Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders

I have to admit upfront that I just did not have any strong reaction to this one.  So retroactively I guess I’m glad I didn’t try to do it immediately after Adam West passed.  Be sorta a crummy thing to do wouldn’t it?



Mind you Adam West was absolutely excellent in this, as were Burt Ward and Julie Newmar.  Indeed, the ease with which they slip into those old roles and bounce off each other justify the entire film easily.  The trouble I’m having is that it’s absolutely designed to be a self-aware love-fest for the ’66 show.  I’m passingly familiar with it, it was still in reruns when I was a kid and restricted to whatever came in on the antenna, but I couldn’t tell you the contents of any episode.  It just means I have some audio/visual  reference to back up general pop cultural osmosis knowledge.  But it’s not something that nostalgia bombs me all that hard.  It’s cute and you can tell they worked really hard to slip some of those references in those places, but… it’s there, being cute.  And I really feel about the same way about the barbs at the darker and grimmer Batmen of modern times; like, that’s kinda the point of the plot and… it’s cute, I see what they’re doing, it’s sorta funny for Adam West to say those things?  But it just doesn’t really carry the piece by itself.

I feel like I’d probably have a better appreciation for this if I’d watched it when it came out… because that was last fall, before a certain other Batman animated feature made a lot of those same points much better.  That’s probably the best I can peg my non-response to the film: if you don’t have a full nostalgic response to Batman ’66, what’s left is a weaker version of Lego Batman.

I’m being more negative than the film really deserves though, so… I’m going to break a bit of a personal taboo and give props to two specific jokes.  Batman gets gas to the face, and starts seeing triple… of Catwoman.  Of course they make the right joke.  During the second fight against Joker, Penguin, and Riddler, the impact sounds suddenly get dark.  And I think that did a lot more to float the story than almost anything else, because those balloon words got pretty out there.  A gag only this film could have made, and it really works.

Rating: 6/10. It’s got a standout moment or two, and doesn’t have any huge flaws, but largely just doesn’t click for me.