Jumping the Bat-Shark: The Demise of Batman by Will Murray
At the
completion of this essay I must inevitably file it under, ‘interesting for a
Batman fan, irrelevant for the digital culture of today’. The entire essay focuses on the last season
of the TV show and how due to budget cuts, suffered a slow and painful descent
into ridiculous obscurity. At the
writing of this blog post, I am having difficulties drawing parallels or
similarities with digital texts that are available today. As an outsider looking in on the digital
natives culture, I have a difficult time seeing an end to the culture that has
been created around digital texts and media.
"Some Days You Just Can’t Get Rid of a Bomb”: The Legacy of
Batman by Paul Kupperberg
In this
final full essay, Kupperberg revisits a lot of the points stressed throughout
the other 13 essays. Batman, in all its
forms, still manages to influence pop culture today just as much as it did
almost 50 years ago. While POW! WHAM!
SMASH! has slowly been removed from our lexicon, some of the issues that the
creators and producers of the show had to overcome are still around today.
The
greatest example was the debate over the influence of comic books on the youth
of the time. In the 1940s Senate
hearings were held to determine whether the violence depicted in comic books
were damaging to the youth of America, creating a generation of violent
children who lack empathy and compassion for others. Today, we are hearing a similar argument
about violence in video games.
The
purpose of the campiness and slapstick in Batman was twofold. It was to wow the children watching and to
humor their parents. No one ever
complained that the Batman TV show was creating a generation of violent
children. Perhaps, and this is an
argument I regularly stick behind, it is due to the fact that viewing the
television show was a family event where certain situations and dialogues could
be put into their proper contexts. This
is an issue that has been strangely absent throughout the entire book. I feel the need to pursue this theory further
in my ‘free time’.
I appreciate the honesty you display in your blog Thomas. I'm fascinated by the 1940s Senate hearings you mentioned. It seems like we, as humans, are always looking for somewhere else to place blame for our faults.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the Jumping the Bat-shark essay, perhaps the digital text parallel we can take from this is that, just like the vast expanse of digital text available online, not everything written in a book is of value. :-)
Thomas, I agree that video viewing as a family event is helpful. I think it is interesting that according to articles I'm reading in a Quantitative Research course, so far there is not scientific research proving that viewing violence causes violent behavior. It seems to make such intuitive sense to me, that I was surprised to read that conclusion. June
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