captainsblog | Holy miscalculation! (Reply)

With the Dark Kinnnnnigit about to rise again, I found this rather amazing piece about how a single fan saved the Batman franchise from the campy depths of the Adam West era. Don't get me wrong- I loved me my Campy Crusader back when it was on, and none of the darker incarnations of film and animation since then have ever excised that Bat-image from my head. To this day, I'd love to see a campy one-off of the franchise, to take a quasi-canonical place much as the Sellers version of Casino Royale infests the shelf of Bond.

Long term, though, Holy Batshit couldn't sustain a series, and that's what makes Michael Uslan's contributions so important.

He's 60 now, so was a little older than I was when the ABC series hit the airwaves in the mid-60s. Unlike me, though, he knew the Bob Kane original, and was horrified by the "Pow! Zap! and Wham!" image of his hero. Many felt the same, but only Uslan had the smarts and, ultimately, the influence to do something about it. First, as an Indiana U. undergrad, he pitched a course on comics as modern mythology, and got it accepted. Next, he Astroturfed himself, protesting his own idea in the press to get attention for his cause. And he got it- from one S. Lee of Marvel, New York. THAT led to a summer job at DC, where Batman was still dying of prolonged exposure to Camptonite, and Uslan took the series over and gave Bruce his groove back.

That's not where the story ends, and certainly not where the stupid did. Well into the 80s, studio after studio, including Warner (which got first refusal on all Bat-ideas when it acquired DC in 1969), passed on Uslan's idea of a Darker Knight of Gotham. Some of the stated reasons for it defy the imagination:

Warner didn't want the Batman film—they didn't even hear the pitch—so Uslan and [his partner Ben] Melniker took it to United Artists, Uslan's former employer. A production VP there rejected the proposal: "Batman and Robin will never work as a movie because the movie Robin and Marian didn't do well," Uslan recalls him saying. (That film starred Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as an aging Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and to this day, Uslan can't follow the executive's logic.) Columbia Pictures was no less encouraging. The head of production predicted that Batman would never work as a movie because their film Annie had flopped. "They're both out of the funny pages," Uslan says he was told.

Finally, though, Uslan and Melniker found an enthused young suit at PolyGram named Peter Guber, who in turn led to a meeting with a then-unknown named Tim Burton. The rest,as they say, is Holy History!

So taking a fan's interest in material CAN matter- but you probably already knew that;)