Tuesday marks the exact anniversary (June 23rd) of Burton's movie - a film that broke box office records despite many people expecting it to disappear without trace as soon as it opened. Instead, it opened the door for three sequels with different levels of diminishing return, a classic cartoon series, numerous bad superhero movies and a summer where it seemed like everything had a Bat logo on it. If there truly was life before Burton's Batman (and we only have science's word and our own faulty memories that there was) one thing's for sure - it was certainly a lesser place without the sounds of Prince's "Batdance" available for us to listen to.

To do our part to mark the 20th anniversary of the movie, we've looked back at the making of the movie, remembered some of our favorite merchandise from the Summer of the Bat, thought about the disasters that were made as a result of its success, and tried to think of the good things about each of the sequels. Feel free to join in, but if we hear someone doing the "this town needs an enema" line, we're turning this nostalgiafest around right now.

Batman Returns

There are many who think that Burton's second Batman is his best, and I have to admit that I'm one of them. For one thing, it's just weirder, dropping a lot of the compromise from the first to form a messier, funnier movie where Keaton doesn't have to fight for attention next to a scenery-chewing Nicholson (Not that Danny DeVito's Penguin isn't almost as bad). Yes, it doesn't have the clearest narrative in the world, but I fully and only slightly shamefully admit that the 17-year-old me didn't care about that as long as Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman was onscreen.

Batman Forever

Burton vacated the director's chair for the third movie (He stuck around as producer, however), leading to Keaton also leaving the series to pursue "more interesting" roles. Enter Joel Schumacher and Val Kilmer, and the beginning of the end. You can see the potential in all of their choices, even as the execution didn't live up to it: Trying to go for a new visual aesthetic instead of aping Burton was a good idea, but the neon dayglo look they came up with definitely wasn't. Similarly, the media-mocking of the plot (The Riddler's television-replacement device literally being an idiot box and sapping the intelligence of its audience) had potential, but the overly broad acting of Jim Carrey as the Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face brought everything down to a farce-like level that reminded people a little too much of the Adam West days.

Batman and Robin

...And this was where the franchise ended, thanks to Schumacher's attempts to "homage" Adam West and Dick Sprang going horribly awry. To his credit, the director apparently wanted the movie to be much more like a cartoon than the earlier installments, but with toy companies having input into the design of the movie's costumes and characters this time around, maybe things got a little out of hand from his original intentions (Whether the toy companies were in favor of the much-ridiculed nipple additions to the Batsuits is unknown, if unlikely). Not helping things was the arrival of Batgirl, bringing the lead cast to a cramped five characters (Batman, Robin, Batgirl and two villains Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy, the last two masterclasses in overacting from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman). And yet, despite Schumacher himself apologizing for the movie on an extra from the recent DVD reissue, there's something weirdly compelling about it. I demand a critical re-appraisal!

(There's arguably a case to be made for the idea that Batman's success drove new readers and, perhaps more importantly, movie and television producers to the medium, leading to the early 1990s speculator boom and subsequent bust, but that's another article in itself.)

The Movies
If there's one thing Hollywood likes more than a hit, it's a formula for more hits, and Batman's success convinced movie executives that they could do exactly the same thing with whatever comic character they wanted (Even if, in Robert Townsend's case, he had to make him up). The result? Lots of bad movies, made with less love and less talent than Burton brought to Batman. Exhibit A: Warren Beatty's garish, flat Dick Tracy:


Also, see The Phantom:


...And Meteor Man?


Not all of the comic-based movies were terrible, of course; I still adore The Rocketeer:


Goths the world over loved The Crow:


And who can forget Marvel Comics' ill-fated early attempts to get into the movie biz? Look! Here's the direct-to-video Captain America:


Or even better, the direct-to-bootleg Roger Corman Fantastic Four:


Looking at some of these, I'm kind of glad that Batman and Robin accidentally killed the genre for a few years.

The Best Thing To Have Come From The Success Of The Movie
Surely there's no contest, right...?


Batman: The Animated Series (AKA The Adventures of Batman & Robin and The New Batman Adventures, amongst other names it had during its brief but wonderful life) may have gained from the success of Tim Burton's movies - it premiered in 1992, following the release of Batman Returns, but had been in the works long before - but it wasn't a copy by any stretch of the imagination. Dark without being humorless, endlessly stylish thanks to the talents of Bruce Timm, Dan Riba and many others and much smarter than other Saturday morning cartoons (or, for that matter, many other incarnations of Batman), Batman: The Animated Series defined the character for a generation, and remains an example of how good an animated series can be.

Maybe you'd like to see the original animation that got the series greenlit...?

