I understand the need for a gritty Dark Knight, but I miss Adam West’s campy Batman

The full first season of The Penguin is now available to watch on MAX. The series was intense and gruesome, yet elevated and complex. A truly fantastic entry in the Batman universe.

The success of The Penguin comes from Lauren LeFranc’s incredible writing. The pacing and story threads all worked together in a way that made the ending feel satisfying. Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti’s performances balanced terror and humanity where needed to create moments that were truly chilling. And the disability representation? I will personally knock on doors to get LeFranc an Emmy.

Yet, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of yearning for something I don’t think we’ll see again for a long time.

Once upon a time, Batman was in color

I have visceral memories of spending long days at my Grandma’s house during summer breaks. I would sit on the brown carpet and look up at a small TV to watch classic television re-runs. This is when I fell in love with Batman. It didn’t matter that it was a TV show from the ’60s. The gags were corny, the graphics popped against the action scenes, and it was really fun. Adam West remains the Batman of my heart as the character’s universe continues to be reworked into new forms again and again.

As for depictions of the Penguin, Danny DeVito’s grotesque take on the villain in Batman Returns is maybe the most memorable. While the film itself is in the limited color palette that Tim Burton likes to work with, there are still plenty of nods to the highly stylized sets and scenarios that play out in the ’60s TV show. I mean, he travels by duckie, straps rockets to actual penguins, and has an umbrella for every occasion. Though dark, the absurdist touches keep the story firmly rooted in the realm of fantasy.

While I’ve enjoyed the first entries into the latest Batverse, I notice that we are getting further away from the absurd. In what has been shown so far in Matt Reeves’ version of Gotham, the storytelling has been interesting and nuanced. However, some of the choices have me curious about whether or not this era will completely abandon the idea of Batman being a fantasy property. Instead of the German expressionist sets or over-the-top scenarios, we’re left with a decaying city that closely resembles those in our IRL world. Circus performer henchmen are traded in for crime families. Even when the hero saves the day, it doesn’t really feel like Gotham is any safer.

What happens to Batman when we take away the fantasy elements?

For many people, fantasy offers an escape when life feels a little overwhelming. With the closing of a brutal election season and actual villains taking over the White House, escape seems appealing. However, by escape, I’m not talking about dissociation. In Ellen Kirkpatrick’s book Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes, she asks that we think of the escape offered in fantasy a little differently. Rather than a simple portal we climb in and out of with no consequence, we can ask what transformations occur when we re-emerge. How did the world change for us after that interaction? What tools did we gather?

What fantasy does is give us the distance to properly look in the mirror at ourselves and our surroundings. We can see how we are the same and different from the proposition presented on the screen. Through this introspection, we can begin to imagine our personal transformations. I think, when we have our feet too firmly planted in reality, we lose a little of the safety found in that distance. We shrink away from the horrors until someone makes a witty quip and we get to relax our shoulders again.

Jane Espenson, a TV writer who has worked on escapist shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica, and Game of Thrones, is quoted in Kirkpatrick’s book: “You don’t create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.” I can’t argue with the quality of the Batverse and I don’t even think I would change much about it. I’m beyond excited to see a team-up between Sofia Gigante and Selina Kyle. There is so much room for transformational escape if we get to see these two burn down empires together. However, when I reflect on where we have been with Batman, I do miss the camp that made me become a fan in the first place. Sometimes, a little silliness serves a purpose.