The Dark Knight of Grassy Glen
- Aug 17
- 13 min read
I would like to begin by clarifying that this is not a formal announcement that I am “into Batman” again.
This is important, because there are people in my life—and by people, I mean my sister—who still seem to believe that whatever I liked at age eight should be treated as permanent biographical evidence.
If I mention Batman, it does not mean I need Batman socks, Batman mugs, Batman jewelry, Batman bedding, or a commemorative utility belt for Christmas. Childhood interests are allowed to remain in childhood.
I’m sure my sister would not want me assuming she still needs Pippi Longstocking socks just because there was a time when that made sense.
That being said, Batman did have a moment in my life.
Actually, Batman had a cape, a patio, a Barbie car, a green-haired neighbor, and a backyard production budget of zero dollars.
Same Bat-Time, Same Childhood
I took Batman seriously as a kid.
Seriously enough that I once watched Batman and Robin get tied together in an enormous knot, only for the episode to end before they escaped.
“Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel,” the announcer said, as though this were a charming arrangement we had made together.
It was not.
I was apparently expected to eat dinner, sleep, and attend an entire day of school while Batman and Robin remained somewhere in Gotham tangled together like Christmas lights.
The next afternoon, I came straight home and turned on the television.
There were no recordings. No streaming. No helpful button asking if I wanted to continue watching. You had one appointment with Batman, and if you missed it, Gotham would recover without you.
The original series was actually built around this kind of suspense, often airing connected episodes twice a week. ABC was not merely showing children Batman. It was teaching us that emotional closure would be available tomorrow at the same Bat-time, assuming nobody changed the channel.
Naturally, Batman escaped.
Batman always had some tiny object hidden in his utility belt specifically designed for the situation he had just entered. He could have been lowered into a volcano and announced that, fortunately, he had brought the Bat-Lava Ladle.
After enough of this, my next-door neighbor Justin and I reached the conclusion children often reach when professionally produced entertainment is no longer sufficient:
We would make our own.
Gotham Comes to Grassy Glen
At least once, we graduated from mere Batman adventurers to filmmakers.
My dad operated the camera while Justin and I made a Batman home movie in the fenced backyard on Grassy Glen, complete with improvised costumes, dramatic action scenes, and plot twists that made no sense but felt Oscar-worthy at the time.
I had to be Batman.
That was a given.
Regardless—or irregardless, as kid me would probably have argued in court—of whether Justin wanted to be Batman, I was Batman.
Justin was the Joker.
In my memory, I made him dye his hair green. Whether I actually dyed his hair green or applied some kind of temporary color and then exaggerated the event for the next several decades, I cannot say.
Memory is not a legal document.
It is more like a badly labeled VHS tape you find in a cabinet and decide to trust anyway.
I do remember putting a Zorro-type hat on him. I remember white face makeup, red makeup on his lips, and turning it into a big Joker grin.
For Batman, I had a blue towel for a cape.
I don’t remember much else about my costume, which probably means it consisted mostly of confidence and fabric.
There were no tights involved.
That alone made our production more dignified than several professional Batman projects.
Our getaway Batmobile was Justin’s sister’s Barbie car, because sometimes Gotham has to work with what is available in the garage.
His sister and my sister played damsels in distress, because older superhero stories loved a woman whose main job was to stand somewhere dangerous and yell for help until a man in a cape arrived.
We did not question this at the time.
Apparently, our casting department had very traditional ideas.
Childhood says, “You stand there and be rescued. I have a towel on my shoulders and things to do.”
The script was improvised using whatever prompt had just arrived in my brain. I’m sure it had the structure of a dream and the dialogue of someone who had recently eaten cereal.
I also remember a ladder—probably a stepladder—which my childhood brain conceived as flying.
This is how children make movies.
They do not say, “We lack the technical ability to depict Batman soaring over Gotham.”
They say, “Stand on that ladder. It’ll work.”
And somehow, it does.
The Sideways Gotham Years
Looking back, our Batman movie probably had several different Batmans floating around inside it.
There was the darker Batman I knew from the 1989 movie.
But there was also Adam West.
That Batman operated in a Gotham where criminals wore themed outfits, every dangerous object was conveniently labeled, and gravity could apparently be negotiated with the television crew.
I especially remember Batman and Robin climbing up the sides of buildings.
As a kid, I believed they were actually climbing.
This was before I understood that television could build a wall horizontally, film the actors from above, turn the finished image sideways, pull the capes in the appropriate direction, and tell gravity to mind its own business.
