Before Adam West's Batman Was, It Was

Recently, I watched the first (1943) Batman serial.

To say that it was somewhat... cracked is an understatement.



Not entirely in a bad way, though. (FYI, "Batman's ray gun" was actually a stolen piece of villain's equipment which he just happened to be using because it was convenient.)

According to Wikipedia, this serial introduced the "Batcave proper" (although they called it the "Bat's Cave") and also strongly influenced later depictions of Alfred, and additionally was an enormous influence on major parody fodder for the "Adam West Batman" series.

Although I don't recall ever seeing a desk in the Batcave.

Yes, really. A desk. I guess they wouldn't have come up with a computer for him to sit at just yet.

Incidentally, not only is this one of the smallest and least cavernous Batcaves I've ever seen, it also apparently has one really stupid bat that can't fly in a straight line-it keeps going backwards. (I know I shouldn't pick on the "special effects," but I can't help it.)

Batman and an incredibly curly-haired Robin are actually supposedly secret agents for the government in this, reason being that '40s to '50s era censorship didn't permit depiction of flouting authority without said flouters being punished in some way. (If you've ever read The Ox-Bow Incident and then watched the film adaptation from that time period [or vice versa], the significant plot changes are a direct result of similar censorship.)

Batman calling the police on a police callbox frankly made me smile, if only because it made me think of the TARDIS (even if it had no resemblance to the TARDIS at all).

His calling card, folks:

The plot of the main story opens when Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend (who, in one of the last episodes of the serial, inexplicably is suddenly his fiance and probably knows his identity even though before she was completely clueless about it) go to pick up her uncle from jail.

Her uncle was supposedly wrongly imprisoned, but nobody who matters (i.e. the judge and jury) believes him on this point, even though everybody else takes his statements of innocence at face value. He's a rather harmless-seeming old man, which makes this even more incongruous. (Incidentally, it was a corporate crime he was accused of.)

Before they get to the prison, a couple of suspicious looking guys pick him up and drive off with him. When Bruce and company notice and pursue, they manage to get out of sight for a minute, spin around on the road...

...and cause their car to change color via the magic of incredible special effects pulling a tarp blocking a bright light out of the way and swapping license plates (and disguising the driver with a hat while having the others hide beneath the view of the windows).

Having lost their pursuers, the villains return to their headquarters in "Little Tokyo," which has been abandoned because, as the narrator cheerily relates, all the "sneaky Japs" have been rounded up and carted off.

All of them except for the villain, Doctor Prince Tito Daka.

(He's the one wearing bad makeup that's supposed to make him look Japanese and smoking a cigarette.) When I call him "Doctor Prince Tito Daka," it's because he was generally referred to as "Dr. Daka," his name was also established as "Tito Daka" (yes, really), and he was often called "Prince Daka" as well. It's possible that "Prince" was supposed to replicate the impression of the honorific "-sama," but I'm not sure I want to give them that much credit.

Anyway, Dr. Daka's evil plot involves mind-controlling people as "zombies" with incredible strength and using a "radium gun" (the aforementioned ray gun) to commit acts of sabotage, recruiting disgraced former businessmen and the like as minions.

And pretty much all of this is established in the first chapter.

This serial is an amusing artifact of its time period, and I think that people interested in comic book characters might be interested to watch it purely for its historical amusement value.

That's not even going into the increasingly ludicrous cliffhangers, which in the serial's climax involves about three or four scenes being added that changed what happened when the final cliffhanger resolved. (I'll probably save talking about some aspects of this for later posts.) To give you an idea of it, the "Batman's ray gun" scene takes place around when the cliffhanger of the previous episode appears, and in the cliffhanger, they conveniently omit Batman falling out of the armored car just before it flies over the literal cliff.

I would talk more, but I think that's enough for one post.

-Signing off.

The Origin of the Iron Ace

Probably my favorite Golden Age character who never made it out of the Golden Age is the Iron Ace. He just seems to have the perfect combination of interesting concepts and total insanity to hold my attention and amuse me. (The other main candidate would have to be Micro-Face, whose name alone is made of concentrated awesome/stupid, but Micro-Face's stories tended to be a bit more mundane.)

The story of the Iron Ace starts with this panel.

Golden Age exposition: The only thing faster than the speed of light.

Unfortunately for him, the Nazis do show up.

And so he's shot.

