Return Of The Caped Crusaders Review

My very first Batman experience was the 1960s series with Adam West and Burt Ward. I didn’t see it in the 60s and 70s, though, but during a re-run on one of the first privately-owned TV stations in Germany in the late 80s. My first ‘real’ Batman, thus, was Michael Keaton in 1989’s “Batman.” If I’m honest, though, I have a lot of love in my heart for West’s version, which no other has really replaced since (though LEGO Batman came close).

The three seasons of West’s time as Batman also brought us a movie (“Batman: The Movie” - note the most imaginative title…) - and West spent the rest of his career being reminded of that time he donned the tights and the cape. My next meeting with him was as a voice actor in “The Fairly Odd-Parents,” where he was an inhabitant of the town main character Timmy lived in - and also turned up as Catman every now and then. Clearly, he took it all in good humour, otherwise he would hardly have returned, at least vocally, to an animated movie in 2016, shortly before his death: “Batman: The Return of the Caped Crusaders.”

The movie is completely based on the TV series, using the character and costume designs, but also the characters as they were portrayed in the series - three actors also came back for voice acting: Adam West as Batman, Burt Ward as Robin, and (much to my delight) Julie Newmar as Catwoman (Aretha Franklin would have been even more wonderful, but sadly, like Burgess Meredith and Cesar Romero, she’s no longer available).

The series was always geared towards comedy and West’s talent to play his Batman/Bruce Wayne completely straight without betraying that comedic edge is what has made the series so great. In thin tights and shirt, his not-quite-heroic build shown clearly, and with eyebrows painted onto his cowl, he managed to give us a Batman who stands completely behind his position as protector of the law and model citizen, regularly reprimanding his young charge for rash actions. Few actors are that good.

Even fewer actors can take that over to animation, where they are not in control of the body language of their character, and still pull it off. West does, one hundred percent. This is not to meant down-talk all the other voice talents - Burt Ward and Julie Newmar come back to their roles with gusto and (especially hard for the no-longer-adolescent Ward) manage to pretend no time has passed since they last portrayed them. The many other voice talents (especially of the trio Joker-Penguin-Riddler) are equally good at their work.

An equal amount of praise must go to the writers. The script for the 75 minutes of animated movie (and I urge you to watch the credits, if only for Batman and Catwoman dancing) is on point and perfectly paced. Despite the ridiculous premise (as if anything based on the series could ever be serious), the story unfolds well. It’s almost as if they had channelled the original writers to help with the script. As a follow-up to the series, “Return of the Caped Crusaders” is much better than “Batman: The Movie.” It’s much better paced and the animation does, of course, give a lot more freedom with the content than a live-action movie would have. You can hardly have a rocket-powered penguin zeppelin flying through a city for real, but in animation, it’s not a problem at all.

The animators did an excellent job with taking the character designs from the series (with a little help from the fact that those were made to resemble comic designs) and turning them into animation. The Joker looks even slightly better in animated form, because the moustache (Romero didn’t want to shave his off, so they covered it in greasepaint) is no longer visible. When all of the Batman (the series) villains are freed and come back for a battle with the many Batmen (don’t ask, watch!), each of them is easy to recognize, if you’ve watched the TV series at some point, even those who never really were in the comics. The animation makes the movie look like the original series, using similar camera viewpoints and the same colour pallet. Even the ‘boom,’ ‘bang,’ and ‘whack’ sound bubbles are back. And what would an Adam West Batman outing be without those? Or without the Batusi?

The story, which I’m not going to spoil here, is weird, but well-executed. We have the pleasure of seeing an evil Batman - and it turns out, as we should have expected from West’s Batman, he is actually lawful evil, as D&D players would put it. This forces Robin to seek help in unlikely places and opens the way for more shenanigans. Even though in the end everything comes full circle, that is no reason not to enjoy the wackiness which ensues.

As mentioned, the animated movie has a runtime of 75 minutes, which may seem short by today’s standards (thanks to computers taking over in-between animation, even animated movies these days tend to be longer, hitting the one-and-a-half or two-hour mark). However, the relatively short runtime helps a lot with the pacing, keeping action happening without any undue downtime. As a comparison: with 1 hour 45 minutes (according to IMDB), “Batman: The Movie” (1966) is thirty minutes longer, but might have profited from a little cut here and there to better hold the story together. “Return of the Caped Crusaders” is only slightly longer than the full episodes (stories were usually cut in half, so two episodes as screened would be one full episode story-wise) and feels much more like a part of the series than the movie does, even though it was released 50 years after the start of the series (which ran from 1966 to 1969).

It’s strange that the most amusing Batman movies I’ve seen during the last couple of years - which were anything but devoid of Batman movies - were “The LEGO Batman Movie” and “Return of the Caped Crusaders.” None of those is a live-action movie, none of them takes Batman all that seriously, but both have entertained me well. Perhaps it’s because I had my initiation into the world of Batman through the 1960s series, perhaps it’s just that they’re better written and thus more enjoyable. If you have those 75 minutes I’ve just mentioned, I suggest you give the movie a chance.