Occasionally, someone famous would open a window while Batman and Robin were climbing and have a perfectly ordinary conversation with the two masked men scaling the building.
Nobody seemed especially alarmed by this.
Apparently, in Gotham, looking out your window and finding Batman at eye level was roughly equivalent to seeing the mail carrier.
If my backyard Batman movie had contained cameos, I would have wanted Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Elvis, the Beatles, Phyllis Diller, Julia Child, Alfred Hitchcock, Mister Rogers, Mr. Peppermint, Mary Poppins, Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Marty McFly, Doc Brown, and Ernest P. Worrell to open windows during the climb.
This would have involved several problems.
First, I did not know any celebrities.
Second, our budget was zero dollars.
Third, our “building” was probably a patio, a fence, or a stepladder.
Fourth, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were animated and, to my knowledge, unavailable for neighborhood filming.
So we made do.
The villains’ hideouts had their own visual logic.
I used to notice that the camera sometimes seemed crooked and wonder why nobody had bothered to straighten it.
Years later I learned that this was intentional.
The villains were crooked.
Therefore, apparently, their rooms needed to be crooked too.
This show never encountered a metaphor it could not turn into furniture.
Then there were the fights.
BAM!
POW!
ZOWIE!
THWACK!
I love the idea that instead of worrying too much about whether every punch looked convincing, the show simply added punctuation with enthusiasm.
Was that hit believable?
Perhaps not.
Did a giant word just fly across the television and instruct you to stop asking questions?
Absolutely.
My backyard movie desperately needed this technology.
BAM! I assigned myself the lead role.
SOCK! Justin became the Joker whether Gotham liked it or not.
ZOWIE! A Barbie car entered the criminal underworld.
THWACK! Two sisters were placed in mild distress near a fence.
KER-SPLOOSH! A stepladder became the Gotham skyline.
Robin contributed his own special form of emergency communication.
Everything was “Holy” something.
And not always something a normal human being would think to say during a crisis.
“Holy bunions!”
“Holy tintinnabulation!”
“Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods!”
Robin did not merely react to danger.
Robin provided vocabulary enrichment.
His utility belt, meanwhile, seemed to contain:
One batarang.
Rope.
Optimism.
And the confidence to shout “Holy—” while Batman handled the actual equipment.
Bruce Wayne certainly had the money to give Robin a fully stocked utility belt.
Apparently he believed in workplace hierarchy.
Batman got the executive tool package.
Robin got the unpaid-intern version.
Batgirl Gets the Motorcycle
For all the ridiculousness, the show eventually gave Gotham something our backyard production had not bothered to provide:
A girl who got to do the rescuing.
Batgirl arrived in purple, with yellow-gold accessories and a red wig that visually separated Batgirl from the brunette Barbara Gordon.
She also had her own wonderfully impractical purple Batgirl cycle.
Barbara Gordon was Commissioner Gordon’s daughter.
Commissioner Gordon, a man professionally responsible for identifying criminals and solving mysteries, apparently never realized that his own daughter was spending her evenings in a purple cape fighting Gotham’s underworld.
To be fair, this was also a city where putting a small mask over your eyes rendered you nearly impossible to identify.
What I like more now is knowing that Yvonne Craig later heard from women who remembered Batgirl as important to them when they were girls.
That lands differently when I think about our own Batman movie.
Justin’s sister and my sister were the damsels in distress.
I was Batman.
Nobody held a meeting about this arrangement. Nobody objected. We were kids copying the stories we knew.
But somewhere on television was Barbara Gordon putting on her own cape, getting on her motorcycle, and heading out the door without waiting for Batman to rescue her.
Our Gotham may have had a Barbie car.
At least the real one was beginning to let the girls drive.
BATCOMPUTER READOUT
Some completely necessary research
14 miles — Distance from the Batcave to Gotham City
357 — Number of times Robin said “Holy—”
86 — Different spoken fight sounds
$2,500 — What the villains were paid per episode
47 — Signs in the Batcave
45 mph — The Batmobile’s reported top speed
And somehow:
Batman, Robin, and Batgirl were once turned into two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, and Alfred had to restore them with a 3-D machine.
The Movie Where Batman Fought a Shark
The 1966 Batman movie took all of this and apparently decided television had been exercising too much restraint.
Watching it again as an adult was an interesting experience because I remembered loving this world.
My adult brain, however, had questions.
