A clock ticks at an unvarying pace, and yet our subjective experience of time can vary widely. Wait in line for something, and time seems to drag. Hustle to meet a looming deadline, and time seems to fly by rapidly. And a day packed full of interesting events can feel longer – in a good way – than an average day.
So it is on this first Saturday I spent at Manhattan’s Museum of Television and Radio’s retrospective “Look! Up at the Screen! It’s Superheroes on Television!” (To learn more about the retrospective, go to www.mtr.org.)
In this afternoon’s screening in the museum’s main theatre, “Comic-Book Classics,” I’d already seen the premiere of The Adventures of Superman from the 1950s and an episode of The Incredible Hulk from the 1970s. These led up to the most celebrated – and infamous – superhero television show of all: the live action Batman show of the 1960s.
The Museum has numerous Batman episodes in its collection, but on previous visits I’ve made there, if the Museum is showing Batman in one of its screening rooms, it invariably selects the first Catwoman two-parter, “The Purr-fect Crime”/”Better Luck Next Time” (1966 episodes directed by Hanmes Shedon and written by Stanley Ralph Ross and Lee Orgel). And here it is again as one of the “Comic-Book Classics.” Perhaps simple inertia motivated the choice, and it is indeed a good pair of episodes, but it also was appropriate to show them in the summer that Warner Brothers released its new Catwoman movie. This also gives me the opportunity to compare and contrast Catwoman’s depiction on television and in the movies in this week’s column and next week’s.
I’ve always liked the better episodes of the 1960s Batman TV series, most of which are in its first season, though its comedic approach is hardly my first choice for a treatment of the character.
The Museum’s pamphlet for the retrospective notes that the Batman live action show “introduces the concept of ‘camp’ to mainstream audiences and dazzles the eye with its pop art-derived visuals – most surprising, considering the character’s violent, grimly realistic origins in comic books.”
Well, first, it’s not “surprising” at all. Once again, the Museum is demonstrating that its staffers are nowhere nearly as knowledgeable about the superhero genre as they think they are. Yes, indeed, Batman’s origin, as first presented in 1940, is “violent” and “grimly realistic.” Starting around 1970 editor Julius Schwartz, writer Denny O’Neil, artist Neal Adams, and others returned Batman to his original role as the grim, driven avenger in a noir world, and that interpretation has prevailed in movies, television series and comics about the character ever since.
But this version of Batman was nowhere in evidence in 1966, when this TV show began. Batman debuted as a grim vigilante in 1939, but within a year his series – and the character himself – were becoming, well, cheerier. You can see the transition in 1940’s Batman #1, which showcases the first Joker story, depicting the character as a macabre serial killer, and a tale with Batman’s early archnemesis, Professor Hugo Strange, in which Batman actually fires guns at enemies. But Batman #1 also contains the very first Catwoman story. Here she hasn’t yet adopted the “Catwoman” name or a costume; she’s simply a mysterious jewel thief called the “Cat.” Dazzled by her beauty, Batman lets her go, and the story ends with Batman leaning back, smiling, as he thinks about her. This is hardly the implacable nemesis of criminals we see today.
As the comics series continued through the 1940s into the early 1960s, Batman was often shown wearing a wide grin, joking back and forth with Robin as they clobbered criminals. Their world too became less dark: for example, the Joker evolved from a grim serial killer to the jolly criminal prankster, who might still want Batman and Robin dead, but otherwise just wanted to rob banks and get rich. Since superhero comics were then aimed at children, it’s no surprise that the original, “grimly realistic” intentions of Batman’s creators were quickly diluted. Surely the public uproar against comics, including “crime comics,” in the 1950s also had an effect on how “violent” Batman stories could be.
Just a few days ago I read through Mark Evanier’s third commendable compilation of his past columns, with the startling title Superheroes in My Pants, from TwoMorrows Publishing, and in it he traces Batman‘s downward slide in the comics. Batman acquired a “family” including Batwoman and the original Bat-Girl, and even Bathound and the magical imp Bat-Mite; he underwent ludicrous physical transformations into the Zebra Batman (with stripes!), and the like; he fought extraterrestrials and traveled through time.
