Horny Nightmare Heroes: The Doomed Toys of ‘Batman Returns’
Batman was, without a doubt, one of the biggest movies of all time when it was released. It was an event. The hype was enormous and so long-lasting that I was still feeling the residual effects of it when I was a child in the early ’90s even though I was born the year that movie came out. Bat-Mania was very real, but I missed out on its peak. Instead, my early childhood was spent in the grips of the merchandising surrounding Batman: The Animated Series, and the movie’s sequel, Batman Returns. Like the first film, there was Batman Returns stuff as far as the eye could see, and as a kid, I didn’t ever question it. Just seemed like more Batman stuff and I was a kid who loved Batman.
I owned both movies on VHS as far back as I could remember, and both just seemed like Batman to me. Of course, it might have something to do with the fact that I started watching horror at a pretty young age, too. I received the infamous Monster Face, a rotting skull face you could puppet and decorate, for Christmas when I was either three or four. Because while I wasn’t aware of it as a kid, Batman and Batman Returns are very different movies, and that led to some pretty interesting and ultimately wild merchandise, on top of so much else.
Batman Returns is Tim Burton unrestrained and is also one of the director’s best films, probably because of that. Whereas the original movie felt somewhat out of time, inventing a crossroads between the Prince-infused ’80s and ’30s gangster movies, Batman Returns took a similar approach to a different genre. This time, it’s a full-blown gothic horror movie, a superhero blockbuster built on a foundation of German Expressionism, influenced highly by the likes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu.
These influences aren’t any kind of secret, either, as there’s a central antagonist named Max Shreck, after the actor who portrayed the infamous vampire Count Orlock in Nosferatu. The Penguin is reimagined as a deformed, sewer-dwelling crime boss leading a gang of circus performers. Catwoman is no longer a thief, but a secretary hell-bent on revenge against the corporate boss who didn’t think twice about pushing her out of a skyscraper window. She’s a woman who gets killed and wastes no time reimagining herself with a fetish outfit and a mind for murder. The core of the characters are more or less intact, as Penguin is still a mob boss at heart, just with many Gothic flourishes heaped on top of that. Catwoman’s whole backstory and motivation have changed and yet her personality is as recognizable as ever.
The point is, Batman Returns is one of the best superhero movies of all time, because it simply does its own thing. It’s a dark, sometimes gross, often surreal psychosexual gothic fantasy. As such, it’s incredibly goddamn hard to make toys out of.
Nonetheless, Batman was massive, and its sequel not only needed to be marketed to kids, they needed to market the Hell out of it. That’s the true root of the issue with the controversy surrounding Batman Returns, I think. Kids just wanted to see Batman and they got treated to Horny Nightmare Heroes. It’s not just that this was a hard movie to make toys out of, it’s the fact that it was, in addition to that, the single most merchandised movie of the year. It’s a lot to ask of a film that is just a few quarts of blood and a nipple or two away from basically being Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Nonetheless, it had to happen. Batman Returns had a massive merchandising push and it was obvious right out of the gate that nobody knew what to do with it. There were lunch boxes, coloring books, video games, erasers, you name it — but nowhere was this struggle clearer than when it came to the toys.
The toys were the key. Kenner had known this since they had purchased the toy rights to Star Wars back in 1976. Similarly to the initial Star Wars craze, there had been more demand for Batman toys upon its release in 1989 than there had been toys to meet that demand. The initial lineup just included Batman, The Joker and Bob the Goon. It really felt more like an extension of their DC Super Powers Collection than anything else. Because of that, Kenner spat out as many Batman Returns toys as possible, with all of the favorites right up front, right out of the gate. The first waves of toys featured the Penguin, Catwoman, and many, many versions of Batman. Right away, however, things were different.
