The story of how the farcical Batman of the '60s transformed into the solemn one of today mirrors the elevation of the comic book in general from belittled kiddie fare to the subject of academic inquiry and box-office-breaking, R-rated action movies.
ABC's live-action Batman TV series, which ran from 1966 to 1968, was deliberately campy ('To the Batpole!') and created a long-enduring association between the superhero and the cartoonish onomopeias 'Pow!' 'Zap!' and 'Wham!' so.serious?'īatman has been so successfully remade in recent years that we scarcely remember how, for a generation, the Dark Knight lived in the public imagination as a pot-bellied caped crusader with a goofy sidekick. Uttering a barely intelligible growl, facing off against villains that recall real-life terrorists, and confronted again and again by his own mortality, the Bruce Wayne imagined by director Christopher Nolan reflects the grim avenger that debuted in 1939, so po-faced that in 2008's The Dark Knight the Joker took to taunting him about it: 'Why. The Batman who shows up in Friday's The Dark Knight Rises actually is something like your grandfather's Batman. Batman in a 1939 comic book, in the 1960s ABC TV series, in Tim Burton's 1989 film, and in The Dark Knight Rises