So by the early 1960s the Batman comic was decidedly silly. When editor Julius Schwartz took over Batman and Detective Comics in 1964, he made the series considerably more serious, reaching out, as he always did, to the more smarter readers. But many years of damage had already been done to the Batman series. In the 1960s Schwartz at DC and, simultaneously, Stan Lee at Marvel, were giving the superhero genre more sophistication, intelligence and depth. But at that period very few adults considered superhero comics any more than rather silly juvenile entertainments.
So it’s not a surprise that the creators of the Batman live action show thought that, too. Mired in the conventional wisdom of their time, they did not perceive the more serious direction in which comics were evolving. Instead they were out to parody superhero comics as they had existed for over two decades from an adult perspective. They were utterly blind to the potential that Batman had as a mythic figure for adults, about whom serious narratives could be created.
It is true that the live action Batman series was the first television series that intentionally adopted a “camp” style. This may need explanation, since “camp” strikes me as one of those words that are continually used in ways that dilute their actual meaning. (I am convinced that the vast majority of people who use the word “deconstruct” have no idea what this term from literary theory actually means.) It seems that not a week goes by without TV Guide describing a sitcom or a movie or an actor’s performance as “campy.” From the context of such references, it seems the writers think “campy” means a broad, comedic performance.
But, consulting the dictionary software that came with my computer, I find that “camp” as a noun, when it isn’t referring to a place, means the following:
1. An affectation or appreciation of manners and tastes commonly thought to be artificial, vulgar, or banal.
2. Banality, vulgarity, or artificiality when deliberately affected or when appreciated for its humor.
And “camp” as an adjective therefore means, “Having deliberately artificial, vulgar, banal, or affectedly humorous qualities or style.”
Those who attempt to write in the superhero genre seriously utilize its fantasy elements as metaphors for aspects of real life. However unrealistic the genre’s outer trappings may be, such writers strive to give the characters and stories a core of emotional reality.
In its “camp” treatment of the superhero genre, this Batman television series’ creators moved in the opposite direction. They stressed – or “deliberately affected” – its unreality, and hence its “artificiality”; perceiving no serious artistic merit to Batman stories, they regarded them as “banal.” These creators chose to play Batman for comedy, so it could be “appreciated for its humor.”
At its best, though, the Batman show was somewhat more complex. It surely owed its initial massive popularity to the fact that it could be appreciated on two levels. The show’s initial approach to the material was tongue in cheek, but straightfaced. Indeed, a number of the first season’s episodes were direct adaptations of stories from the comics. Younger viewers who took the superhero genre seriously could follow the episodes as heroic adventures; adult viewers who were in on the joke could enjoy the satiric style in which the material was written and played.
In my own first encounters with the show, growing up, I was aware of the obvious attempts at comedy (e. g., Batman dancing the “batusi” at a disco), but appreciated the elements of the comics series that the show got right. In the second season, as if trying to up the comedic ante, the stories became more blatantly ludicrous, the show lost the balance it had maintained, and ratings plunged. Presumably adult audiences grew weary of the basic joke of finding superheroes silly, and the young audiences who sought a real superhero adventure show could no longer ignore the overwhelming silliness.
Nowadays, watching Batman episodes at the Museum or on cable, I pick up on subtler humorous elements that I missed when I was growing up. In this Catwoman two-parter, for example, there’s a bit with Batman donning rubber gloves over his Batman gloves to work with radioactive material. The director and actors don’t draw attention to this throwaway bit of absurdity, but it’s there to be spotted by the attentive viewer. At another point Batman waits patiently in line, like any ordinary citizen, to buy admission tickets for the Gotham City exposition where Catwoman will strike. Adam West’s marvelous deadpan manner as Batman itself symbolizes the balance the show struck at its best: he would deliver absurd dialogue, but with apparent seriousness. At another point in the Catwoman two-parter Robin exclaims that he and Batman could’ve been killed. “Or worse!” adds Batman, leaving it to the more discerning viewers to wonder what he could possibly mean by that and, as the Museum screening’s audience did, laugh aloud.
