Thursday, 8 December 2011

Batman S01-S02[imdb rating 7.6]

The "teasers"

The typical story began with a villain (often one of a short list of recurring villains) committing a crime, such as stealing a fabulous gem or taking over Gotham City. This was followed by a scene inside Commissioner Gordon's office, where he and Chief O'Hara would deduce which villain was responsible. Commissioner Gordon would press a button on the Batphone, a bright red telephone located on a pedestal in his office. The scene would then cut to stately Wayne Manor where Alfred (the butler) would answer the Batphone, which sat like a normal everyday telephone on the desk in Bruce Wayne's study.
Frequently, Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson, would be found talking with Dick's aunt, Harriet Cooper, who was unaware of Bruce's and Dick's secret identities. Alfred would discreetly interrupt so they could excuse themselves to go to the Batphone. Upon learning which criminal he would face, Wayne would turn a switch concealed within a bust of Shakespeare that stood on his desk. This would cause a bookcase to slide back and reveal two fireman's poles. "To the Batpoles!" Wayne would exclaim, and he and Grayson would slide down to the Batcave, activating an unseen mechanism on the way that dressed them as their alter egos. The title sequence often began at this point.



Similar in style and content to the 1940s serials, Batman and Robin would arrive in the Batcave in full costume and jump into the Batmobile, with Batman in the driver's seat. Robin would say, "Atomic batteries to power...turbines to speed." Batman would respond, "Roger, ready to move out" and, after fastening their seatbelts, the two would drive out of the cave at high speed. As the Batmobile approached the mouth of the cave (actually a tunnel entrance in Los Angeles's Bronson Canyon) a camouflaged door would swing open and a hinged barrier outside the Batcave would drop down to allow the car to exit onto the road. Scenes of Batman and Robin sliding down the Batpoles and getting into the Batmobile, the Batmobile exiting the Batcave, and the arrival at Commissioner Gordon's building (while the episode credits are shown), are reused footage utilized in nearly all episodes.

After being summoned to Commissioner Gordon's office via the Batphone, the initial discussion of the crime usually led to Batman and Robin conducting their investigation alone. This investigation usually resulted in a meeting with the villain, with the heroes engaging in a fistfight with the villain's henchmen, and the villain getting away, leaving a series of unlikely clues for the two to investigate. Later, they would face the villain's henchmen again, and he or she would capture one or both of the heroes and place them in a deathtrap leading to a cliffhanger ending, which was usually resolved in the first few minutes of the next episode.
[edit]
After the cliffhangers

The second part of the episode (until late in Season Two) would begin with a brief recap of part one. After the opening credits and the theme music, the cliffhanger was resolved.

The same pattern of plot was repeated in the following episode until the villain was defeated in a major brawl where the action was punctuated by superimposed onomatopoeic words, as in comic book fight scenes ("POW!", "BAM!", "ZONK!", etc.). Not counting five of the Penguin's henchmen who disintegrate or get blown up in the associated Batman theatrical movie, only three criminal characters die during the series: the Riddler's moll Molly (played by Jill St. John in Episode 2) who accidentally falls into the Batcave's atomic reactor, and two out-of-town gunmen who shoot at Batman and Robin toward the end of the "Zelda The Great/A Death Worse Than Fate" episode, but end up killing each other instead. Twice, Catwoman (Julie Newmar) appears to fall to her death (into a bottomless pit and from a high building into a river), but since she returned in later episodes, it is presumed that as a "cat," she has nine lives and thus has several more left to go. In "Instant Freeze," Mr. Freeze freezes a butler solid and knocks him over, causing him to smash to pieces, although this is implied rather than seen. There is a later reference suggesting the butler survived. In "Green Ice," Mr. Freeze freezes a policeman solid; it is left unclear whether he survived. In "The Penguin's Nest," a policeman suffers an electric shock at the hands of the Penguin's accomplices, but he is presumed to survive, as he appears in some later episodes. In "The Bookworm Turns," Commissioner Gordon appears to be shot and falls off a bridge to his death, but Batman deduces that this was actually an expert high diver in disguise, employed by The Bookworm as a ruse (implying that the diver survived the fall).

Robin, in particular, was especially well known for saying "Holy (insert), Batman!" whenever he encountered something startling.

The series utilized a narrator (producer William Dozier, uncredited) who parodied both the breathless narration style of the 1940s serials and Walter Winchell's narration of The Untouchables. He would end many of the cliffhanger episodes by intoning, "Tune in tomorrow — same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!"

Only two of the series' guest villains ever discovered Batman's true identity: Egghead by deductive reasoning, and King Tut on two occasions (once with a bug on the Batmobile and once by accidentally mining into the Batcave). Egghead was tricked into disbelieving his discovery, as was Tut in the episode when he bugged the Batmobile. In the episode when Tut tunnelled into the Batcave, he was hit on the head by a rock which made him forget his discovery and jarred him back into his identity as a mild-mannered Professor of Egyptology at Yale University. While under the spell of the Siren (Joan Collins), Commissioner Gordon found the Batcave beneath Wayne Manor and deduced Batman's true identity, but Alfred gassed him to prevent his informing her, the memory of the discovery gone after leaving the Siren's spell.

Batman S01:-
http://mediafireefreaks.blogspot.com/2011/12/batman-s01.html

Batman S02:-
http://mediafireefreaks.blogspot.com/2011/12/batman-s02.html

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