Batman and Robin, the second movie! Even fans have not seen this funny adventure!

Director Joel Schumacher isn’t the only one who’s attempted Batman and Robin’s adventures on film. In 1948, the Dark Knight and his young sidekick went on an adventure that lasted more than four hours, watched by several spectators. Was the movie better with Schwarzenegger playing Mr. Freeze and Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy? Not an easy decision!

The DC Universe has seen quite a few screen adaptations since the early 1940s, the first of which was the TV series The Adventures of Captain Marvel in 1941 with Tom Tyler, an avid weightlifter, in the title role. Batman will also pass there in 1943, as well as the attending spy Smasher, the pilot Hope Harrigan, the cowboy The Vigilante or the superhero Congo Bill.

A series is a three- to four-hour film divided into episodes, then distributed to theaters, most often weekly every Saturday morning. The format would disappear with the popularization of television in American homes and the development of soap operas for this new medium.

In the late 1940s, producer Sam Katzman Productions struck a deal with Columbia Pictures: he would finance TV series adapted from DC comics, and in return the studio would distribute them theatrically. It began in 1948 with Spencer Gordon Bennett and Thomas Carr’s Superman, followed two years later by Atom Man vs Superman. Anyway, Kirk Allyn is Superman and Noel Neal plays Lois Lane.

Between these two Man of Steel adventures, Katzman created Batman & Robin, a 15-chapter series that chronicled the confrontation between the Dark Knight, the Boy Wonder, and a supervillain called “The Wizard” (The Wizard in VO). More than a wizard, he’s primarily a hooded figure with a penchant for gadgets, regularly interrupting vigilantes to create rocks at regular intervals.

DC’s Whitney Ellsworth served as an official consultant on all of the series based on the comics. He seems to have looked a bit different during this period, as Batman had already been around for almost ten years by then, but we don’t find any trace of him in the series at all. Just the Dark Knight costume with its little horns is hilarious.

Only the most consummate fans will make it to the end of this story without much interest in the mystery surrounding the identity of the witch and dare the final twist of who stood the proposed four hours ago. Without the means, the story hardly continues, but remains more serious than the film and the Batman series with Adam West, who will be the next adaptation of the character on the screen.