Articles and reviews of the Batman television show in the 1960s fastened on classifying it as camp. But what we did not see mentioned in the show’s publicity is that “camp” is regarded as an element of gay sensibility. People didn’t talk about such things openly back then, certainly not in articles about a TV series that would be watched by millions of children. Considering Dr. Fredric Wertham’s tirades in the 1950s that Batman and Robin were actually a gay couple, it seems even stranger in retrospect that a Batman show that embraced the designation of camp made it to network TV in the 1960s, in time slots aimed at family audiences.
In its library the Museum has a video copy of a seminar it held about the Batman show in 1995, featuring Adam West, actresses Julie Newmar (who played Catwoman), Yvonne Craig (who played Batgirl), and writers Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Stanley Ralph Ross (the show’s principal Catwoman scripter). But not even in this seminar was the gay aspect of “camp” addressed.
The Museum’s “Superheroes on Television” finds the answer in noting that the Batman show “introduces the concept of ‘camp’ to mainstream audiences. . . .” The show represents the co-opting of the concept of “camp” by the mainstream entertainment industry, which proceeded to water it down. This was “camp” for the heterosexual majority of all ages, who did indeed flock to the show in its first season, and hardly like, say, purer examples of camp like the John Waters movies to come.
Similarly, as the Museum brochure observes, the Batman TV show visuals were influenced by pop art; the famous visualized sound effects (“Bam!” “Pow!”) are the clearest example of this. But what the Batman show does is hardly on the same artistic level as Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol’s appropriation of comics artwork.
In both the cases of “camp” sensibility and pop art, the Batman show represents the mainstream absorption of avant-garde concepts, with only limited comprehension of the originators’ intents, and coming up with thinner, blander versions that the mass audience would find palatable.
When the 1960s Batman was the only version of the character on film or television (apart from the earlier Columbia serials and later Saturday morning animated cartoons of the 1960s and 1970s), there was much more justification for comics fans to disapprove of it. Surely the show did not persuade the mainstream audience that superheroes were silly characters that only children took seriously; that was already the general opinion. But the 1960s Batman certainly reinforced that opinion, making it harder for comic books of any sort to be taken seriously. Now, thanks to Tim Burton’s Batman movies and Warner Bros. Animation’s subsequent television series, a new image of Batman has finally supplanted the 1960s TV Batman in the public mind. Now that the ’60s TV show no longer defines Batman, the show can be more easily appreciated for its own merits.
Still, the ’60s show made such a strong, lasting impression on the public consciousness that its influence on the mainstream’s attitude towards comics still continues to be felt here and there. Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies seemed out to fuse the “camp” treatment of the character with Burton’s darker vision, with disastrous results. And even the Museum of Television and Radio seems stuck in the “camp” approach to the genre. Its exhibition of superhero artwork in the first floor gallery is decorated with “Pow”-style sound effect balloons, and, as we shall see, the retrospective’s programming signals a steadfast refusal to recognize an adult approach to the genre that is not satiric.
The Warners Animation Batman shows are nowhere to be found here.
It’s fun to view the Museum show Batman episodes on a theater-sized screen, far larger than the shows were designed to be seen on. This can work to the show’s disadvantage: on a big screen the caverns in the background in Catwoman’s “death” scene are revealed as a rather shoddy painted backdrop. On the other hand, on a small 1960s TV screen one could not see the detail that the set designers put into the rooms at Stately Wayne Manor, or all the cat-themed bric-a-brac in Catwoman’s lair. It’s also fun, and revealing, to watch the shows with an audience and hear where the laughs come.When I first saw the Batman TV show, I’d only been to New York City, the model for Gotham City, once. Watching episodes today it seems so obvious that this show unintentionally moves Gotham City to Southern California. This is a Gotham virtually without skyscrapers! Often we’re shown the Batmobile driving along streets lined with buildings only a few stories tall. Much of the second Catwoman episode is shot on a roadside location that looks far more Californian than East Coast to me, even apart from the brilliant sunshine.