Firstly, there was also a figure of Robin, who does not appear in the movie. That’s less on Kenner, than it is on Warner Bros, because Marlon Wayans had actually been cast as Robin in the film before the decision was made to scrap the character. This Robin figure was actually based on Wayans, presumably from concept art of what the character would have looked like, making it an interesting piece of Batman history. Then you have Catwoman, who looks pretty faithful to her movie counterpart, though the stitching on the costume is heavily downplayed. And then you have The Penguin, who is a repaint of Kenner’s previous Super Powers Penguin and bears absolutely no likeness to the character in the movie whatsoever. That’s right. Penguin looked so gross in Batman Returns that they didn’t even try.
For Batman himself, the faithfulness varied quite a bit. There are a few figures in the recognizable black outfit, and the Bruce Wayne figure is vaguely modeled after Michael Keaton. But there are so many different Batman outfits for so many different purposes ranging from scuba to the questionably nondescript “laser.” I had Deep Dive Batman, who had the same cowl and chest symbol as Movie Batman, but everything else was bright, neon yellow. It’s hard to imagine Batman in bright yellow, sure. But it is way harder to imagine this Batman, with his fetish criminal girlfriend, this Batman, who grins maniacally after strapping a bomb to a circus performer, wearing bright yellow. Some of the figure choices seemed arbitrary, too. Penguin couldn’t sport his Dr. Caligari look in an action figure, but the suicide bombing penguins complete with bombs strapped to their backs were fine, because at least they just looked like regular penguins.
That’s the issue that was impossible to overcome with merchandising Batman Returns. There was simply no way to reconcile the need to market this to children with a movie that was just as interested in being a Neo-Gothic psychosexual horror film as it was in being an action-filled summer blockbuster.
As can only be expected, the Happy Meals were truly when it came crashing down. Nothing could be more explicitly for children than a McDonald’s Happy Meal. The toys themselves are harmless enough. I had most of them. The Happy Meal toys depicted the characters driving vehicles that were much too small for them. Catwoman drove a purple Cat-Mobile that was nowhere to be found in the movie. There was a clear move, like the action figures, to distance the product from the motion picture while also retaining its likenesses.
That’s a weird balance to maintain, and it’s safe to say they didn’t succeed. Parents were outraged and wrote angry letters. Little narc kids even went on TV complaining about how the film was too scary. Then again, the age range of a Happy Meal at the time was considered 1–10 (this is a separate issue, but please do not feed a Happy Meal to your baby) and thus every kid that would be getting them would technically be too young to even see the movie without their parents’ permission. Warner Bros. even insisted, with the many liberties the toys took, that they were not making toys (speaking for the Happy Meals specifically) based on the movie itself, but were generally just making them based on the Batman character. That’s fair on one level, but at the same time, all of the likenesses from the film that they felt comfortable with are still there.
People weren’t upset over the toys themselves. The Happy Meal toys were just little Batman heads in little cars. They were upset that the movie was being marketed toward children at all, and that’s the unsolvable problem. There is no way to make Batman Returns kid-friendly, at least in the way execs and parents’ & censorship groups wanted, and there is no way to not give a Batman film the biggest merchandising push possible, especially for being the Batman movie immediately coming on the heels of Batman ’89. In the end, that merchandising boom for such a mean and grimy superhero movie became on of the most fascinating anecdotes in modern pop culture history. Many kids at the time fueled the fire, likely intentional on the part of their riled-up parents, by insisting that Batman Returns traumatized them. That the toys were a Trojan horse that led them into a Gothic nightmare.
But those toys were celebrated by the other kids, the kids like me, who happily played with our Batman Returns action figures while wearing out the VHS, watching Danny De Vito spit up black bile and eat raw fish, watching Michelle Pfeiffer electrocute Christopher Walken until there was nothing left but a charred skeleton, all without batting an eye. I cherished these toys. In fact, Catwoman was probably my first favorite toy, ever. Bafflingly, I even had more than one of her.
Like I said, I received Monster Face for Christmas when I was very young. What I forgot to mention was that I was wearing my Batman Returns pajamas when I did. That’s the kind of kid Batman Returns was for, that’s the kind of kid who embraced both the movie and the toys. The kind of kid who spent Christmas morning cuddling a plastic corpse.
