BATMAN: and Friends
I’ve played around with the new Brave and the Bold cartoon, as I’m always willing to at least try a new spin on the Batman character, but come away dissatisfied. It’s not just that the character is bright and poppy and has a permanent cowl shadow more reminiscent of Adam West’s mask than the effects of actual light sources — after all, I don’t begrudge the Batman that smiles over in DC Kids‘ Super Friends. No, cuteness is not my problem, it’s just not being written for me, despite the presence of Blue Beetle, Plastic Man, and a bat-utility belt that comes with a frickin’ lightsaber! My friends with children seem to enjoy it, so it’s clearly reaching some demographic that simply doesn’t overlap with my little Venn radius.
No, my Batman-related joy has been almost entirely British in the recent past. I stumbled upon an announcement that Lily Allen was releasing a song on her new album called “Guess Who, Batman?”, which had a marvelous campy Riddler quality to the whole thing. And when I heard that Allen felt that she was “becom[ing] a character in a comic” and two songs off the new album, I became quite excited about this whole thing. The first single — if pre-release internet buzz-leaks can be called “singles” — “Everyone’s at it” was quite catchy, and the interesting Madonna-parody ironic self-awareness of “The Fear” definitely intrigued.
This was all well and good because after seeing Ms. Allen on both Never Mind the Buzzcocks and The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, I had given her variety show Lily Allen and Friends a try and found it to be the dullest collection of pseudo-hip tripe I’d encountered in quite some time. The BBC told me it was boffo with the kidz, and I was relieved to discover that this was merely so much spin. Not that I wanted a charming young person with glasses to fail utterly, but it was so, so, so dull, that I just wanted to chalk it up to overenthusiastic marketeers and forget all about it.
It turns out that, reviewing my iTunes data, that I don’t have much by Ms. Allen, and that what I do have, a) I only repeatedly listened to a very select few songs, and b) I may have confused her frequently with Kate Nash. Embarrassing and predictable, I know. Still, it does make the fact that I enjoy the first two “singles” from It’s Not Me, It’s You that much more of a nice surprise. Check out this post from Pretty Much Amazing for a vast sampling of tracks from the record, including the vulgarity-titled one, which is the song rumoured to be the Batman track. I don’t hear it myself, which may be why the Caped Crusader’s name no longer graces the track list. Which sort of makes this entire thread a bit moot.
So let me close with this, instead: if you really loved me, you’d be bidding to get the naming rights to a recently discovered species of bat. Sure, the current bidding is at five thousand dollars, but isn’t it worth it to have the name rhogeessa batmanueli forever ensconced in the Museum of Natural History? What price nerd infamy?
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