That summer was huge. You couldn't turn around without seeing the Bat-Signal somewhere. People were cutting it into their fucking heads. It was just the summer of Batman and if you were a comic book fan it was pretty hot.

Contemporary estimates suggested that over $500 million worth of merchandise was sold for the first movie, with some suggesting the number was closer to $750 million - but then, there was a lot of bootleg merchandise available at the time. While merchandise had been a large part of the summer movie business since George Lucas made a fortune from Star Wars' ancillerary products, the blanketing of the Bat was something different: Starting, perhaps, as uncertainty on behalf of Warner Bros over whether the film itself would recoup costs, it became a genuine craze somewhere along the line - leading to all manner of random Batproduct on the market. Even before the movie opened, analysts knew something big was happening:

''Batman'' does not reach theaters until June 23, but market research surveys have shown an extraordinary awareness on the part of moviegoers for the last month. '' 'Batman' is the movie equivalent of 'Phantom of the Opera,' '' said Jack Brodsky, the president of marketing and distribution at Morgan Creek. ''It jumped onto the research charts in first place. That's like being No. 1 on the best-seller list your first week.''

Mr. Vogel thinks ''Batman'' could sell $300 million worth of merchandise. The comic-book character has been around for 50 years and the Caped Crusader appeals to adults as well as children. Although Warner Brothers has been secretive about the merchandising of the movie before it opens, Licensing Corporation of America, a subsidiary of Warner Communications Inc., has already mailed out thousands of catalogues hawking everything from Batman playing cards to a $499.95 jacket with the Batman logo ''studded with rhinestones.''

And, even if you weren't willing to pay $500 for a rhinestone jacket - or just had enough taste to not want a rhinestone jacket in the first place - there was still an embarrassment of Bat-riches available. For example, you could buy a bumper sticker allowing you to pretend that you were really Bruce Wayne:

Alternatively, if you really wanted, you could just buy the Batmobile itself. It even has "2 concealed rockets"!

If you were hungry, there was always some Bat-cereal to get your day started properly -


- and if you needed a snack during the day, your Bathead candy dispenser was sure to help you out:


Batman could also help with your leisure activities - you could play the arcade game or the pinball game...


... and, if you felt the need to spend your evening dancing instead of fighting crime, Prince was there to help you out with what may have been one of his last hurrahs before disappearing into self-pleasuring obscurity (Sorry, Prince fans. But you know that I'm right):

And then, you could unwind before sleep with the movie's second soundtrack release, the Danny Elfman score. Which, I have to admit, reminds me much more of the animated series now than the movie... But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Images from Batman Movie Online

If Burton as director was seen as a risky move because of resume up until that point, his casting of Michael Keaton as the lead character was assumed by many to just be outright suicide. It also wasn't just the comic fans who were scared about the idea of someone known more as a comedic actor taking on the role (50,000 letters of complaint were apparently sent to Warner Bros as a result), as executive producer Jon Peters recalls:

One of the most powerful men in Hollywood went as far as to call Warners' chairman Steve Ross and tell him casting Michael was such a horrible idea it would bring Warners to its knees... The entire studio would crash. Heaven's Gate revisited.

(I have to wonder what the response would have been if Bill Murray, another of the actors under consideration for the role alongside more traditional candidates like Mel Gibson, Pierce Brosnan and Kevin Costner, had been cast.)

The casting of Jack Nicholson as the Joker, however, met with much less anger (Other actors considered included Robin Williams, James Woods and, in what could have been either awesome or the worst decision ever, David Bowie), even if many - including screenwriter Sam Hamm - disliked the retcon that revealed that Jack Napier, the young Joker, was the man that killed Bruce Wayne's parents; that change in the story happened during shooting, when the 1988 WGA Writers Strike prevented Hamm from working on rewrites himself.

(Here's the first production draft of the script and, for fun comparison, Hamm's original 1986 draft.)

The production was troubled, to say the least. As well as the Writers Strike, the four month shoot - described later by Burton as "[t]he worst period of my life" - also saw producers change the end of the movie without telling Burton, the budget spiral out of control - it was rumored to end up more than 50% higher than it was when it started - and footage stolen from the set, as the press fought to be the first to have pictures from the secretive set. Even in the movie's pre-release publicity, the stress was clear as this Time Magazine story demonstrates:

As in all megaprojects, the Batman people were just happy to have survived. "Tim is a pale guy," his friend Keaton says. "Put him in England and add the demands of the shoot, and he becomes transparent." But Burton soldiered on, and now offers a cautious commendation of his own work: "Given the scale, the number of people involved and how quickly we did it, it still has a personality, which big movies often lose. It doesn't feel like a cardboard clone."

