly sets the tone for what was to come as, instead of a super villain, we have Green Lantern rescuing a villainous slum landlord who is being ‘attacked’ by some kids. After he tries to do what’s right in the eyes of the law the people in the street throw cans and bricks at him to suggest their displeasure at Green Lantern’s intervention and neighbour Green Arrow gives Hal Jordan a quick lesson in the issue of Law Vs Justice. After dealing with the strips villain under circumstances written to ensure the two are still seen by readers as the ‘heroes’ of the strip, it’s proposed that Green Lantern and Green Arrow (accompanied by one of the Galactic Guardians, for a while) go on a road trip of America to explore the dark underbelly of a nation still labouring under the horrors of the war in Vietnam and turning their hand at trying, not always successfully, to find some kind of a solution or compromise to the social injustices of the day.

And that’s more or less what this run of issues did… until it finally got cancelled but, not after it got itself noticed by the rest of the comics world, for sure. This handsome tome faithfully reproduces (sadly, sans the adverts of the day) the entire run and, even now, I found myself surprised at the direction some of these issues go as the two heroes take on pollution, racial intolerance, drug dealers, political corruption and even handle religious imagery in what must have been a very risky way for the day.

In their adventures, they are often accompanied by Oliver’s on/off girlfriend Black Canary, who is very much a feminist icon, I reckon (even at three years old I was a big fan of her costume incorporating fishnet stockings). I love the way that she’s described and drawn in action here as a total powerhouse who hates violence but is forced to use it to keep the bad guys at bay. Love the pained expression on her face as she is obliged to make short work of her adversaries.

Another impressive thing is the running continuity between issues, which take place in the same real time as the issues were published (so after a few issues the guys have been on the road for six months, for instance). As the characters get injured during their various confrontations, their wounds (not to mention their emotional scars such as when Green Arrow discovers that his perpetually young sidekick Speedy has turned into a junkie), stay with them over a number of issues. Another example is when Green Arrow gets shot in the arm, for instance. He’s still complaining about that bad arm and it becomes a major plot point even in the last story in the series. This is good stuff.

I also appreciated some of the pop cultural references in the strip too. Such as when the characters are attacked by birds under the influence of a mind controlling child and Black Canary compares the incident to the Alfred Hitchcock movie version of Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds. Sure enough, there’s a wordless cameo of Hitchcock himself in the left foreground of the panel. Wonderful stuff.

This was a great and important comic and, comparing the social issues described within the pages, you’ll soon realise that many, possibly all, of these problems are still with us today… some in an even more magnified form. So, yeah, great comic and a truly lovely and respectful reprint of them can be yours to read now. Green Lantern/Green Arrow - Hard-Travelling Heroes is an absolutely excellent book and a must read for anyone who considers themselves interested in the history of the form. Grab this one while it’s still relatively easy to get hold of. You really won’t want to miss it.


*If anyone remembers this bookshop or has photos of it, please share with me on Twitter.

Batman - Return of the Caped Crusaders

Heading West to Newmar Kit

Batman - Return of the Caped Crusaders
USA 2016 Directed by Rick Morales
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B
Warning: Mild spoilers on some of the jokes.

Adam West and Burt Ward have twice before returned to the roles which made them household names in the 1960s. After the phenomenal success of the 1966 Batman TV show and its companion movie, they also returned in 1978 for the horrendous attempt at a new live action Justice League like TV show, Legends of the Superheroes (reviewed by me here) and, somewhat more successfully, playing themselves in an adventure story around a mini biopic in 2003 in Return to the Batcave (The Misadventures of Adam and Burt).

Although the Batman movie they did at the end of the first 1966 season has been fairly easy to see over the years, for many decades the TV show itself was trapped in some kind of legal hell with various companies holding bits of the rights, from what I understand. So no new merchandise, or even the shows themselves, were allowed to be sold in any format (although the bootlegs surfaced big time about seven years ago, as I recall). All this changed a few years ago when the complicated minefield of who owns what finally got unravelled, to a certain extent, and all kinds of merchandise and, of course, DVDs and Blu Ray sets, were finally released onto a mostly unsuspecting public...

And it all did phenomenally well. I used to watch the show when I was a kid so I was chomping at the bit to get clean transfers of the episodes but apparently a good deal of the tie in merchandise which they’ve been releasing over the last few years sells very well, from what I understand. This includes a Batman ‘66 comic book which continues the adventures of the TV incarnations in the medium which spawned it. Now I won’t go into just how truly ironic this is because of certain things introduced in the TV show which then became ‘Batman lore’ in the comics (I’ll save that info for when I finally get around to reviewing the TV shows) but it seems the comic is every bit the hit that the toys and gadgets released for the show were and so it maybe seems an obvious thing to do a Batman ‘66 animated movie.

I have to say, though, that until they announced Batman - Return Of The Caped Crusaders (and got it out quite quickly), I never saw that one coming!

And so we have Adam West and Burt Ward reprising the voices of Batman and Robin and, as a tasty bonus, they’ve also bought one of the original Catwoman actresses, Julie Newmar, with them. It’s quite cute, actually, when you see the three of them in the sound studio on the extras and realise that Julie was wearing pussycat ears during the recording session. She rocks! I also hear she still throws great parties, too. They also had a load of other fellows voicing the other three main super villains in this movie - namely The Joker, The Riddler and The Penguin.

Now, this is a hard review to write because it’s always going to be fun to watch a new Batman movie taking the camp style of the TV show with some of the original Bat-thespians plus other people mostly sounding like the actors they have been recast as. However, this is a mixed bat-bag in terms of my reaction to it although, for the most part, I took a really positive experience away from this. There are a couple of things that let it down, though, and I’ll get to those in a while.

