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The Geeks Of Doom Round Up 16: The Dark Knight Rises
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cGt2099   |  
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The Geeks Of Doom Round Up 16: The Dark Knight Rises

The sixteenth episode of The Geeks Of Doom Round Up is here, and for this special edition, we review The Dark Knight Rises, directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Christian Bale. We discuss in-depth all the SPOILERS from the movie, and examine the next steps for the DC film universe.

Keeping with the theme of this week’s episode, we take a listen to some music from the soundtrack for The Dark Knight Rises by Hans Zimmer; and take a short listen to the audio of the teaser trailer for Man Of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder, at the end of the show. We also take a look at some of the Batman and TDKR-related posts happening here at Geeks Of Doom.

Podcast

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The Evolution Of Batman In Popular Culture
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Hunter Camp   |  
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Batman in Popular Culture

Batman has become one of, if not the most well known characters in the history of American pop culture. He’s been dark, he’s been bright, and he’s even been an agent of propaganda, but one thing that has remained consistent is that people know who Batman is. With The Evolution of Batman in Popular Culture, my attempt is to take an extensive look at all the ways that Batman can be interpreted, why he’s remained a consistent force in popular culture, and how he becomes a reflection of society making him the most iconic superhero.

When Batman (Bat-Man) was created by Bill Finger and Robert Kane, he was initially created as an answer to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s iconic superhero of the lower class. And while Superman was given super powers and a fighting stance against corruption, Batman was a little darker. The creation of Batman came mainly from pulp novels, Zorro, and the 1926 horror film The Bat. Batman was a weird creature of the night that, initially, wasn’t afraid to kill and would do so if the criminal “deserved” it. In his creation, Batman is already a reflection of an era that is commonly described as being hopeful, yet disillusioned in the face of World War II, a time when almost everyone was on board with the Allied Powers in their war against the Evil Axis Powers. Society was cut and dry, good and bad, so a four-color look at a wealthy vigilante lent itself perfectly to the culture of the time.

Furthermore, this interpretation of The Batman was moved into the popular propaganda films shown during war times where Batman and Robin teamed up to fight on the home front while all the soldiers were defending America’s freedom. Sure, if you try to watch The Batman and the Batman and Robin serials, you’re going to lose your mind if you’re brain’s not stuck in a World War II mindset in which you’re pretty much sure that Japanese people are completely evil and should be punished for all their evil deeds. Yes, it’s completely ridiculous and completely wrong, but it is 100% an accurate portrayal of the United States’ attitude toward the world at the time. Another aspect of this that’s worth mentioning is that in most superhero stories, this was the interpretation. In fact, this was the interpretation of most movie serials during the time period, but for the sake of argument, even as an overweight “on-a-budget” looking Batman, the interpretation is valid and represents the time.

The next major incarnation of The Caped Crusader came with “The New Look” that accompanied the heralding in of The Silver Age of comics. Oddly enough, with sales of superhero comics tanking, the introduction of the Batman TV show came to our Earth and showed a completely different side of Batman. This Batman was campy, this Batman was fun, this Batman was kid friendly, and above all else, this Batman was psychedelic. If one thing is tied to the 1960s, whether accurately or not, it’s the free love, acid freak hippie nature of society at the time. This youth culture was high on life and many other things which made straight-laced stiffs, like Adam West’s portrayal of the Batman character, completely hilarious. While kids were loving the cartoony action of Batman, the elaborate death traps created by brilliantly acted villains like The Riddler, The Joker, King Tut, and Egg Head, adults saw the humor that laced every other moment outside of the square Adam West. The cast was in on the joke, the adults were in on the joke, the only ones that were left out were the kids. And quite honestly, as a kid who watched this show growing up, it was absolutely perfect. All of the elements that are over done and goofy to me as an adult, which I still adore, were exactly what my child-like mind thought a superhero TV show about Batman should be like. The goofy, post-Wertham nature of The Silver Age in comics, alongside the ironic attitude of the country allowed Batman to be one of the biggest pop culture icons of the pre-Vietnam 1960s. Most today would refuse to admit the importance of this era of Batman, but when you take a grander look at his history, Batman reflects society, and that exactly what happened with Batman ’66.

Following the escapades of Adam West’s Batman, the titular character was relegated mostly to cartoon shows with interactions between other Warner properties like Scooby-Doo. Sure there was the live-action special Legends of The Superheroes which showed a handful of DC heroes fighting DC villains, but for the most part, while Batman was being redefined in the comics throughout the 70s, Batman for better or worse became a cartoon character. He stayed in the minds of children and parents until the 1980s when Frank Miller got a hold of him. In Miller’s The Dark Knight, he redefined what a superhero comic book could do, and alongside Alan Moore’s Watchmen, he changed comic books forever. Miller, as a writer, creates stories with hardboiled toughs in an incredibly dark setting, and after this version of Batman was brought to the attention of the masses again for the first time since the 1940s/1950s, Batman was once again The Dark Knight. This next step in Batman’s evolution led to filmmaker Tim Burton‘s 1989 Batman.