Lots of questions.
There is a shark.
Not merely a shark, but a shark that attaches itself to Batman while he is dangling from a helicopter.
Fortunately, Batman has shark repellent.
Of course he does.
This is a man whose utility belt operated on the same principle as my grandmother’s purse: whatever emergency had just occurred, somehow the necessary object was already in there.
I could accept the shark repellent.
What distracted me more was realizing that Batman had eyebrows drawn onto his mask.
How had I never spent my childhood staring at those?
Apparently there is an age at which a masked crime fighter can have eyebrows painted several inches above his actual eyebrows and your brain simply says:
Yes.
Batman.
Then Batman and Robin become magnetically stuck to a buoy.
This is treated as a serious problem.
Watching now, I found myself staring at their utility belts.
Take off the belts.
Just unbuckle them.
Batman’s utility belt could apparently produce shark repellent on demand, but neither of the world’s greatest crime fighters seemed able to access the advanced technology known as a buckle.
Instead, they struggled heroically against a piece of clothing they had voluntarily put on that morning.
For several minutes, Batman and Robin temporarily forgot how pants worked.
And yet there is one scene from that movie that has stayed with me all these years.
The bomb.
Batman finds himself running around with an enormous cartoon bomb, desperately searching for somewhere safe to dispose of it.
Every time he thinks he has found a place, somebody innocent appears.
People.
A marching band.
A nun.
Baby ducks.
Gotham seems to have organized the entire civilian population specifically to prevent Batman from responsibly discarding explosives.
And Batman keeps trying.
That is what makes the scene funny to me now.
He is not behaving recklessly.
He is doing everything right.
He is simply having one of those days when every reasonable solution immediately develops another problem.
Finally, after trying everything, Batman says:
“Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”
I remembered that line.
And I understand it considerably better now.
That is not merely Batman.
That is adulthood.
That is errands.
That is customer service.
That is trying to accomplish one simple task and discovering that before you may accomplish Task A, you must complete Task B, locate Document C, call Department D, and somehow avoid the ducks.
Sometimes you are not incompetent.
Sometimes you are simply holding the bomb and every available exit has developed a marching band.
The United Nations Becomes Powder
But the image from the movie that may have stayed with me most was the ending with the United Nations delegates.
The villains dehydrate them.
Not metaphorically.
They actually reduce the world leaders to colored piles of powder.
Eventually Batman and Robin recover the powders, and because no sentence about this movie should ever be allowed to remain normal for very long, the different delegates get mixed together.
Batman attempts to reconstruct them.
With water.
They come back.
Mostly.
Except now the delegates are speaking one another’s languages and displaying what Batman describes as a “mixing of minds.”
As a kid, I accepted this.
Apparently I thought international diplomacy could survive being swept into little piles, accidentally combined, and reconstituted with water.
Watching it as an adult, I had several follow-up questions.
Did these people still have their own memories?
Did they recognize their families?
Did they know which countries they represented?
Was anybody going to call a doctor?
The movie responds to none of this with the urgency I now feel it deserves.
Batman essentially hopes the mixing of minds might improve international understanding.
Then Batman and Robin climb out the window.
Honestly, this may be the smartest decision they make in the entire movie.
Everyone has temporarily forgotten the Dynamic Duo are even there, so Batman and Robin get to escape into the sunlight while somebody else deals with the medical emergency, diplomatic emergency, identity crisis, and inevitable paperwork.
Let Bob from HR explain why several United Nations delegates were dehydrated, accidentally stirred together, reconstructed incorrectly, and sent home speaking one another’s languages.
Batman had already done enough.
And Robin, forever the Boy Wonder, probably needed to get home in time for his afternoon nap.
Then Gotham Turned Off the Lights
Then there was the 1989 Batman.
If Adam West’s Gotham operated in broad daylight with brightly labeled equipment and villains who apparently decorated according to theme, Tim Burton’s Gotham looked as though the sun had filed a complaint and left town.
I was seven when the movie came out, which was probably the wrong age to understand much of what was happening but exactly the right age for certain images to attach themselves permanently to my brain.
What I remember most is the atmosphere.
Everything looked dark.
Wet.
Smoky.
Even the expensive places seemed to need better lighting.
The Batcave did not look exciting to me so much as enormous and lonely.
Bruce Wayne sat down there surrounded by screens and equipment, and instead of thinking, “Cool Batcave,” some part of me apparently thought:
Does this man have any friends?
