You kids today, with your sequels and remakes and instantaneous re-boots, you’re spoiled! Between The Dark Knight and Gotham Knight and umpteen animated Bat-shows on the tube, you’re up to your pointy ears in Batman. It wasn’t like this back in my day, let me tell you. Growing up as a Batman fan in the 70s and early 80s, I would have killed for just one Batman movie, any Batman movie, even one directed by Joel Schumacher. But between the end of the ABC television series in 1968 and the first Tim Burton movie in 1989, there was a long Bat-drought, broken up only by the occasional rumor and ill-conceived attempt at resurrection.
As far as the comic books were concerned, mind you, we had it pretty good. My childhood coincided with two of the most acclaimed eras of the Dark Knight’s career. The Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams reign of the ’70s is rightly credited with restoring some mystery and moodiness to the character after several decades worth of goofy gimmickry. Those issues weren’t “dark” in the Frank Miller psycho-Batman sense – they were still kid-friendly, but just gritty and grimy enough to open the doorway to the adult world a crack for a young reader like myself. In one of my earliest childhood memories, I am practically grinding the 1973 issue “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” into dust with repeated re-readings. (There are rumors that The Dark Knight draws heavily on that particular story.) Later that decade, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers collaborated on a brief but memorable run of Detective Comics; their noirish, atmospheric take on Batman was later collected in the trade paperback Strange Apparitions.
Those of us who wanted to see our hero come to life on the screen, however, were basically shit out of luck. There was the occasional rerun of the ’60s TV series, which was fun for a kid with no conception of the word “campy,” and there was a Saturday morning cartoon, but that was about it until an ad for an NBC show called Legends of the Superheroes appeared in the TV Guide one week in 1979. This seemed to come out of nowhere, and I couldn’t have been more excited; not only did it promise live-action Batman and Robin, but a bunch of my other Justice League favorites like the Flash and Green Lantern, as well as a passel of great supervillains. Then the thing actually aired and my heart sank. There were two episodes total, a “Challenge” and an Ed McMahon-hosted superhero roast, both shot on videotape and featuring a laugh track. This was not what I’d had in mind:
These things made the Star Wars Holiday Special look like The Sopranos by comparison, and were quickly, mercifully forgotten. Not long afterward, however, rumors began to surface of an impending big-screen version of Batman. Back then we didn’t have the Ain’t-It-Cools and Dark Horizons tracking every blip and fart out of Hollywood; no, we were reliant mainly on Starlog magazine to keep us abreast of such happenings. In 1980, a small blurb indicated that a Batman movie would be in theaters by Christmas of 1981, with rights-holder Michael Uslan announcing, “This film will be done straight.” An update in October 1981 indicated that the original timeline may have been a little ambitious. Despite continued claims by the producers that the movie would be truer to the dark origins of the character, Adam West was now angling to reprise the role. When asked if he would be willing to take on a smaller role – say, that of Bruce Wayne’s father – the man who was then starring in the likes of The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood huffed, “If the character was important enough and handled well…I might consider it.” Even then, this made me laugh. Nonetheless, a whole “Put the Man Back in Batman” movement was launched, dedicated to restoring West to his rightful place under the cowl. There were ads, petitions and even a song, which fell on deaf ears.
A 1983 profile of Tom Mankiewicz revealed that longtime James Bond screenwriter was working on a script then titled The Batman. “We’re trying to return to the original concept – Batman as a dark avenger of the night,” said Mankiewicz. “The villains, while being outrageous, will be very cruel people.” While he wanted an unknown in the title role, his wish list for the supporting cast included Peter O’Toole as The Penguin, David Niven as Alfred, and…Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Of course, only the latter came to pass, and by the time it did I was past my Bat-prime. But it’s still possible to get a glimpse of the movie that might have been; the Mankiewicz script can be found here.