So yeah, there a some things I did find lacking in this one, for sure, but what it certainly doesn’t lack is both a sense of fun, some imaginative and innovative scripting and... loads of enthusiasm and love for the original shows (it even has a Nelson Riddle-esque score). If you’re an old time Bat-fan then you won’t want to miss out on this one. Even my dad, who was the first to point out the flaws with this, seemed to be taking away something from it. There’s some great humour in here, as you would expect. And anyone who used to find the funny side in the absolutely ridiculous conclusions that Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, would leap to from the various dubious jokes, rubbish riddles and clapped out clues left for them... only to be proven right when they follow up on their loopy leads... will be happy to know that there’s more of the same here.

Yes, Robin’s “Holy...” exclamations are in here with a wonderful homage to Russ Meyer when he first sees Catwoman’s Catmobile and exclaims “Holy Faster Pussycat Kill Kill!”. Other stuff like the musical transformation into Thus Spake Zaruthustra (synonymous to many with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) when the dynamic duo fly their Bat-rocket into space, the bizarre architecture on the space station and the recreation of the ‘Bat ascent’ scene up the side of the space station are also pretty great. There are two of the famous Bat ascent sequences staged in this, though, and I was pretty disappointed that none of them featured ‘special guests’ popping out of windows to question the dynamic duo like they often did in the 1960s.

There are also some nice references to more modern, darker film and comic strip incarnations of Batman in the use of various lines of dialogue Batman uses when he gets transformed into ‘evil Batman’ by Catwoman’s ‘bat-nip’ potion and also in the use of colourful, onomatopoeia style word bursts synonymous with the Adam West show during the fight scenes. For instance, some of the words start of in the calmer sections with silly captions that read “Spork!” or “Sprang!” (the latter presumably a nice reference to golden and silver age Batman artist Dick Sprang) but when Batman becomes more ruthless and evil the bubbles change to things like “Bludgeon!” and “Pulverise!”. A similar nod and dig to one of the more modern versions of the character comes when Catwoman tries to make a deal with Batman near the end of the movie and tells him she’ll give herself up if he’ll give it all up and run off to Europe with her so they can drink tea in a café. They all agree however, that this would be a bad ending for their story... thus getting in a nice little poke at Christopher Nolan’s ending to The Dark Night Rises.

Another great joke to the format of the original show is where someone switches their TV camera to “fight” mode which just tilts said camera to coincide with those whacky, Dutch angles the old series would often employ to capture the action sequences. My favourite moment, however, is when Batman gets hit over the head in front of the Julie Newmar Catwoman and his vision goes funny so that he sees three of the Catwoman in front of him... however, the joke is that, with Julie in the middle, the other two images are of Lee Merriweather and Eartha Kitt’s incarnations of the character from the originals. Neat stuff.

However, there are a few little things which really let this move down for me, too. Adam West’s delivery, unlike Burt or Julie, sounded just a little slow throughout. Now, my guess is he wasn’t doing anything different with his voice to how he used to play it years ago and I suspect when you see the actual actor delivering the lines it looks fairly terrific but, when you put it against a flat cartoon, it kinda loses something in translation.

Also, the look of the characters and the way they sound caused problems for me in certain cases. Why do they have a fairly respectable looking Chief O’ Hara and the fake Irish voice to go with him, for example, when Commissioner Gordon, who also sounds like his 1966 TV counterpart, is drawn absolutely nothing like him and is, instead, the classic looking Commissioner Gordon, recently recreated quite well in the Nolan movies. Similarly, some of the villains sound great... the people doing the voices for Cesar Romero’s Joker and Frank Gorshin’s Riddler, for example, sound really quite good. So why does The Riddler look nothing like him? I’m not even going to mention The Penguin here.

Which brings me to my real problem with Batman - The Return Of The Caped Crusaders. I haven’t seen any other recent Warner Animation movies as yet but f they’re anything like this then I may find myself steering clear. The animation is lousy. It’s not quite as bad as mid 1970s ‘made for America by Koreans’ cartoons but... it’s not that far off either. I kept waiting for someone to blink a bit to make it look like it was less lifeless. Now, I appreciate that because of the kitsch material the movie takes as its source, there was probably a conscious decision to simplify the animation style but, seriously, if you compared this to a 1940s Max Fleischer Superman short, the Fleischer would win every time. Now, as it happens, I think if you compared the 1940s Fleischer stuff to ‘any’ animation made in the last 30 or more years, the new stuff is going to come up short but, seriously, I was not enthralled by the animation on this one... even when they had some great visual gags on, for instance, the transition Bat-symbol scenes through certain parts of the running time.

All in all,  however, Batman - The Return Of The Caped Crusaders is still a big bag of fun and, once you can forget the not so great animation, you should be in for a good time with it. We even have Batman dancing the Batusi in the end credits, with occasional variants on the famous Batman The Movie “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.” scene (although, again, you have to really know the movie and the 1966 character to get why things like this, with no other reference in the body of the current story, are here at all). If you were into the show in the 60s or were lucky enough to catch the 1970s repeats, like me, then you might want to spend some time with this fun, if a little flawed, tribute to those simpler times. If you have no interest or familiarity with the originals (nor why the originals came out in the first place... referenced nicely in this cartoon with the costumes from the 1943 and 1949 serials hanging up in the Batcave)... then you might be better off going straight to those originals before heading into this one.