Whereas the Penguin two-parter I reviewed in a previous installment (see Comics in Context #34) was a political satire, “The Purr-fect Crime” and its rhyming second part don’t have any specific satirical target other than superhero comics themselves.
With few exceptions (like King Tut and the Bookworm), the TV show did not create successful villains of its own, but (with the notable exception of the Joker), it repeatedly came up with imaginative takes on the costumed villains it borrowed from the comics. In Catwoman’s case, the TV show represents a major step in her evolution that has effects lasting through the present day.
First, editor Julius Schwartz had not revived Catwoman since taking over the Bat-books in 1964; he actually rarely used costumed villains in Batman or Detective until the TV show came along. Moreover, she had been little used in the later years of Jack Schiff’s previous editorial regime. Perhaps the TV show’s creators found out about her from the same recent Batman Annual that reprinted the story that introduced Mr. Zero, who became the show’s Mr. Freeze. This annual reprinted a remarkable Sunday sequence from the old Batman newspaper strip in which the Catwoman, first appearing in her boudoir as a slinky 1940s Caniff/Eisner femme fatale, leads Batman in a cross-country chase.
The TV show considerably updated Catwoman’s look in a way that heightened her sexuality. Catwoman’s traditional costume in the comics included a cowl with round ears, a cape, and a billowing, floor-length gown with a cape. Despite the slit on the side of the skirt, this was a costume that hid her figure rather than revealing it. It was an imposing look, but not an erotic one, certainly not from a 1960s perspective. Then again, the comics writers and artists of that time saw themselves as aiming at children.
The TV show’s creators, on the other hand, also wanted an adult audience. They cast actress Julie Newmar in the role and put her in a skin-tight black “catsuit.” Despite its cat-like ears (now pointed), this costume doesn’t look absurd. In “The Purr-fect Crime” we are initially given only glimpses of Catwoman’s gloved hands, amid darkness, building up suspense to the shot that finally reveals her, full face and figure, in bright light. With her spectacular build, Newmar in costume looks impressive, indeed. And the TV show’s creators know it, not only holding a long time on this initial shot but also repeating it in a freeze frame in the second episode’s introductory recap.
(Moreover, Newmar provides a spectacle designed to last. Elsewhere in Mark Evanier’s Superheroes in My Pants he has a column, titled “A Stupefyin’ Evening,” in which he describes seeing a concert performance of the Broadway musical Li’l Abner. Newmar appeared in the original 1956 production and the 1959 film version as Stupefyin’ Jones, the very sight of whom literally stopped men in their tracks. She recreated the role in this 1995 revival and, as Mark says, “She was wearing a flesh-colored body stocking and the audience was. . .well, stupefied” by how little she’d changed over the decades. I saw a performance, too, and can confirm Mark’s report. Maybe like Catwoman, Newmar has nine lives, too.)
It makes sense that since Batman wears a skin-tight costume, Catwoman could, too. When Schwartz finally did bring Catwoman back in the comics, she was in a green bodysuit (Were they legally unable to use Fox’s black costume design?). Schwartz later put her back in the ’40s costume, but it didn’t last. Whether in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, or the animated TV show, her own comics, or the new movie, Catwoman wears variations on the Newmar costume.
Thinking again of the Penguin two-parter I reviewed months ago, notice that Newmar and Burgess Meredith, who played the Penguin, take very different approaches to the task of playing super-villains. Meredith acts the Penguin in a larger than life style, making him a vivid, even Dickensian caricature. Whereas Meredith enthusiastically quacks and waddles, Newmar is quieter and more subtly ironic in her delivery, and moves realistically: her style is more in tune with West’s deadpan manner, whereas Meredith’s sharply contrasts with it.
