REEL RETRO CINEMA | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

Mar28

BATMAN RETURNS: How the Comics Adaptation Improves Upon the Classic 1992 Movie

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Mar 28, 2024

BATMAN RETURNS: How the Comics Adaptation Improves Upon the Classic 1992 Movie

BATMAN WEEK: A special REEL RETRO CINEMA column… — Welcome to BATMAN WEEK 2024 — celebrating the 85th anniversary of the release of Detective Comics #27, on March 30, 1939. Over seven days, you can look forward to all sorts of groovy and offbeat columns, features and cartoons that pay tribute to the greatest comics character in the history of mankind. Click here for the rest of the BATMAN WEEK features. You’ll be glad you did! — Dan — By ROB KELLY The excitement the teenage me had for the release of 1989’s Batman was so intense and all consuming that even seeing the movie didn’t fully satisfy it. I think it was less than a week later before I started thinking, “OK, when’s the sequel?” I clearly wasn’t the only one—I remember watching a segment about the film’s massive success on a local current events TV show out of Philadelphia and the host started speculating who might be the villain and play the role. “Rumor is the next villain will be the Penguin, to be played by Danny DeVito… and that is perfect casting.” Flash forward three years. The excitement I had for Batman Returns was, while not as white hot intense as it had been for Batman, it was more fun to luxuriate in because I didn’t have any worry that they weren’t going to get it right. We already had cinematic proof that Burton and company knew what they were doing when it came to Batman. This time, I could just sit back and enjoy. For the most part, I did. Then and now, I’m most immediately struck by the tonal changes Burton brought to the Batman movie universe in Returns. Both films seem to exist in an indeterminate time period, where modern technology sits alongside buildings and costumes from decades past. But while 1989’s Batman has a grittier, more film noir feel, Batman Returns is sleeker, cleaner, and purposely more artificial. Surely some of that is due to the change in cinematographer, from Roger Pratt (Brazil, Chocolat) to Stefan Czapsky, who worked with Burton on Edward Scissorhands and would do again on Ed Wood. While there were some outside scenes in Batman, the entire world of Batman Returns is shot on sets, making the whole movie feel like a snow globe—completely self-contained. Also, the screenplay by Daniel Waters (Heathers, Hudson Hawk) is more jokey...

Mar14

The Weird Wonder of WONDER WOMAN’s First Movie

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Mar 14, 2024

The Weird Wonder of WONDER WOMAN’s First Movie

50 YEARS LATER: You’re Sort of a Wonder, Wonder Woman! — UPDATED 3/14/24: The Wonder Woman TV movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby premiered 50 years ago this week, on March 12, 1974. Perfect time to re-present this REEL RETRO CINEMA column from May 2017. Dig it! — Dan — By ROB KELLY If you were a comic-book fan in the 1970s, you had to get to used to the idea that any live-action adaptation of a beloved superhero property would be… a loose adaptation, at best. In the dark days between the 1960s Batman TV series and 1978’s Superman, Hollywood was so sure that audiences would not be able to tolerate wall-to-wall (or, more specifically, commercial-to-commercial) superhero action that they tended to jam whatever character they were adapting into more traditional TV templates. 1974’s Wonder Woman TV movie might represent the Platonic ideal of this philosophy. Wonder Woman, which aired on ABC on March 12, 1974, was written and developed for television by John D.F. Black, who had a long career in the medium (Mission: Impossible, Star Trek and, later, Charlie’s Angels). It stars Cathy Lee Crosby, a former tennis pro transitioning into acting, who nabbed the title role in a TV movie that was intended as a pilot for a series. Amazingly, even though the character had been around for over 30 years, this was her live-action debut, and only her third appearance ever outside of comic books. (There was an unaired ’60s TV reel and she was on the Super Friends, of course, but her first-ever televised appearance was in 1972, in the cartoon series The Brady Kids, where the six Brady moppets time-traveled back to ancient Greece, which of course makes total sen… — wait, what?). A pre-title sequence shows us various MPs seemingly stealing volumes of top-secret information from different locales (Paris, Istanbul, Berlin, etc.) and delivering them to the very 1970s-ish George Calvin (Andrew Pine), who summarily has his field agents executed by a brother-and-sister assassin team! Our first shot of Princess Diana (the very blond Crosby) is on Paradise Island, as she prepares to leave her home and enter Man’s World. She bids a melancholy goodbye to her mother Hippolyta (Charlene Holt) and some of her Amazonian sisters, one of whom, Ahnjayla (Anitra Ford) who all but begs to go with Diana, only...

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