But in a plot twist that's so obvious that you'd have to have such a strong resistance to foreshadowing that I suspect it's more likely that you're actually dead and haven't noticed yet, the Iron Ace's armor leaps forth from the case it's in.
And he proceeds to mete out a helping of ghostly justice upon those Nazis.

Of course, here's the really crazy part: That's not a ghost in there, that's some British pilot who the old man rescued and who hid under the armor, and then climbed into it when the Nazis shot the old man.

And the only thing we know to call him is... Captain Britain. No joke. (Although also no relation.)

So how come this ancient suit of armor is bulletproof? Who knows?

Why was the ancient guy called "Iron Ace?" No clue.

How come the old man made (or rather, modified) a plane specifically for the Iron Ace? Aside from the obvious answer that this was an Air Fighters feature, we can't say.

How is Captain Britain able to run around in the armor as effortlessly as if he's in workout sweats? You've got me. (Dude is insanely strong-at one point, he had a ball and chain affixed to him to hold him while still wearing his armor and casually started beating the tar out of people with it.)

He's just an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an inexplicably indestructible suit of plate armor.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: Children of the Lens

I've been meaning to re-read and then review this book for a while, but for some reason I couldn't find it. Then, the other day my sister was looking for something on her bookshelves, and randomly hands it to me. I told her several times I thought she had it, but she didn't believe me... (She had it because, as I've mentioned in the past, she's a huge, huge fan of the Lensman anime movie. Unfortunately, this is the only Lensman book I've actually got easy access to [I don't think the public domain version of Triplanetary counts], and it's the last book in the series, a bombardment of series terminology and obtuse narration that also didn't much suit her tastes generally. Ah, well, you can't be a fan of everything.)

Children of the Lens represents the culmination of years of work by Smith, and the culmination of the original long-running Lensman Arms Race. It is also the culmination of a rather creepy breeding project. And when I say "rather," I mean "extremely." But more on that in a moment.

The ultimate weapons of the original Lensman Arms Race are pretty well ultimate. Number One is a weapon that makes the Death Star look like a pea shooter-a hyperspatial tube opening into enemy territory, out of which a planet from another universe is fired at multiples of c like a huge bullet at the target.

This weapon was fired twice; once at a planet, and then, just for good measure, at the same planet's sun. There wasn't much left.

Number Two was arguably not the same kind of weapon at all. It was not a device, or an implement. It was the massed total mental powers of every Lensman then alive, plus that of the Arisian race, guided and managed by a superhuman telepathic fusion. Keep in mind, the Civilization which the Lensmen were a part of had literally millions of member planets, as it spanned multiple galaxies; a typical good-sized member planet produced a hundred Lensmen a year. Assuming that the majority of Lensmen who graduated in the past twenty years were still active (not a dubious assumption, as the major protagonist of most of the Lensman books, Kimball Kinnison, was at least in his forties in this one), a low estimate puts that at something like 20 billion Lensmen. A fairly typical Lensman can telepathically communicate over interstellar distances and even kill someone by frying their minds at that distance; the Eddorian civilization, despite its age and power, didn't really stand a chance.

This isn't even going into the "loose planets" and "negaspheres" (antimatter planets) that were chucked around rather casually by the good guys, or the supposedly terrifying sunbeam that never gets used in the story. These were all old hat.

You might be wondering about my "rather creepy breeding program" crack earlier. Well, as it happens, the Arisians, using their sufficiently advanced alien license, decided to guide several genetic lineages, not just among humans but among four different potentially useful races in Civilization (humans being one of the four). They decided that humans showed the most promise, so they canceled the breeding programs for the Velantians, the Rigellians, and the Palainians (sorry, no super awesome children for you!), and only humanity gets to advance to the next level. And so, Kimball Kinnison's five children are the first members of a new race of superhumans. ... Think about that.

Yes, it means exactly what it sounds like. Chris "Kit" Kinnison is going to get really close with his sisters.

The first time I read this, I was younger and more naive, and I didn't pick up on the subtexts. Now that I'm better at ferreting these out... Well, let's just say that Wikipedia's remark that there were only a few ambiguous passages referring to this idea was just bull. It was about as ambiguous as a kicked puppy and about as subtle as a bomb blast. Kit and "the kids," as he called his sisters, hit on each other continuously.

For that matter, they also hit on their mother, usually while she was naked.