Early reviews for the movie were mixed; while some enjoyed the dark tone, others felt as if the darkness overwhelmed everything else. Roger Ebert, for example:

[D]id I care about the relationship between these two caricatures? Did either one have the depth of even a comic book character? Not really. And there was something off-putting about the anger beneath the movie's violence. This is a hostile, mean-spirited movie about ugly, evil people, and it doesn't generate the liberating euphoria of the Superman or Indiana Jones pictures... The movie's problem is that no one seemed to have any fun making it, and it's hard to have much fun watching it. It's a depressing experience.

Time Magazine's take was similarly damning:

Batman's style is both daunting and lurching; it has trouble deciding which of its antagonists should set the tone. It can be as manic as the Joker, straining to hear the applause of outrage; it can be as implosive as Batman-Bruce, who seems crushed by the burden of his schizoid eminence. This tension nearly exhausts the viewer and the film.

Nonetheless, the film was a runaway success, much moreso than Warners had anticipated - its opening broke box office records (It was the first movie to earn more than $100 million in its first ten days), and by the end of the year, it had become the sixth most successful movie of all time. The moral of this story? Perhaps, to let Tim Burton do whatever he wants - unless that happens to be remaking Planet of the Apes.

Gordon Tracy from Dick Tracy. In the radio serial, Dick Tracy's brother Gordon has an equally square jaw (I think), but isn't quite as smart as the Dickster. A supervillain who goes by the names The Spider and The Lame One (Really — worst supervillain name ever!) captures Gordon Tracy and does brain surgery on him to make him EEVIL. (The "Lame One" also uses a sound weapon to destroy San Francisco's bay bridge, and steals a superspeed airplane, according to Wikipedia.) Anyway, the brain surgery may turn Gordon Tracy ebil, but it doesn't make him a match for Dick. Probably because now he's evil and brain-damaged. Oh well.

Superman has a million evil duplicates, to the point where you wonder what's his deal. Luckily, they're all lacking in the super-intelligence aspect of his Kryptonian rockstarness, especially Ultraman, the evil alternate universe version whose name sounds like he's the spokesman for a dish-washing liquid. And who keeps coming to our universe despite some bizarre rule that says he can only win in his own universe. And then there's Superboy Prime, who's just kind of a nutbar. Really, the smartest quasi-evil Superman duplicate is Bizarro, who can at least master the incredibly complex grammar involved in saying everything in reverse — except for the things that make it possible to understand what he's saying.

Star Trek is full of slightly addled evil dupes as well, including bearded Spock, who's first a pawn in an evil alternate universe, and then lets Kirk talk him into betraying all the evil fascist principles he stands for. The real Spock would never have let Kirk talk him out of supporting the Empire with one of those five-minute Kirk rants. And then there's Transporter Kirk, who wears too much eyeliner, macks on his Yeoman and wears the wrong uniform shirt. The worst, though, is probably Data's evil twin Lore — can anybody explain to me his evil scheme involving a Borg alliance and giving Data fingernail-enabled emotions? Anyone? (I think fingernail emotions probably feel sort of chalky.)

Knight Rider: Not only did KITT have a rival with a somewhat slower processing speed, KARR, but Michael Knight also had an evil brother, Garth. As far as KARR goes, he's sort of the less-streetwise prototype of KITT, who often drives into situations his tires aren't fortified for. Garth, meanwhile, is Michael's twin, also played by David Hasselhoff. Only Garth drives a truck... named Goliath. I love how even the KR fan site admits that Hasselhoff may have given in to overacting slightly when playing Garth. Here's Garth meeting his sad end. ("So cold and so ruthless! You remind me of my mother!" "You're hungry for my touch... just because I look like HIM!")

The One features an evil version of Jet Li from an alternate universe, who's killing all of the other versions of himself so he can become god, or something. If I had the power to jump into alternate universes, I'd probably be too busy tracking down Firefly season three DVDs and then selling them on eBay.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, in most versions at least, shows people being replaced with alien "pod people" duplicates, whose prozac-addled demeanor gives them away.

UFO: In this series by Gerry Anderson (Space: 1999), Commander Straker and Col. Foster run into duplicates of themselves hiding out in a secret undersea base. Unfortunately, the alien duplicates can't quite copy human speech, so they just play taperecordings of the real Straker and Foster when they need to fool people.

Blork's Evil Twin. In this sequel to the classic children's book Space Brat, the space-brat Blork has mended his ways... until he creates an evil duplicate of himself named Krolb that does the opposite of whatever he does. And for some reason Krolb wants to shrink their home planet of Splat using a shrink ray. Why? Don't ask for logic from a person named Krolb. Just... don't.

