The Bat Symbol Throughout the Ages: A Visual History.

Some time ago I read this post about the ways that the Bat-signal has changed over time. It's an interesting meditation on the uses of said signal over the decades, and now in a time when its function could easily be replaced by the Bat-beeper or the b-Phone. In particular, I'm like the portions of the above article that discuss the way that the bat-signal of years past has functioned as an almost physical object symbolising Batman's dominance whereever it's projected. You see, I've been playing Arkham Asylum off and on since I got it in October. This may spoil part of the game for some people, but it came out in 2009, so yeah, spoilers away. Early on, Batman is exposed to Scarecrow's fear gas and experiences vivid hallucinations. This culminates in a platforming section, where the player is stalked by a gigantic manifestation of the Scarecrow whose gaze will kill you if he sees you. How this is relevant is that after reaching the top of a tower of ruins Batman defeats giant Scarecrow, for the moment. How? By shining Bat-signal onto Scarecrow that blasts him like a big freakin' laser beam.

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In the spirit of that article I linked to before the nightmares started, though with less analysis and sophistication, I present: The Bat Symbol

"Back to the Batnipples" or "The Neon of Batman"

 If anything or things are remembered about Joel Schumacher's oeuvre in the Bat-movies, they tend to be these.

Thus begins our descent into the underworld.

Back to the Batcave Part 2

And we're back.

When we left off, Batman was drugged at the wheel, and Robin's demise seemed eminent.

Now the concluding episode: Smack in the Middle

Act I

Space Medicine: Back to the Batcave

Since 1938 Batman has been adapted to the changing tastes of pop culture. In the thirties and forties he was a pulp detective/vigilante, in the eighties he was the reactionary answer to crime and urban blight, and in the late sixties he adapted to the tastes of that generation as well. In 1966 ABC began airing Batman two nights a week. Unfortunately, for complicated legal reasons, none of the series has been released in a home video format. Fortunately, some guy on YouTube called FanOfBats has a bunch of episodes online. Many people object to the series for not taking Batman seriously or just for being silly. Silly is a matter of taste. As for not taking Batman seriously, I suspect it's really a fairly recent phenomena for fans to take Batman seriously. It probably doesn't go much further back than the mid to late seventies. However, even if we are taking Batman seriously, it's a mistake to try and act like such a significant portion of Batman's cultural history just didn't happen. No matter what box one tries to fit Batman into he's bound to escape sooner or later, and then you find that you've been in his box all along.

Instead of selective amnesia, as if there's been some kind of traumatic Bat-molestation that can't, musn't, be remembered, I propose embracing the thing with all its campy deconstruction of the super hero story and off-putting attempt to be humorous, and seeing if there's actually anything we can learn from the thing.

Thus I present the full pilot episode Hi Diddle Riddle.

Act I