Batman was the next big superhero movie after the Superman franchise took off and then ultimately fell off due to poor writing/directing/producing/lack of public interest. After the boom and economic hopefulness of the 1980s, we were met with the grunge era. The grunge era, as I’m calling it, accompanied musical acts like Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, The Pixies, and The Melvins, and was a sign of America’s youth caught up in a wave of disillusionment. Gone was the chrome horizon of the 1980s. What we were welcomed with, and on a path towards, was a somewhat dark era in which many felt ostracized and hopeless. It’s my opinion that 1989’s Batman helped usher in that time period, but either way, it’s hard to deny that Tim Burton’s cartoony gothic hero was not in part a reflection of that mood. When Batman hit theaters, fans saw a new Batman dressed all in black whose motivation once again became vengeance on the part of his parents’ murder. The gothic hero was an orphan on a grand scale, and considering the attitude of America’s teens at the time, people flocked to this interpretation. In fact, Batman stayed on track with Burton for quite some time, which included the debut of Batman: The Animated Series, which many young kids used as their first exposure to The Dark Knight and in the future, this series would become incredibly important, but we’ll get back to that in just a little bit when we discuss the modern era. This truly was a renaissance for The Batman.

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Check Out Samples From Hans Zimmer’s ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Score
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BAADASSSSS!   |  
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The Dark Knight Rises

A few days ago we got our first look at the cover art and track listing for the forthcoming release of Hans Zimmer‘s orchestral soundtrack to The Dark Knight Rises was released.

Today we have for you a selection of 30-second samples from each of the album’s fifteen tracks. You can listen to them here below.

The chilling chant that serves as the theme for the film’s villain Bane (Tom Hardy) is quite prevalent in several of these tracks, but in the final track “Rise” there is a subtle callback to a piece used to underscore the death of Bruce Wayne’s (Christian Bale) parents in the early moments of Batman Begins. A hint of rumors to come true, perhaps?

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Black Friday Lightning Deals: Lost, Dexter, Kick-Ass, Superbad
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Empress Eve   |  @   |  
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LOST: The Complete Collection DVDEvery day, Amazon offers up “Lightning Deals,” limited quantities of various products for a discounted price for a 4-hour window of time. You have to be on the lookout for these deals and once the item runs out within that four hours, the sale is over.

Meaning, if you see something on sale that you want, buy it immediately before it’s gone. Since BLACK FRIDAY is coming up, there’s tons of great deals going on sale today, STARTING ON NOVEMBER 26 AT 12:30AM PST (yes, that’s 3:30am EST!).

Typically you don’t know what will be on sale until the minute it gets posted, but as part of this Black Friday event, Amazon has released this week’s Lightning Deal schedule for Movies & TV on DVD and Blu-ray. See list of today’s deals here below, along with more information on how these special deals work.

NOTE: Amazon has lowered the price of ALL seasons of Mad Men on DVD and Blu-ray to $9.99 each from November 25-27!!! Visit the Mad Men page to select DVDs/Blu-rays to purchase.

Also, Amazon’s Blu-ray box set deal of the week is the Alien Anthology Blu-ray Edition for only $70.49 (that’s 50% off the list price of $139.99). This deal is valid only for this week through November 27, 2010.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2010

12:30 a.m. – 4:30 a.m. PST

Angels & Demons
Blu-ray – $5.00

Legion
Blu-ray – $5.00

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‘Inception’ Star Tom Hardy Re-Teaming With Christopher Nolan On ‘Batman 3’
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The Movie God   |  @   |  
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Fans have waited patiently as director Christopher Nolan took his break from Batman after The Dark Knight and made a little movie called Inception. The director did the same thing after Batman Begins with The Prestige, and this is just the way of Nolan’s world.

But now that Inception has indeed come and gone, everyone is getting pretty anxious for things to get going on the next chapter in the DC Comic superhero’s dark new story, currently just being referred to as Batman 3. And today it would appear that our first casting has occurred.

It’s being reported that Tom Hardy has been cast by Nolan for a major role in the next Batman. Unfortunately for us, it hasn’t been revealed what exactly this role will be, or even if it’s a villain or not. This is already starting to become an unpleasant new Hollywood habit, as we just saw with the casting Kevin Bacon as an unknown villain in X-Men: First Class and with Rhys Ifans as an unidentified villain in Spider-Man. Before we know it, every big casting will come with massive questions of who they’re playing in the movie they’ve been cast in.

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