Futurama features a duplicate of Bender named Flexo, complete with the required goatee... but it turns out Bender's actually the evil one. And you know that Bender is pretty brain-damaged from all his wild robo-carousing.

Godzilla has at least two evil duplicates, Space Godzilla and Mechagodzilla. But neither of them can dance as well as Godzilla can.

Darkwing Duck has an evil duplicate from an alternate universe, Negaduck — he's just as skilled and smart as Darkwing, but with a chainsaw instead of friends. Actually, not such a bad trade-off.

Dark Samus sprouts out of the DNA of the real Samus, in the Metroid Prime video game. Called "the Dark Hunter," she's almost a match for the real Samus, except that she's overconfident. Plus she keeps destabilizing and losing her physical form. (I have days like that too.)

Inspector Gadget has an evil twin named Robo-Gadget, whose hands are replaced with machine guns in the movie version. Built by Dr. Claw, he's probably only about as smart as his creator. Plus he only has a handful of gadgets built in, as opposed to the dozens with the Inspector wields.

The Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror VII includes an evil twin of Bart named Hugo, who lives in the attic wants to reattach himself to Bart. As in so many of these evil twin stories, though, it turns out Hugo is actually the good twin, and they switch places. (And since Bart's really the evil twin, it's pretty safe to say the evil twin is the dumber one. Just think of all the self-inflicted brain damage.)

The Flash has Professor Zoom, aka the Reverse Flash, who isn't exactly a duplicate of Barry Allen, he's just an evil counterpart in a color-reversed costume.

The X-Men have tons of counterparts, including the Beast's evil twin Dark Beast, plus a ton of Skrull dupes. Professor X has an evil twin named Cassandra, who actually comes pretty close to wiping out the mutants but underestimates poor old Cyclops. (Everybody always undestimates Cyclops, probably because they've seen X-Men 3.) As for Dark Beast, he's just not as brilliant as Hank. There's no way.

Bill And Ted meet Evil Robot Bill And Ted in Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey. They've been sent back in time from the future to take Bill and Ted's places in the Wild Stallynz. Actually, they probably are smarter than the original Bill and Ted, come to think of it. Scratch them from the list.

Miles Vorkosigan has a clone named Mark, who starts out being designed to kill and replace Miles by terrorists, but ends up not really being evil. In Mirror Dance, he even becomes a sympathetic (if flawed) character who wants to free other clones from non-consensual brain transplants.

Wonder Woman meets an evil alternate version of herself, from another universe, who's seen how lame Wondy's relationship with Steve Trevor is, and decides to come take Steve for herself. (Why??) For some reason, this leads to a contest of wills in the evil alternate universe, where Wondy gets de-aged to her pre-pubescent self.

Lois And Clark featured an evil clone of Lois, who tries to take her place, and does a good enough job that Clark marries her. She only gets caught out because Clark notices she's behaving strangely. There's also a clone of Clark named "Vatman." And a frog-clone that takes the place of the president. And Smallville featured Bizarro Clark, who's weakened by direct sunlight.

Stargate: SG-1 featured a replicator version of Colonel Carter. She turns out to be pretty unreliable, though, betraying her fellow Replicators when they attack the humans. Later she becomes the leader of the Replicators, but the real Carter gets to an anti-Replicator superweapon before she does, making all the Replicators disassemble.

Third Rock From The Sun tried to replace our beloved supreme commander, Dick, with Evil Dick, who may have been as good-looking as Original Dick, but isn't quite as good in bed, or as inspiring a leader.He decides to call all three of his underlings "Tommy," and has some very original ideas about courtship.

Doctor Who features many evil twins, including the cactus-faced Meglos, who duplicates Tom Baker's Doctor but utterly fails to carry off the burgundy-great-coat look with the proper panache. And the eye-patch wearing, mustache-clad Brigade Leader, an alternate-universe version of the Brigadier who just isn't quite as resourceful when faced with a monster rampage.

The Bionic Woman, Jaime Sommers, has a duplicate named Lisa Galloway, who actually just has plastic surgery to make her look like Jaime. But she's not even bionic, she just does a lot of drugs that make her able to jump high. Or maybe the drugs just make her feel like she's jumping really high. That seems very plausible.

Additional research by Katharine Duckett.

