Wonderfully absurd film-length version of the popular TV series, featuring all of the main characters from that timeless show. You get to see the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the Riddler (Frank Gorshin) and the Joker (Cesar Romero) all working together on an evil plan involving dehydrating members of the United World Organization’s Security Council to a test tube’s worth of dust. Catwoman is also involved, this time played by Lee Meriwether (rather than Julie Newmar or Eartha Kitt from the television version). It’s a pleasure to see her pretending to be Soviet journalist Kitayna Ireyna Tatanya Kerenska Alisoff in order to woo the unsuspecting Bruce Wayne.
As with the TV programme, it’s visually colourful to an extraordinary level, with bright greens and purples bringing out a psychedelic feel. It’s playful and inventive, too, with camera angles as crooked as the crooks themselves used whenever the villains are on screen.
The humour emerges from how seriously Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward) take themselves and their crime-fighting. They are stiff, moralistic “straights” in direct contrast to the loose, thrill-seeking baddies.
Stand-out moments include Batman trying to dispose of a bomb as the fuse burns down (wherever he turns, there’s a nun or a baby or a young couple or a family of ducks in his way) and Batman trying to fend off a shark that bites his legs as he dangles in the sea from the Batcopter. (He only survives because Robin climbs down the ladder and passes him a can of shark-repellent spray.)
The frivolous wit is refreshing. When Batman was reinvented in 1989 as a “moody”, troubled character in line with the “darker” comic origins, it all seemed tiresomely po-faced.
