Way Out Wednesday: The Bat Boys – Batman | PopdoseWay Out Wednesday: The Bat Boys – Batman
With the Batman: Arkham Asylum game coming out this week (for PS3, Xbox360 and PCs), I thought I’d throw out another Batman-related album for you. When the Batman TV show came out it seemed like you couldn’t swing a dead bat without hitting some sort of Caped Crusader tie-in, and record albums were no exception. Some were pretty good. Some, not so much. I’ll let you judge where this one falls.
This first song is the Bat Boys’ version of the Batman theme song. This really isn’t too bad, with a nice swinging organ solo.
I hope you liked the previous song because, despite the name Batman and all the sound effects on the album cover, absolutely nothing else on this album is remotely Batman related! There’s not even any name checking in the song titles. What the songs I picked from this album do have in common, though, is that they’re jazzed-up versions of classical tunes. The first, “Uppercut Blues,” borrows heavily from “Flight of the Bumblebee” (which was actually the Green Hornet’s theme song). The titles of these songs seem to be pretty random. You can maybe imagine people punching each other while listening to this song, but there’s nothing bluesy about the song at all!
If you watched The Ed Sullivan Show, you might remember the song “Saber Dance.” It was used a lot for death-defying acts like the Flying Wallendas and people who juggled swords. This is the basis for the song “It’s Murder!” This doesn’t have much to do with the Batman show either, since I don’t think anybody ever got murdered on the show. Jill St. John fell into the Batcave’s atomic pile and Catwoman fell to her supposed death a number of times, but that was the closest they got.
The last song featured here, “Mars Visitor,” is based on the song “Funeral March for a Marionette,” probably best known as the theme to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I know that whenever I think of little green men from Mars, Hitchcock is the first person that comes to mind!
If you’d like to hear the rest of this album, which contains more jazzy instrumentals that have little to do with Batman and less to do with their song titles, you can get it here!
