From the prologue, wherein Gotham City crime-fighters Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward) are lured out to sea only to be attacked by an exploding shark (Robin deduces who's behind it: "Sea...'C' for Catwoman!"), to a denouement that sees Batman attempting to reconstruct the world's leaders from coloured clumps of powder, the film is a wonder of stream-of-consciousness construction ("Theatre of the absurd," as West calls it). It is also, however, marred slightly by the law of diminishing returns: with all four of the show's major villains (The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Riddler (Frank Gorshin), The Penguin (Burgess Meredith), and Catwoman (Lee Meriwether, stepping into Julie Newmar's shoes)) working together to stop The Cowled One, their personalities get reduced to their barest specialties, although Meredith's seemingly off-the-cuff dialogue is memorable. Ironic without also being cynical, this is a sophisticated movie that will have kids on the edge of their seats and developing a sense of humour at the same time; if it's what Joel Schumacher aspired to in Batman Forever and Batman and Robin, trust me: he failed.

Most DVD collectors expected to see a Special Edition of Warner/Tim Burton's Batman long before one for Fox's earlier big screen incarnation of the Bob Kane comic, but lo and behold, the situation is reversed. The Fox Batman is letterboxed at 1.85:1 and 16x9-enhanced; the remastered image is of sound mind and body, rarely betraying its age except when optical effects are happening. The look is pure sixties, of course, with flatter lighting (prone to grain) and more exaggerated colours than is employed in today's motion pictures, but the disc houses a lovely transfer that greatly improves upon what we're used to seeing on cable and videotape, especially in the area of tint. As for the audio, a remastered Dolby 2.0 stereo soundtrack accompanies the original mono mix, but fidelity, rather than channel separation, is what differentiates them. I am content with both.

A commentary from West and Ward ("Pass the popcorn, Adam," Ward begins) is good fun, full of fond recollections and pee-pee jokes. It is some kind of statement that the track's pertinent info could be compressed into an included featurette (17 mins.), but there, West and Ward (now heavy set and barely recognizable) were interviewed apart, and one misses the chemistry. The affable motion picture vehicle designer George Barris appears alongside his most famous creation in "Batmobile Revealed" (6 mins.), which, contrary to studio declaration, doesn't qualify as a tour, though it contains winning anecdotes, like Barris' arrest by a clueless cop in Fargo, ND for driving the unusual car. Two still galleries (the better one compiled from Adam West's private collection), teaser, Spanish, and English trailers for Batman, and a preview of Fox's Planet of the Apes: The Evolution box set finish off this sparse yet Bat-tastic Special Edition.-Bill Chambers