One of my fondest childhood memories has to be the Bat-Mania of 1989. It’s difficult to explain, and I imagine the only thing even close to it would have been a part of Bat-Mania 1966, but even then, guys that were around for both say there was nothing like the craze that swept the world that last summer of the 1980s.
I had been introduced to Batman probably not even a full year before the craze began. It might have been just dumb luck, or maybe my parents recognized the hype building even then and got me a head start. Sadly, my Super Powers toys were the victim of a yard sale some time before, so I rolled into the summer movie hype without a proper Batman figure. It’s crazy to think about — for a period of time in recent human existence, you were unable to walk into a toy store and find a Batman action figure.
Luckily, due to no small amount of diligence and vigilance on the part of my mom, I was able to get my 1989 movie Batman figure from ToyBiz. Being as he was a repaint/remold of that Super Powers one I had lost, there was something nice about the familiarity of the figure — same size, same articulation same lantern jaw — and combining it with a cool new paint job and a self-winding belt-rope was just icing on the cake. So you can imagine my surprise when a half-dozen all NEW Batmen sprung up a few months later.
At the time of Super Powers, Kenner was owned by General Mills, and in 1989 Kenner had recently been purchased by Tonka. Despite good funding and a strong history with DC, they lost out on the licensing to the American upstart of an old Canadian company called ToyBiz. The Batman movie line was comprised of three figures, five vehicles, and one of the best Batcaves of all time. The figures themselves were decent but very derivative of the Kenner Super Powers figures — attempts were made to “Keaton-ize” the Batman head in running changes, but it’s difficult to spot. No doubt the vehicles and playset were very impressive at the time, and it did enough business to warrant a DC Superheroes line that was mostly a hot mess of shoddy Kenner reuses. Thanks to that line, though, Kenner was able to win back DC and quickly set about cashing in on the Batman movie with their own take — The Dark Knight Collection.
*The story of how Kenner eventually becomes owned by Hasbro; ToyBiz becomes a Marvel shareholder, taking it from Mattel; Hasbro then dumping DC to get picked up by Mattel, only then to make a deal with Marvel and ultimately kill ToyBiz, is probably worthy of an article of its own. We’ll save that for another time.
Kenner started the line in the tail end of 1989 with the tagline “It’s Batman — As you’ve never seen him before!”
And that’s actually pretty true! While committing the cardinal sin of removing the knee joint, something that pissed me off as a kid for years, the Kenner Keaton Batman was a pretty impressive sculpt for the time and actually looked the part, even better than Mattel did in Multiverse. The goal, simply enough, was to get as much Batman on the shelf as possible at the same time, and the standardized style of the figure let them do lots of redecos with crazy accessories and colors, making it easy to fill the shelves with Batmen, not just Batman.
Learning this trick from their Real Ghostbusters line, Kenner’s design guys let their imagination run wild as far as what designs and accessories they would use, or occasionally reuse. The initial line as made up of some eight Batman variants, a Bruce Wayne, and a Joker — all with a respectable assortment of vehicles, some new, some shamelessly pulled from other lines. This quickly expanded to include some deluxe versions with more elaborate gear, even more vehicles, and a pretty damn cool mulit-use Batcave.
No doubt about it, though, this was the beginning of the Bat-variant plague, a disease that would run through Batman lines from then on. Not the variants of today, where we get a different suit or artist version; these were complete toy fabrications, built on little to no comic basis. Within a decade, we would start to recognize this scourge and curse it’s very name from the rooftops. But not in 1990. And probably not even in 1992. In those days, this was exciting and new, a concept we’d never seen applied to the Dark Knight.
Afterward, yeah, we hated them for years. But time heals all wounds, and I now look back on some of these silly concepts and recognize their charm. These were just for fun. Some looked cool, some had awesome gear, and, a time or two, we got a color palette or a weapon that actually did look a little like real Batman gear. It’s easier now to look at these designs and remember how fun they were to play with. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder now if the same fate awaits the Mattel Batman line from the early 2000s . . .
Nostalgia’s a helluva drug. I was messing around with some extra parts and a uniform I had laying around and unintentionally crafted a very Dark Knight Collection-esque Batman, complete with non-movie colors. I found him some ridiculous accessories and sent Lestat and Colirio some pictures, and we all had a good laugh at my expense . . . until Lestat decided he needed one. Colirio too. What started off as a few friends goofing off in between serious customs has instead turned into a bit of a running challenge. So, considering all that history I just wrote above, we started crafting a sort of tribute to this pivotal line in Batman history — some customs to honor it’s 25th birthday.
So should that fill you with nostalgic interest or just morbid curiosity, follow the link below to the Custom Galleries, as well as the new Fwoosh Customs site, and see what we came up with — with more to come. And special thanks to James (Sallah) of the Fwoosh boards for letting me use his vast resource of movie-related pics and info over at www.1989Batman.com!