• The Masks from Mission Impossible: The latex masks which could apparently turn a thin Tom Cruise into a chunky Philip Seymour Hoffman weren't exclusive to the movies. They used a fair share of these disguises throughout the television show, and the best part was when they'd cut from the live person to the dead looking fake mask being peeled away to reveal the operative underneath. At least MI:3 showed us a bit of how the machine that makes them works, but it still doesn't explain how they fit so well. The company that makes those could have made a fortune at Halloween every year.
• The Translator Microbes in Farscape: Science fiction properties have tried for years to get around the problem of everyone speaking English on new worlds lightyears away from Earth, and this has led to everything from The Universal Translator in Star Trek, to the Babel Fish in Hitchhiker's Guide, and the telepathic translating done by the TARDIS in Doctor Who. So, by the time Farscape came around, the writers decided to make them injectable translator microbes that let you understand whatever languange was hurled at you. Other people could understand you as well, but only if they were likewise injected. They didn't work perfectly, and often failed to translate slang like "dren" and "frell."
• Almost Everything in the 1960s Batman TV Show: Batman has had a slew of his own wacky gadgets, both in the comic books where he has an outfit for every possible encounter, and in the television show which really took the cake in creating bizarre items for Batman. Almost everything he used was a "Bat" something. In this clip from the show, you've got probably the lamest Batman gadget ever invented: The Bat Ladder. What exactly makes this a Bat Ladder, and why did he need to label it? In case he lost it somehow? Que ridiculo. Then there's the Bat-copter, the "Bat Auto Mode," and the Shark Repellent Bat Spray, which apparently makes sharks explode. He even has Barracuda, Whale, and Manta Ray repellent in there too.
• The Psychic Paper from Doctor Who: While this seems cool at first, eventually you start thinking it was an easy stopgap by the writers to get around the Doctor showing identification. In the old Tom Baker episode "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" (featuring the Doctor as a sleuth in Victorian London) the Doctor is asked to turn out his pockets, and he has everything in there from jelly babies to a toy Batmobile. We sure would have loved to see what Christopher Eccleston or David Tennant has crammed in there. Maybe a junior g-man badge would have worked just as well.
• The Giant Amplifier from Back to the Future: Doc Brown was an eccentric inventor, to be sure, but why on Earth would he create a massive speaker? Watching this movie again, it seems like it was just created for comic effect, and surely it would have blown out both of Marty's eardrums, scrambled his brain, and broken a bone or two in the process. Slight chance of overload my ass. Maybe the terrorists had asked him to build this thing too.
• Reed Richards and his Unstable Molecules: Unstable molecules sound like they'd be, well... unstable. Seems like just an easy way to explain why the Human Torch's clothes don't burn up, or why Sue Storm doesn't have to strip naked every time she turns invisible. Were the Thing's blue shorts made out of unstable molecules too? No idea what he needed them for. Reed supposedly made a fortune for the Fantastic Four by selling the patents to all of his inventions, but were most of them stolen? One thing is for sure, while he could seemingly invent a teleportation device out of a wristwatch and sticks of gum, he sure couldn't invent anything to turn Ben Grimm human again. So, how did Reed invent these things? In the movie the cosmic rays did it, but in the comics, it was just pure Reed Richards pseudogenius. It's also the name of an awesome graphic novel about the "real life" Fantastic Four by James Sturm.
• The Jetpack from The Rocketeer: Now, don't get me wrong, I wanted one of these things so bad that I could taste it. Who wouldn't want to slap on a funky helmet that makes you look like a hood ornament, a cool leather jacket, and just take to the skies? The problem was that later I realized this thing would totally burn your ass off. I mean, the flames shot out mere millimeters from his butt... how on Earth did he not scorch himself? Asbestos pants? Even one little throwaway line could have someone explained this, but now I just imagine Cliff Secord in a hospital bed with third-degree burns covering his backside. Plus, how could he even bend his legs upwards without melting those boots?
• Dick Tracy's Magnetic Space Coupe: Dick Tracy is probably best known for his two-way wristwatch radio, which later became a two-way television and eventually housed a computer to help him solve crimes. However, in the 1960s things got a lot more ludicrous when Tracy and Co. traveled to the moon via his Magnetic Space Coupe. While they were there, Tracy met "The Governor of the Moon" and his daughter, "Moon Maid." She eventually married Tracy's adopted son Junior, and they had a daughter together who... sorry, my brain just exploded.
• The Antigravity Belt Buckle in Ultraviolet: Or "Ultraviolent" as I like to call it. Milla Jovovich's badass vampire, er... "hemophage" with a conscience used this round little belt buckle to change her personal gravity, meaning she could walk on the ceiling, climb up walls, and it could even make her motorcycle drive up the sides of buildings. While we could (barely) buy the nanotech/portable hole technology in her wristbands and in that white plastic backpack, this thing just sent it over the top. What would keep her from flying off into the sky?