The year was 1989, and the Bat-symbol was everywhere.
If you were alive in 1989, you knew there was a Batman movie coming out. It was an inescapable inevitability. The hype, the tension, the sheer unbelievable anticipation was boiling over. The world was covered in a black bat surrounded by golden yellow. If you were a kid that was into comics and such as I was at the time, the Batman movie was an almost holy thing that hurtled towards you in a mad flurry of merchandise and teaser images.
I succumbed to the hype, friends and neighbors. I was ready for this movie. I was as ready as I have ever been for anything. I had been nourished on a wave of teasers and trailers and promotional niblets on Entertainment Tonight. I have never been someone who wants to see a movie on the first day of it’s theatrical debut, but neither before nor since had I been so overwhelmed with the vein-popping need to see something as soon as possible. I was at the right age and the right time to feel a complete, undented exuberance at the possibility inherent in seeing Batman on the big screen.
I had to be there the first day. June 23rd, 1989, 30 years ago today. I had to see it as soon as it was available to be seen, so there I was at the first showing at my local theater. My parents—who were younger than I am now, something that makes me feel bizarre and old and temporally out-of-place—were interested in the movie as well, but nowhere near the level I was. I had already read the novelization. I had already read the novelization, spoiling myself for the entire movie. Why I did that, I have no idea, but it somehow didn’t diminish my enthusiasm. I had already bought the Official Souvenir Magazine. I already had a keychain, and a shirt, and probably more things I’m forgetting that had that damned Bat symbol on it. I would end up buying the comic-book adaptation soon afterwards.
I was, in short, all over that movie, and I wasn’t alone.
I sat in that darkened theater with unreserved anticipation and let the movie wash over me in a sensation of sights and sounds that lived up to all the hype that had been built by the marketing juggernaut that preceded it. From the mood to the action to Batman and the Joker, I loved everything about the movie.
It’s weird to think about now when people’s opinions are as hard to ignore as the sun, but I remained blissfully ignorant to how poorly Michael Keaton’s casting had been initially received. There was no internet as we know it today, so for me there was no communal place to read about the bitching. I wasn’t too familiar with him as an actor. I knew of him, of course, just as I knew of Jack Nicholson, but without either cable or a VHS for most of the 80s I had no real exposure to him. So I had no per-conceived opinion. I had never seen a Tim Burton movie. I was going in as unblemished as possible.
I can see how his casting would be a shock back then. But I never batted an eye. Oh, sure, he didn’t look like he had the strength to lift a man off the ground, but I believed in the world that was built, so I went along with it. I succumbed to the fantasy.
That’s the important part. For two hours in that theater, I succumbed. I watched Batman fight the Joker, and it was awesome. My mom was force to spend the entire movie peering around the frizzy-haired head of the person sitting in front of us, but she loved it. My dad dug it also.
Six years later, that frizzy-haired dude would end up being the owner of the local comic shop that I was a customer of for ten years.
When the movie ended to a huge round of applause (something I had never heard happen in a theater, but again, I had never been there on the first day of a release) I felt completely justified in all the pre-hype I had gotten swept up in. It was good. It was damn good.
The local news crew was on hand to get reactions from the people filing out of the first screening. They stopped my dad and asked him what he thought of the movie.
“It was a real cliffhanger,” he said.
Yeeeeah…his comment was left on the cutting room floor. When we watched the news later that day, they had instead gone with the far more ebullient reaction from the the previously mentioned frizzy-haired guy that would go on to sell me tons of comics.
Weird.
The movie came out on VHS in November of the same year, which was a pretty fast turnaround. We got our first VCR player that September, and I ended up getting it for Christmas of 1989. In keeping with the overpowering Batmania, my parents also got me the 1960’s Batman: The Movie starring Adam West. I ended up watching the ’89 Batman movie on Christmas afternoon, and the Adam West movie that night. They were night and day takes on the same theme, but there was room for both.
I had given up toys in the fall of 1988, but that little black movie-esque Toybiz Batman called out to me when I saw it hanging on a peg. That Batman figure, with it’s zipcord belt, was the gateway that would lead me back into collecting toys.
Batman’s style and tone would go on to influence the Animated Series and the live action Flash series.
Eventually Batsuits with nipples and George Clooney would dampen the thrill of this particular take on the franchise, but at the time. it was pure magic. There have been other takes on Batman since, and other takes on the Joker. With the passing of time, it has become very popular for people to look back on this movie with a critical eye and pick away at all of the faults. For some, it has diminished the movie. “It doesn’t hold up,” is a popular critique, although I’ve never known what it should hold up to. Youthful memories? Good luck getting anything to hold up to that. Today’s standards? It doesn’t need to and shouldn’t have to. It’s asking too much of a movie to replicate that initial experience.
I watched this movie again just last year. It had been a few years since I watched it before that, and many many years since I stuck that VHS into the VCR player for the first time. I have no idea how many times I’ve watched it over the years in all the available formats.
But every time, it still entertains. I like Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne. I like his Batman, as stiff as he is. And Jack Nicholson’s Joker remains my favorite theatrical version of the Joker. I can’t help it. I love that Joker. Maybe I lack the necessary skills to be truly objective with things I enjoyed as a kid. Maybe I’ve never developed the muscle to cannibalize my childhood for critical judgment trophies. I don’t know, and it’s not important to me.
30 years ago today.
Feels like it was just yesterday.