Jim Steranko has pointed out that Bob Kane was too smart in ripping off Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson: he also retained the merchandising rights and that's why there was no Batman merch for the first 20-30 years unlike every other major comicbook superhero of the era.
There were actually two separate pilots, one in the mid '40s and the other in the early '50s. The first one only exists as snippets of a script called, "The Case of the Drowning Seal," a re-working of Robin's origin which has the Flying Graysons as secret government spies, and Nazi spies as their killers. (It also has the weird choice to have Batman adopt an English accent to disguise his voice.) You can see photos of a few of the script pages in a book called, "Batman, The Complete History: The Life and Times of the Dark Knight." (In case you're wondering, the titular seal was trained to send coded messages for the Nazis by flapping his flippers.) The second one, called "The Batman Mystery Club," still exists as a recording and can be found on multiple Old Time Radio websites. Batman and Robin tell a group of kids (the titular club) the first half of a locked-room mystery they were involved in, with a bunch of unexplained supernatural goings-on. Frustratingly, there's no resolution to the story, since they never made a second episode! Obviously, neither of these was very good, so Batman was stuck being second-banana to Superman! (Over the radio waves, anyways.)
Thanks for uploading!
A lot has happened to these iconic characters in the last 71 years.
Future Hollywood star Gary Merrill as Batman and the legendary Bud Collyer as Clark Kent.
What is the name of this episode?
Dr Bly's Confidence Gang!
Thanks. I've really enjoyed the Superman Radio shows and have been trying to find as many as I can.
The Smithsonian museum used to sell all of the episodes on cassette. I'm not sure if they still do.
This is good stuff.
why didn't batman get his own radio show?????
10141991 there was a pilot recorded but nothing came of it
Batman was more of a plot device to move the story along or to save Superman
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Jim Steranko has pointed out that Bob Kane was too smart in ripping off Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson: he also retained the merchandising rights and that's why there was no Batman merch for the first 20-30 years unlike every other major comicbook superhero of the era.
There were actually two separate pilots, one in the mid '40s and the other in the early '50s.
The first one only exists as snippets of a script called, "The Case of the Drowning Seal," a re-working of Robin's origin which has the Flying Graysons as secret government spies, and Nazi spies as their killers. (It also has the weird choice to have Batman adopt an English accent to disguise his voice.) You can see photos of a few of the script pages in a book called, "Batman, The Complete History: The Life and Times of the Dark Knight."
(In case you're wondering, the titular seal was trained to send coded messages for the Nazis by flapping his flippers.)
The second one, called "The Batman Mystery Club," still exists as a recording and can be found on multiple Old Time Radio websites. Batman and Robin tell a group of kids (the titular club) the first half of a locked-room mystery they were involved in, with a bunch of unexplained supernatural goings-on. Frustratingly, there's no resolution to the story, since they never made a second episode!
Obviously, neither of these was very good, so Batman was stuck being second-banana to Superman! (Over the radio waves, anyways.)