V02-T07a "And where...is the Batman?"

.....This interstitial is well known as a sample.

Volume 2: "WE'RE ALL GOING TO JAIL FOR THIS, AREN'T WE?", track 7a

• 00:10 [excerpt from "BATDANCE" (Prince)]
• performed by Jack Nicholson (via Prince)
• original source: CD BATMAN Warner Bros. 9 25936-2 (US)
• and my source: the same

.....As a long time comics fan, I had serious misgivings about the casting in that first Tim Burton Batman movie. After seeing the movie I surprised myself by remarking that Michael Keaton was so promising as the lead that they should never have hamstrung him with that idiotic costume, a solid piece of vulcanized rubber with less flexibility than a truck tire. He couldn't even turn his head without turning his entire body, he couldn't raise his arms above his head without being switched into a different version of the costume. Keaton, whose earlier career was built on bottom of the barrel comedy film roles clearly written with Bill Murray in mind but which Murray wisely turned down, wasn't someone the casual filmgoer would chose first as Batman, certainly not over actors who simply look more the way Bruce Wayne is typically drawn. (Pierce Brosnan comes to mind.) But shortly before being cast Keaton was seen in a movie about a man struggling with alcoholism. Finding that movie on cable some time later made casting him seem more reasonable.

.....What I couldn't get past, not when it was announced, not while I sat in the theater watching the movie and not in the years since, was casting Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Somebody apparently couldn't absorb the fact that more than a decade had passed since "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest". I know that Nicholson is sort of a sacred cow in Hollywood, largely on the strength of superlative films like "Five Easy Pieces", which were already pretty dusty when Burton's "Batman" was being filmed. I know that he's a baby boomer, meaning that when he looks in a mirror, he still sees himself as he was at 23 years of age. And at 23, he would have been magnificent as the Joker. But in 1989 he was WAAAAY TOOOO FAAAAT. I was prepared for a live action movie to gloss over or ignore many elements that ask for a suspension of disbelief in a comic book. For instance, the cape could never actually move the way it is often drawn for dramatic effect. But it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that a character who, at the time, had been skinny for half a century to be played by a skinny actor. The Joker had been skinny in the comics, in the newspaper strip, in cartoons, on television, in coloring books, board games, paperbacks, trading cards, posters, month after month, year after year since 1940. And after Jack Nicholson played him in the movie he continued to be skinny in every iteration and permutation conceivable. It may not be as bad as casting blond English characters with Tom Cruise ("Interview With A Vampire") and Keanu Reeves ("Constantine"), but it still bothers me twenty years later that almost everyone pretended to not notice.

.....I decided that Jack could make himself useful introducing the next track.