No, I'm completely serious. That actually happened multiple times.

What really gets me is this idea that, once the breeding program was showing fruit (ARGH), they canceled three of them. The three other races were shown to be immensely complementary to humans. Velantians were relentless, implacable, and tough as heck giant flying snake monsters, and Rigellians and Palainians both displayed analytical capabilities far beyond humans at the same "level." They all got along extremely well. I say, if you're going to have a creepy breeding program where you uplift several lesser species through eugenics, if they all get along then you should finish them all. That's an awful lot of wasted work, guys. (Also, what about the Nevians? They were pretty awesome, too-why didn't they get awesome super-Nevian breeding programs?)

All in all, a bizarre conclusion to one of the first great space operas. (Wikipedia's article was glowing praise obviously written by a huge fan.) Oh, yes, and technically, it was a frame story that was sent by a future Chris Kinnison to some unknown party time capsule style to warn them of the Lensman Arms Race methodologies or something, as it was suspected that there would be new counterparts to the Eddorians in the future.

-Signing off.

A Strong Foundation

(One of the roughest things about blogging, I've found, is coming up with titles regularly; hence my heavy use of colons. So if that title makes you groan at all, terribly sorry. I know I groaned.)

I recently re-read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. (Specifically, the original Foundation trilogy, that is, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation.) Not terribly surprisingly, while the series was written in the '40s and '50s, it's aged very well. It once won the Hugo for "Best All-Time series," whatever the heck that means, which is a sure sign it's quality. (Read the Wikipedia article for a serious discussion-I'm about to digress violently.)

There are things in it, though, that date themselves to greater and lesser degrees. When private messages must be carried from place to place, they're put in sealed capsules which can theoretically only be opened by the intended recipient. This is fine; less fine for the modern reader is that the enclosed message is on paper. (Of course, those clever Foundation scientists figured out how to make paper that automatically oxidizes in air, so the security issue isn't that bad...) Or take the device called the Lens. The Lens is a device used in hyperdrive navigation, making it far quicker and easier than it would be otherwise, with a computer-controlled three dimensional simulation of the galaxy's stars, allowing for what is essentially point-and-click navigation. The odd part? It was brand new, and today there's a multi-platform freeware program called Celestia which does the exact same thing.

Of course, the sharp edge of advancing technology always manages to screw up science fiction; it's all but unpredictable.

The other thing I've been considering is how one might try adapting the Foundation series to other media.

Just looking at it, it'd be hard at least. Foundation is cerebral, concerned with thoughts and ideas rather than things like action and personal interaction. If I were to pick out only a section of it to make a movie out of, it'd almost certainly be the parts surrounding the Mule, but that would be stupid because the Mule's actions don't make sense outside of the larger framework.

But the potential for a great movie or three is in there. Just because Asimov didn't write the framework for one into it doesn't mean it isn't. Therefore, the real question is, how much can be carried over successfully, and what would the central focus of any such work be?

I know how purists get, but I'd tend to say that, other than Hari Seldon and the Mule, there really aren't any important characters in the Foundation series. (The original one, I mean.) The scope of the series is centered on history, and it is the distinct position of the books that it isn't the figures in history, but vast historical forces that generally determine events. And, of course, it is the very rare individual, such as Seldon or the Mule, who disrupts historical forces.

Then, of course, there's the issue of the Second Foundation. The Second Foundation, in case you don't know, is a group of expert psychologist/sociologist/psychohistorian telepaths, whose mission it is to chart history's flow and try to gently tweak it just so to keep the path to the Second Empire in place. These people are rightly resented by the Foundationers, who eventually realize they're being tweaked and set out to get rid of them. But the Second Foundation being what it was, it managed to fake its own death quite effectively, and was still pulling the strings. (And if you're wondering, the Second Foundation felt it was better to fake its death by allowing many of its volunteers to die, than to let the First Foundation believe it still existed, because the First Foundation acted wrong whenever it thought the Second Foundation was acting on it.) Asimov presents the whole thing as part of the flow of history, neither particularly wrong or particularly right... but the Second Foundation was clearly being set up to become the elite of the Second Empire, and that's pretty sick.

Ultimately, the Foundation series isn't particularly likely to be made into a movie, but then again, the Lensman series is getting (another) movie based on it, so anything's possible.

-Signing off.