Posted by Dan Greenfield on Dec 6, 2025
The Great POWER RECORDS BATMAN Album of 1975
TOYHEM! 50 YEARS of sonic satisfaction! — Welcome to TOYHEM! For the seventh straight holiday season, we’re bringing you a series of features and columns celebrating the toys of our youth, which often made for the best memories this time of year. Click here to check out the complete index of stories — and have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukah and Happy Holidays! — Dan — If you were a Batman kid 50 years ago — and I most certainly was, as you know — if he wasn’t on TV and you didn’t feel like reading (or watching your View-Master), your next best option was Power Records. In 1975, you could get Book and Record sets, like “Stacked Cards” or “Robin Meets Man-Bat,” standalone singles, or two LPs, one numbered #8155, the other #8167. I had the first album with its collection of four dramatic, surprisingly mature audio plays: “Stacked Cards” written by Joey Lapidos; “The Scarecrow’s Mirage,” written by E. Nelson Bridwell; “Challenge of the Catwoman,” by Bridwell; and “If Music Be the Food of Death,” written by Joan Wile. “Stacked Cards” is the one everyone remembers, not just because of its fabulous Neal Adams/Dick Giordano-illustrated Book and Record version, but because Batman and Robin openly ponder whether they should get the Joker a frontal lobotomy and just be done with it. (They’re probably right, kids.) “The Scarecrow’s Mirage” stands out because producer Cornel Tanassy (presumably) made the sharp-eared choice to muffle Jonathan Crane’s voice so it sounded like he was speaking from behind the burlap of his mask. In “Challenge of the Catwoman,” the Feline Fatale sounds suitably seductive, while the actor playing the Riddler in “If Music Be the Food of Death” does a higher-pitched Frank Gorshin. That Riddler can be a bit irritating, unfortunately, but the voice-casting and direction is overall rock solid. Batman is stony tough (though a little wooden at times) and Hudson University student Robin is enthusiastically youthful. The Joker, though, gets big points for his counterintuitively gravelly voice. When reading mid-’70s Batman comics, my mind voices sometimes lapse into these versions and they fit well, for the most part. This is not Andrea Romano/DC Animated Universe level, but still first-rate, though the actors are unfortunately unidentified. And what can you say about the Adams cover? Well, here’s what I said about it in NEAL ADAMS’...
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