As a result Newmar’s Catwoman comes off as a more realistic character: genuinely sensual, believably crafty and greedy, impatient and imperious with her underlings (who do look foolish in costume) without resorting to bluster; and credibly evil enough to set up horrible demises for Batman and Robin. In this two-parter look at the way she watches so intently and uncertainly as Batman fights for his life against her tiger. This is not a stereotypical villain’s sadistic glee or gloating. Instead she shows a more realistic reaction, as if this is the moment she has lived for, her triumph over her enemy, and yet she still is not certain it will work.
Despite their different approaches, Newmar and Meredith are united in following a primary rule of successful comedy: not acting as if they know they’re funny. To be more precise, their Catwoman and Penguin each have a sense of humor and make witty remarks, but Meredith and Newmar don’t wink to the audience to let us know they think that dressing up like a cat or bird is ludicrous. They commit to the characters, enabling them to be both truly amusing and believably menacing.
The makers of the Batman show were mocking the superhero genre, but they nevertheless ended up doing a lot of things right. The best performances of the villains, like Newmar’s, Meredith’s, and Frank Gorshin’s cerebral yet manic Riddler, are among these: they still provide our basic impressions of these characters today.
While I’m at it, I want to praise composer Nelson Riddle for the leitmotifs he concocted for some of the major villains: the eerie, sensual meowing music for Catwoman, the jaunty waddling theme for the Penguin, and the laugh-like fanfare for the Joker.
The 1960s TV series captured the color, the action and the sheer energy that Batman should have. In his autobiography Man of Two Worlds, Julius Schwartz talks about the importance of conceiving death traps for Batman to escape. The TV show’s creators may have been inspired by movie serials, but they realized the same thing about Batman.
The first half of every two-parter built to the dramatic peak of a cliffhanger with Batman, Robin, or both in a trap. Though the writers probably never realized it, this also enabled the heroes to enact their own symbolic death and resurrection.
In fact, “The Purr-fect Crime”/”Better Luck Next Time” has a particularly dramatic death trap sequence. Inventively drawing on the famous short story The Lady and the Tiger, the show gives Batman the choice of two doors, with Catwoman supposedly behind one of them. He selects the wrong door, and a tiger emerges. In the first episode, we do not see the tiger and Batman in the same shot. But in the following episode, there is a real tiger grappling with a real person (obviously not Adam West!) in a Batman costume. This is actually happening, and there’s nothing funny about it; even seeing this again in 2004, I’m still surprised by this sequence. Batman finally defeats the tiger by turning up a sound on his “bat-communicator” to literally ear-splitting volume. That too is not funny: it seems a particularly nasty way of disposing of the tiger. (Couldn’t he have just used his knockout gas pellets?)
There’s even a bit in this Catwoman two-parter in which Batman tracks down Catwoman by tracing radiation on her gloves; this is very much a gimmick right out of the Schwartz-era Batbooks.
As I’ve grown older, in viewing the show, I even find things they did right that I wasn’t consciously aware of as a boy. Sequences in some of the early Riddler episodes, for example, have a genuine film noir look.
Even as a boy I was dividing the Good from the Bad in watching this series. Certainly I would not want Batman ordinarily played for comedy, and I recognize that the “dark knight” interpretation is truer to the essence of the character. But perhaps the better parts of the 1960s TV Batman demonstrate that Batman need not be dark and obsessed to work.
The live action TV Batman is neither grim, vengeful nor obsessed, and yet he is still recognizably Batman.
The end of “Better Luck Next Time” draws upon the comics’ tradition of apparent death scenes for Catwoman: unwilling to drop her bag of loot, Catwoman loses her grip and falls into a supposedly bottomless cavern. Also following the tradition in the comics, West’s Batman remarks that Catwoman may have the nine lives a cat is reputed to have, so perhaps she survived (as we discover next season she did).