Alfred, obviously.
Alfred always seemed like the only person in Wayne Manor who knew where the clean towels were.
Some of the movie frightened me because I did not understand what I was seeing.
There was the woman whose mask came off.
I had no category for that image.
I did not understand what had happened to her face, why it had happened, or whether somebody was eventually going to explain it.
Nobody did.
The movie essentially said:
Here is something horrifying.
Moving on.
Fear is one thing.
Fear combined with wait, what did I just see? is how childhood memories get stapled to your brain.
I also remember the television news anchor suddenly laughing.
Seven-year-old me did not understand Joker toxin or dark satire.
I thought I had just watched a woman die during the evening news.
Again, the movie did not stop and check on me.
Then there was the museum.
Prince’s “Partyman” plays while Joker and his men dance around vandalizing artwork.
The music seems to be telling you this is fun.
My little rule-following brain disagreed.
I remember watching them spray-paint paintings and smash things and thinking less about the Joker’s criminal genius than:
Who is going to pay for all of this?
The scene was apparently supposed to feel gleefully chaotic.
I was mentally locating a museum employee with a clipboard.
There were things I loved too.
Bruce Wayne blocking a bullet with a serving tray?
Excellent.
No notes.
Other billionaires buy yachts.
Bruce Wayne weaponized dinnerware.
Batman swooping down, grabbing Vicki Vale, and shooting back into the sky?
That was Batman.
That was exactly what I wanted.
Dark, impossible, dramatic, and over before I had time to ask how any of the equipment worked.
And I remember the dinner table.
Bruce and Vicki sit so far apart that they appear to be having a romantic meal across a county line.
Eventually Bruce gives up and moves closer.
Reasonable.
You cannot build intimacy when someone needs binoculars to ask for the salt.
And then there was Joker’s gun.
For reasons I cannot fully explain, the absurdly long barrel fascinated me.
Why was it so long?
Did that make it more powerful?
Was the length itself the joke?
Did Joker simply refuse to own anything that had not been unnecessarily modified?
I may not have understood the plot, but apparently I was prepared to conduct a detailed engineering review of villain hardware.
That is what I remember about the 1989 Batman now.
Not a clean plot summary.
Fragments.
A wet alley.
A lonely cave.
A frightening face.
A laughing news anchor.
A vandalized museum.
A dinner table long enough to require transportation.
A serving tray stopping a bullet.
Batman disappearing into the sky.
And a gun that seemed to need its own real estate listing.
The 1960's Batman had taught me that Gotham could be colorful, ridiculous, and completely sincere about both.
The 1989 Batman taught me that Gotham could also look like midnight had become permanent.
Somewhere between those two versions was the Batman Justin and I carried into the backyard.
A blue towel for a cape.
A Barbie car for a Batmobile.
And whatever lighting conditions happened to be provided by the Texas sun.
Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid of a Childhood Phase
And maybe that is why Batman stayed in my childhood memory even though I did not stay in Batman.
For a while, I loved it.
Then I grew up.
I moved on.
I became interested in other things.
This is apparently difficult for some people to accept.
Families have a funny way of preserving old versions of us.
You can change your clothes, your interests, your routines, your opinions, and half your life, and somebody who knew you at eight will still walk past a Batman puzzle and think:
There she is.
And to be fair, they are not entirely wrong.
That person existed.
She mattered.
I do remember Batman.
I remember worrying about Batman and Robin while they remained tied in a knot during an entire school day.
I remember “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”
I remember world leaders being reduced to powder and somehow regarding their reconstitution as a manageable diplomatic inconvenience.
I remember a Gotham where the sun worked and another Gotham where it apparently had resigned.
And I remember standing in my backyard wearing a towel and believing, without embarrassment or qualification, that I was Batman.
I am glad I remember her.
I just do not need to remain her.
Childhood interests are not lifelong contracts.
They are little rooms we lived in for a while.
Some of us had Pippi Longstocking.
Some had dolls.
Some had superheroes.
Mine briefly contained a blue towel cape, a green-haired Joker, a Barbie-car Batmobile, and enough confidence to turn a stepladder into the Gotham skyline.
I can visit that room.
I can laugh at it.
I can even write one extremely long blog post about it.
Then I can leave again.
So, Celeste, if you happen to see Batman merchandise while Christmas shopping, I would like to assure you that no action is required.
The Bat-Signal has been officially deactivated.
No tights involved.
ZOWIE.
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