Just thought I'd share this poster marking 30 years since the first Tim Burton Batman movie was released in theaters...on June 23, 1989. Batman, along with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as Ghostbusters 2, were my favorite films of that year. With Batman, though, the movie made me such a huge fan that I got the soundtrack on cassette tape (and listened to the Prince songs Partyman and Batdance multiple times), bought a toy Batwing (on which one of my brothers broke one of the tail fins...intentionally), considered Jack Nicholson the greatest personification of the Joker before Heath Ledger came along 19 years later, and had such a huge crush on Kim Basinger that I rented her movie My Stepmother Is an Alien (which was released in cinemas the year before) on VHS tape. Oh, and I constantly had an argument with one of my elementary school classmates (I was in 4th grade the following semester) about how Michael Keaton was awesome as the Dark Knight (he disagreed just because Keaton played Beetlejuice a year earlier). My classmate was an idiot.
Of course, Batman Returns came out in theaters three years later (on June 16, 1992)...and was a fun film even though it wasn't as awesome as the original movie. And then Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever was released three years after that (on July 15, 1995)—and the Batman franchise pretty much went down the crapper until Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins redeemed the Caped Crusader 10 years later (on June 15, 2005). But this Blog entry is about the film that started it all...and Batman '89 will always have a special place in my comic book movie-loving heart, behind 2008's The Dark Knight. The music videos for Partyman and Batdance are posted below. Carry on.