The idea that someone falls to his or her death rather than forsake his or her greed was surely not original to these episodes. Steven Spielberg disposes of his villainess in almost exactly the same way, complete with bottomless pit, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
There’s a movie in which the sole important female character turns out to be a treacherous, greedy Nazi. And there’s a certain misogyny in Batman‘s first season. too. Consider its only important female characters: the independent but evil Catwoman, consigned to “death”; the more sympathetic villainess Zelda the Great, consigned to prison; the clueless and sexless Aunt Harriet; Bonnie, Commissioner Gordon’s decorative, daughter-like and one-dimensional secretary; and a whole pack of molls subordinating themselves to the various male “guest villains.” Were the show’s creators consciously portraying the boys’ world of comics, or were they not particularly enlightened, either? Two seasons later, in the fall of 1967, matters improved considerably when the TV show brought in Batgirl, created earlier that year in Julius Schwartz’s comics, and a much more positive figure.
Something that now definitely marks the Catwoman two-parter as a product of the 1960s is that Catwoman, though seemingly dressed for action, retreats to the side and lets her male underlings engage Batman and Robin in combat. Nowadays the female action hero – or villain – who is adept in physical battle as any man, has become a mainstay of popular culture. In the 1960s, a time of transitions in so many areas, such characters were only first beginning to appear (as we shall see in our next installment). The new Batgirl of the 1960s was one of them, yet on TV she was still held back by old-fashioned concepts of femininity. It is said that producer William Dozier thought that punching people was unladylike, so Batgirl kicked her adversaries instead. (So kicking is ladylike? Well, arguably more balletic, anyway.)
From my vantage point of the early 21st century, the Batman live action show seems very much representative of aspects of the 1960s, particularly the mid-1960s, when the generational shift in the culture was just beginning to take hold. Look at how conventional, old-fashioned and “square” the “normal” people on the show are:
Commissioner Gordon, Aunt Harriet, Bruce and Dick in their everyday identities, the extras – all dressed as if they were still in the 1950s. I think that the costumed characters now reflect the new 1960s generation: their individualized, nonconformist ways of dressing, its literal colorfulness, their greater openness about sexuality (reflected by the skin-tight costumes), and their refusal to conform to the system. The villains, of course, are in outright revolt against the establishment, but even Batman, who works with the police, doesn’t wear their uniform or follow all their rules. The show pokes fun at high society, politics, and other elements of the old status quo. Even Batman’s strict dedication to law and order is gently mocked, hinting at the outright rebellion to come in the later 1960s. Even the fact that a show based on comic books aimed at kids has been revamped into a trendy prime time television show was a sign that the youth culture was beginning to take over.
TWO SORTS OF DARK SHADOWS
I’ll return to the subject of Catwoman when I discuss her movie appearances next week. But for now, I’m finally leaving my first Saturday at the Museum of Television and Radio’s superhero retrospective behind and jumping ahead to my second Saturday.
By that time the Museum had started a companion retrospective, “Listen! It’s Superheroes on the Radio.” Instead of sitting in a theater in the dark, as I did watching the TV shows, I found myself in a milieu more like a quiet, pleasantly relaxing drawing room. In the Museum’s Ralph Guild Radio Listening Room, visitors sit in comfortable chairs, wearing headsets, listening to the old radio shows they select as cheerful sunlight pours in through the windows.
The first programs offered were two episodes of The Shadow, whose title character is what I’d call a proto-superhero. It was Superman who established and defined the concept of the superhero in popular culture; had Superman not been created, no one would think of the Shadow as a superhero. But, now we can see the similarities between the Shadow and the superheroes who followed him.
The first thing to note is that there are two major versions of the Shadow. In the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, the Shadow was a Depression-era forerunner of Marvel’s Punisher. He was a mysterious vigilante who violently gunned down his adversaries and who presided over a large network of agents. He had a visually iconic costume, though it was composed of conventional clothing: a large black hat, a black cloak, and a blood-red scarf masking the lower half of his face. This version of the Shadow had no super-powers and no real secret identity. A master of disguise, he posed as millionaire Lamont Cranston, but the real Cranston was a member of his organization. Eventually the pulp Shadow was revealed as former World War I aviator Kent Allard, but this Shadow had really given up his “normal” identity and normal life: he had given himself entirely over to his Shadow identity. This version of the Shadow was a direct influence on Batman, as DC Comics acknowledged in 1970s stories teaming up the two characters.
