My 90's and 2000's Experience: Batman Returns (1992)

 Hey everyone, how were your weekends? Mine was nice and quiet. As you know, I was gonna put out a My Star Wars Experience post on Wednesday, but stuff came up and I just decided to push the post I was gonna do last week to this week. I'm back with another My 90's and 2000's Experience post. This week I'm taking a look at the 1992 film, Batman Returns. This may or not be a shorter post than I would normally do for one of these posts because I'm actually going to be reviewing Batman Returns with my friends on the VHS Club Video Podcast, live on Thursday at 9 pm ET on YouTube. So alot of what I'd say here is also gonna be said on the show. Let's get into it.

Released on June 19th, 1992, Batman Returns made only $266.8 million at the box office against a budget of between $50 million and $80 million, compared to Batman's final gross of $411.6 million against its budget of only $48 million. Normally I would attribute this to competition from other movies in theatres at the same time, but nothing was out that could even be considered to be competition. I think the issue was that, the controversy surrounding the movie, namely it being too scary for children, but having toys and other merchandise sold to kids is what hurt the movie at the box office. 

I saw the movie sometime in 1993. I was in the hospital and my roommate wanted to watch it, so his mom put the VHS on for us. It scared the crap out of me! I was six years old at the time and I was used to a less scary version of the Penguin from the reruns of the 1966 TV series that I'd been watching on YTV at the time. The sexual undertones went right over my head, but the movie scared me so much that I didn't watch it again until a decade later. My dad had it on VHS so once I got my TV/VCR combo set for my 16th birthday I borrowed it from him and watched it. While it still creeped me out a bit, I enjoyed it alot more than I did when I first saw it back in 1993.

I eventually got the movie on DVD as part of the The Batman Legacy DVD box set, which was just the original 1997-1998 DVD releases of all four Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman movies. Oddly enough I actually started watching Batman Returns more once I got it on DVD. I don't normally watch it on its own, but anytime I do a re-watch of the series, I'll watch all four movies

A few years ago I got Batman Returns on Blu-ray as part of the Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology box set. It has tons of bonus features on it, including the 1992 TV special, The Bat, The Cat, and The Penguin, which I watched last night for the purpose of making notes on the movie for Thursday night's review. I wanted to see what the people who made the film were saying about the movie when it was coming out, versus what they were saying at the time the Shadows of the Bat documentary was made for the original 2-disc special edition DVD releases of all four movies. Very different.

I didn't have this when I was growing up, but I eventually got a copy of the movie's comic book adaptation published by DC around the time the movie came out. I actually had three different versions because I got the prestige format version (shown above), which is in my collection currently, and I have the adaptation in the trade paperback collected edition, Batman: The Movies, which contains the comic book adaptations of all four Burton/Schumacher movies, and I used to have the regular newsstand edition of the issue as well.

Despite not being allowed to watch the movie at home, because of my siblings, who were quite young at the time, my parents still got me three of the four Happy Meal toys that came out for the movie. I had the Batmobile, the Bat Ski-Boat, and Catwoman's car, which isn't actually in the movie. I never got the Penguin vehicle though. 

A few years later I got a few of the Kenner figures from the movie as hand-me downs from the kids of a friend of my mom's. I had the Penguin, which was actually just a repainted version of the original Super Powers Collection Penguin figure, the Penguin's Commando Penguins (two of them), and Robin, who also isn't in the movie, but they released a Tim Drake Robin figure nonetheless, because I guess there wasn't a toyline based on the comics at that point. While I was in the hospital, probably in either 1992 or 1993, my roommate (different from the one who watched the movie with me) had the Batman Returns Batcave Command Center playset, which was an updated version of the version that Toy Biz produced for the first movie back in 1989, and was also repainted and released in 1993 for the second wave of toys from Batman: The Animated Series, as well as some of the Batman figures that were part of that line, including the Bruce Wayne figure that came with the Batsuit, for a quick change into Batman. 

The thing about Batman Returns's marketing campaign is that even though there are toys produced for the movie, doesn't mean the kids of the time had to have seen the movie to want the toys. If you're a kid in 1992, and you see Batman toys on the shelf at Toys 'R' Us or Walmart or Kmart or wherever, and you like Batman you probably wanted the Batcave Command Center, or the Batmobile, or one of the many Batman variant figures that were released at the time. Even if you didn't see the movie. However, despite making the licensing deals with various companies to produce toys, books, and other merchandise for the movie, Warner Bros. also told Tim Burton that he had complete creative control on the movie. Which means he didn't make it with children in mind, or even families. And while studios could get away with this in the '80's with movies like The Terminator and RoboCop, which were R-rated movies that had toylines attached to them, by 1992 the 90's had become a more conservative time when it came to what parents allowed, and didn't allow, their kids to watch. 

I watched the 30 minute documentary, "Shadows of the Bat: The Cinematic Saga of the Dark Knight Part 4 - Dark Side of the Knight" on the Blu-ray last night, and in it Tim Burton expressed surprise at the backlash the movie received from the public due to how dark and horrifying it is. Of course you're gonna get backlash Tim! You made a movie that wasn't for kids, but was still marketed to kids, and people were gonna be upset when they had to leave the theatre with a screaming child because they got scared seeing a movie that wasn't made for them, but still had merchandise marketed towards them. I don't get why anyone would be surprised.

I didn't own the Super Nintendo game based on the movie, nor have I ever played it, but I remember seeing this ad for it in issue #10 of The Batman Adventures. I also saw ads for the comic book adaptation, the trading cards, and even the movie itself in the first several issues of DC's Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation comic book series that I got. The movie was EVERYWHERE in 1992. Because I didn't see this movie or even the 1989 movie until much later, these ads were actually my introduction to this version of Batman.

At one of the first Scholastic Book Fairs I ever went to, I got this Batman Returns storybook. If I remember correctly, it took out everything with Catwoman and Schreck (played by Christopher Walken), and just focused on the Penguin's original plot to become mayor and that's it. 

I also had this book where you have the basic story of Batman Returns, but you can write your own script for it. I, of course, did write my own script in the book, but it was actually a story based on the 1966 TV series, rather than on the movie, despite the prompts being from the movie. Yeah, I have no idea why this book was even published, being that I don't think very many kids back in 1992 were capable of actually writing a movie script, but it was still pretty fun to look through. 

Despite the movie scaring me when I originally saw it on VHS back in the summer of 1993, I had alot of stuff from the movie, because alot was made for the movie. I didn't have either of them but there was a novelization and a junior novelization for the movie. Like I said though, the movie was everywhere in the summer of 1992, and apparently in my life in general. And while it's not my favourite Batman movie, I still enjoy it. I'm actually looking forward to watching it on VHS again later this week for the podcast on Thursday night. 

Alright my friends, that's it for me for today. I'll be back on Wednesday to talk about the 1991 Star Wars novel, Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn, and how it impacted the Expanded Universe, and the franchise as a whole. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.