The VHS Corner: Batman on VHS (1985-1995)

 Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing alright. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. I definitely did. Today I've got another VHS Corner post for you. This time I'm going to take a look at the Batman VHS that I watched when I was a kid. This includes ones we rented, ones we owned, and ones I saw away from home. I'm probably just going to look at these in release order since, aside from two of the tapes, I don't actually have a definitive order in which I saw these tapes. So let's get into it.

The first tape on this list is Super Powers Collection: Batman from 1985. This tape contains five episodes of the 1968 cartoon produced by Filmation, The Adventures of Batman, starring Olan Soule as the voice of Batman/Bruce Wayne, and Casey Kasem as the voice of Robin/Dick Grayson. My parents rented this tape for me sometime between 1993 and 1996 as we still lived in the log house at the time and all five of us watched the tape together as a family. I actually found it interesting that Batman starred in cartoons long before Batman: The Animated Series debuted in 1992. I didn't grow up with reruns of the various Super Friends shows, so this was my first exposure to earlier Batman cartoons.

Next up is the 1989 VHS release of Batman: The Movie (1966), which is the only release involving the 1966 Batman TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. I have this tape in my collection now, but back then, the only way I had of watching this movie was on the taped off PBS VHS that we had. I watched this while we were visiting the farm of someone who my dad used to work with. Of course I watched because I had already seen the movie on the taped off TV version we had, and loved it. Plus it's Batman. I don't remember exactly when we went to visit my dad's former coworker, but I think it was within that same time period between 1993 and 1996, when we lived in the log house.

Even though my dad owned the original VHS release of Batman (1989) I didn't see the movie until maybe 1995 or 1996, when I was in the hospital for a medical procedure and the person next to me in the room in the Medical Day Unit had it on. I only saw up to the point where the Joker reveals himself for the first time. My first full viewing of the movie came sometime in the 2000s when I borrowed my dad's copy of the VHS to watch up in my bedroom. It was before 2004 or 2005, when I got the DVD boxset of all four Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman movies. I have a later printing of this tape in my current VHS collection. The edition I have now omits the Batman Coca-Cola commercial that the original release has before the movie.  

Batman Returns is a completely different story. I saw this movie in the summer of 1993. I was in the hospital for the operation on my esophagus, and my roommate and his mom had the movie on. Being the Batman fan that I was, I watched it too. It was so creepy that it legitimately scared the crap out of me. Especially Danny DeVito's portrayal of the Penguin. I would rewatch it on VHS as a teenager in the 2000s and it didn't scare me quite as much as it did when I saw it back in 1993, but to this day Batman Returns is far from my favourite Batman movie. I have this tape in my current VHS collection.

Batman Forever was the only Batman VHS that I owned in my personal movie collection. I got it from my godfather for my ninth birthday in 1995 and I watched it all the time. This was actually my first introduction to Two-Face as he hadn't been in the Batman comics I'd gotten up to that point, and I don't think I'd seen his introductory episodes of Batman: The Animated Series yet. This was also my introduction to Val Kilmer (I wouldn't see Willow or Top Gun until years later), Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, and Chris O'Donnell. 

And those are the Batman movies and TV shows that I watched on VHS when I was a kid. It's not a big list but it's something I could easily put together since I wasn't actually sure what my topic was going to be today. 

That's it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow with a look at another trade paperback collected edition from my childhood. So until then have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.