Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-06-03 (Tuesday)

On 6/4/2025 9:20 AM, anim8rfsk wrote:

Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

On 6/4/2025 7:21 AM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:

>
>
What Did You Watch?

>
>
Batman (blu-ray) 1966 movie based on the TV series starring Adam West as
a man dressed as a bat, who just can't get rid of a bomb.  This was
mostly background noise with the writer's commentary.  He had a lot of
good stories about the making of the movie and the TV series (he was
also a writer for the weekly series).

 Biweekly, and sometimes triweekly!
 (And yes, I looked it up. Bizarrely, biweekly can mean both twice a week or
every two weeks).
 Lorenzo Semple Jr.
He pretty much created the whole thing and wrote the movie and pilot and
worked on the series I believe it’s whole run from another country.
 Of possible interest: the movie takes place before the series and was
originally intended to be made first. Note that they’ve never seen the
Catwoman unmasked before.
 I love this movie. I remember seeing it with a bunch of other kids in a
station wagon at the drive-in.
 Anytime I watch it, I see all these things I wish they could’ve fixed like
obvious stunt doubles and back projection and then I wonder: if they made
it better, would it actually be worse?
 

He mentioned the effecs and bascally said they were doning the best they could at the time.  He alsomentioned the movie fialed a tthe box office it it on a combination of a fake Man From Uncle movie that released that same time, but basically consisted of two episodes of the TV series edited together.  He said a lot of the people thought the movie would be the same thing.  And he said the studio completely mismanaged the theatrical release, but went into a bit more specifics on how they mismanaged the release.

Van Johnson a.k.a. The Green Hornet plays Lyndon Baines Johnson. Notice him
trying to take credit for the Cape Crusaders wins. Conditioner Gordon keeps
telling LBJ “they did it“ and LBJ keeps changing it to “we did it”
 

I definitely noticed that.

The movie is full of sly little stuff like that.
 Adam West plays much of the movie as Bruce Wayne and he’s a darker
character than the one in the series, telling the four super villains that
if they’ve hurt Miss Kitka he’s going to kill them all!
 Great soundtrack as well