The radio version of the Shadow was very different. He really was Lamont Cranston, led a normal life as Cranston, and had a girlfriend, Margo Lane. (Could her last name have inspired Lois Lane’s?) The radio Shadow does indeed have a double identity in the traditional manner of superheroes. In action as the Shadow, Cranston adopts an intimidating tone of voice and a malevolent laugh, but this seems less the expression of an alternate personality than an act he puts on to scare his adversaries. In fact, in one of the two episodes, “The Werewolf of Hamilton Manor,” Cranston and Margo Lane banter back and forth as if they were, say, Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man movies.
Moreover, the radio Shadow has actual super-powers: in Tibet he learned from mystics how to “cloud men’s minds” so as to render himself invisible to them. In reviewing Jess Nevins’ book about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Heroes and Monsters (see Comics in Context #37), I took issue with Nevins’ contention that H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man did not represent a character archetype. I suggested that the Invisible Man may actually be a science fiction version of the ghost archetype: the unseen, often malevolent presence. The radio Shadow is like Wells’s Invisible Man if he combated crime rather than perpetrating it. I wonder if the radio Shadow was influenced by Universal’s 1933 film version of The Invisible Man. A ghost, of course, is dead, and ghosts in fiction are often shown as trying to kill the living; Wells’s Invisible Man is likewise a figure of death, not dead himself but killing others. The radio Shadow is not a murderer, but frightens his adversaries into thinking he might kill them. But the Shadow only pretends to be ghostlike: the “Night without End” episode emphasizes that the Shadow can suffer physical harm. This underlines the dual nature of the radio Shadow’s identity: he is both superhumanly powerful and humanly vulnerable.
At first I was disappointed that the Museum had not chosen episodes featuring the most famous voice of the Shadow, Orson Welles. Instead it selected “The Werewolf of Hamilton Manor,” with Bret Morrison as the Shadow, and “Night without End” with Bill Johnstone voicing the character. I presume the Museum’s intent was to showcase the Shadow in a supernatural or science fictional milieu rather than battling conventional criminals.
In “Night without End,” an episode from 1938, the year of Superman’s debut in comics, a master criminal has devised a means to block sunlight from reaching the city, presumably New York, thereby plunging it into darkness. This mastermind is motivated not by politics but by greed, hoping to extort money from the city. Yet he has perpetrated an act of terror against the city nonetheless. How often has popular culture envisioned attacks against New York City or fictional cities based on it until such a vision became reality on September 11, 2001?
“Night without End” also underlines the idea that the police consider the Shadow to be a criminal himself; in this episode the police commissioner reluctantly has to cooperate with the Shadow’s attempt to defeat the plot against the city. Later that same day the Museum screened an episode from the television revival of another proto-superhero’s radio series, The Green Hornet. The Hornet actually pretends to be a criminal so as to battle the underworld from within. Hence the Green Hornet is wanted by the police, just as the Shadow is.
Now, Superman and DC’s other classic superheroes, known in the 1940s as “mystery men,” worked with the police and were hailed as heroes by the public. The Museum’s Shadow and Green Hornet episodes led me to wonder if in the 1960s Stan Lee reintroduced something important to stories about masked heroes when he co-created heroes who were regarded by the police, public and armed forces as outlaws, including Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Hulk.
Last year I wrote about another classic 1960s television series, Dark Shadows and about the latest of the annual “Dark Shadows Festivals” that celebrate the show (see Comics in Context #11 & #12). As I reported, it was announced before last year’s Festival that it would be the final Dark Shadows Festival ever, leading to controversy among the show’s fans and even an onstage confrontation during the Festival itself.
