Posted By Dan Greenfield on May 26, 2025 | 5 comments

A MORRISON MONDAYS anniversary salute!

By BILL MORRISON

May 26 marks the 76th anniversary of the release of Batman and Robin, the 1949 Columbia Pictures movie serial starring Robert Lowery as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and Johnny Duncan as Dick Grayson/Robin! And in honor of this classic in the genre of stingy budget chapter plays, I’m paying homage to the movie poster for this early screen adventure of the Dynamic Duo!

In a previous life, before The Simpsons came along and changed the course of my career, I was a movie poster artist, and I have always been obsessed and fascinated by film advertising. I have a closet full of cardboard tubes stuffed with movie posters, but a particular one in my collection that’s framed and hanging in my studio is an original one-sheet from the Batman and Robin serial. And as much as I love it, the artwork by illustrator and comic strip artist Glenn Cravath looks rushed. But don’t get me wrong, I think the hurried nature of the art is a big part of its kitschy charm.

Many film posters produced back in the mid-20th century were painted in hours instead of days, and with very little reference material, by in-house studio artists. But if you look at the posters that Columbia produced for the Atom Man vs. Superman serial just a year later, you’ll see that the quality of the art is much better than the Batman and Robin poster.

The depiction of Superman has an appealing hybrid illustration/comic book style, and it’s apparent that the artist was not as rushed and was using comic book imagery as reference, even down to the Wayne Boring-style head and bunched up trunks.

There’s also an earlier tie-in poster for 1948’s Superman movie serial starring Kirk Alyn that features just an out-and-out comic book drawing of the Man of Steel.

That got me thinking, and I decided for my tribute to the 1949 Batman and Robin serial, I would create an alternate poster with a “What if?” element. What if, instead of tasking one of Columbia’s regular artists with creating the poster, they instead hired one of the then-current Batman comics artists like Dick Sprang, Lew Sayre Schwartz, or Win Mortimer to produce the art, and gave them a bit more time?

In retrospect, this was a fun exercise for me, but when you hold my comic book-accurate depiction up to the actual low-budget look of the film with its cheap costumes and normal vehicles, I suspect many 1949 Batman fans might have felt they were duped by a bait-and-switch scheme with my poster. And somehow, I still like the original one-sheet better! It’s a more faithful representation of the serial, and its hurried, sloppy art seems to say “Get in here quick and see this thing, before it’s gone!”

So, after all, my hat is off to you, Mr. Cravath!

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