Well, there was no “Dark Shadows Festival” this year. Instead there was a “Dark Shadows Weekend” from Friday, August 12 through Sunday, August 15, run by the same people who ran the Festivals. (You can learn more at www.darkshadowsfestival.com.) I attended on Saturday, and as far as I can tell, there is no difference between a “Dark Shadows Festival” and a “Dark Shadows Weekend” save for the name and the fact that the “Weekend” was located not in New York City but in Tarrytown, New York. In a beautiful location along the Hudson River, Tarrytown is not only the site of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but was also where most of the two motion pictures based on Dark Shadows – 1970’s House of Dark Shadows and 1971’s Night of Dark Shadows – were filmed. The House of the title is Collinwood, which in the movies was “played” by Lyndhurst, the largest Gothic revival mansion in the United States. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art once held a retrospective of the work of Lyndhurst’s architect: how odd to see a picture of Collinwood in the precincts of high culture.) Tarrytown is also located in Westchester County, so this is X-Men territory, and it gave me a better sense of what the area around Professor Xavier’s mansion might be like.
As for the tempting possibility of new Dark Shadows shows, there is the proverbial good news and bad news. The bad news is that a pilot episode of a new Dark Shadows series, rebooting the continuity from the beginning, with an entirely new cast, was shot for the WB Network, but the WB turned it down. For the good news, I remind you of my report last year on Return to Collinwood, a “radio play” performed live on stage by cast members of the original Dark Shadows at last year’s Festival. Written by Jamison Selby, son of David Selby, who played Quentin Collins on the first series, this play picked up the original continuity thirty years later. I was favorably impressed by it, and now the play is out on a two-disc CD set from MPI Home Video. After I get around to listening to it, I’ll probably be reviewing the CD set here (and I have more to say about Mark Evanier’s aforementioned book, as well). (For more information on the CDs, see www.mpihomevideo.com and www.darkshadowsdvd.com.)
As further proof that the world is not divided simply into blacks and whites, but includes a spectrum of grays, there’s also a piece of news that is in a no man’s land between good and bad. A man with a mission named Darren Gross has been trying for years to restore the “director’s cut” of the second Dark Shadows movie, Night of Dark Shadows. Both movies were directed by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis, but MGM cut out well over a half hour of footage before releasing the film. As a result, and as I can attest, Night often seems rushed and hard to follow. (In contrast, the first film, House, is quite a well-made horror film.)
Gross has managed to find thirty-five minutes of deleted Night footage; there’s no sound track for them, but the script exists and the dialogue track could be dubbed back in. Gross wants the full version of Night restored and made available on video; so do Curtis, the surviving actors, and, of course, the Dark Shadows fan community. But Warner Brothers, the present owners of Night, understandably prefers to concentrate on putting together DVD releases of films with potentially bigger audiences than Dark Shadows‘ niche fandom. Still, we’re big enough to support MPI’s release of the entire five-year-long original series on home video.
Had the WB picked up the new Dark Shadows series, Gross told us during his panel, Warners would have been more favorably disposed towards restoring and rereleasing Night. But not now. Hoping that eventually Warners will change its mind, Gross has actually been rerecording the dialogue for the deleted scenes with the surviving actors.
It’s a classic case of a clash between creative artists’ desires for their work and its corporate owners’ different priorities. We’re simultaneously so close to seeing a finished, restored version of Night, and yet so far away. (And there’s more about the restoration project at home.earthlink.net/~moviemandg/)
Only able to spend an afternoon at this year’s Festival – sorry, Weekend – I felt that I was compressing a full three day experience into a little over five hours, with far too little time to spend with friends I saw there. But if I could only be there for one afternoon, Saturday afternoon was the time to pick. The high point of the afternoon was original cast member Nancy Barrett’s performance of her cabaret act, which she has presented at past Festivals on the East and West Coasts. She’s continued to make improvements in her act, in which she uses songs to recount the story of her life. This year, in the section dealing with her time on Dark Shadows, she performed various songs as her various Dark Shadows characters, choosing selections that aptly expressed their different personalities. And, to the absolute delight of the audience, she contributed a surprising innovation to another section of her act: not only singing a number from Chicago but tap dancing to it!
Now there’s something I’ve never seen anyone do at the San Diego Comic-Con! Maybe I picked the right convention to go to this year after all!
–Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson
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