After premiering at New York Comic Con last month and enjoying a very quick theatrical run, the new animated feature Batman: Return Of The Caped Crusaders debuts on home video with this Blu-ray release from Warner Brothers, branded as part of their DC Universe line.

Set in the 1960's, the story revolves around a new allegiance formed between Gotham City's most nefarious villains: Catwoman (Julie Newmar), The Penguin (William Salyers), The Riddler (Wally Wingert) and the Joker (Jeff Bergman). From here? Well, they just sort of go out and attempt a bunch of wonderfully ridiculous exercises in taking down Batman (Adam West) and Robin (Burt Ward). Catwoman tries to use her feminine charm to bring Batman over to the dark side, but of course, he's not having any of it. A ray gun gets stolen and they head into space for a bit before the dynamic duo winds up on a conveyor belt inside a giant TV dinner heading towards a giant flaming oven. Along the way Alfred (Steven Weber), Commissioner Gordon (Jim Ward), Chief O'Hara (Thomas Lennon) and even Aunt Harriet (Lynn Marie Stewart… better known as Ms. Yvonne from Pee-Wee's Playhouse!) get in on the fun.

The plot is anything but deep but it sure is a whole lot of fun. Clearly those behind this project know that nostalgia is indeed a powerful marketing tool. Fans familiar with the vintage Batman TV series that made Ward, West and Newman stars in the first place will get more out of this than those new to this era of the character's history. There's a big built-in audience for this and Warner Brothers/DC Comics would have been foolish not to cash in on it. Thankfully, it works quite well. Clearly West, Ward and Newman are getting up there in years and casting them to play live action versions of their characters probably wouldn't have worked. Getting them to voice animated versions of their sixties selves, however, works just fine. Sure they sound older than they did back on TV but it's close enough and just hearing them deliver new material as they do here will likely put a big smile on the face of any fan.

The animation style used here is pretty close to the ‘house style' employed in a lot of the other DC Universe titles that have been coming out on Blu-ray from Warner Brothers over the last few years, but it has a bit more of a sixties comic book feel to it. The colors are often times very bright and over the top, very much in keeping with the show. Director Rick Morales has been all over a lot of the previous DCU titles, working in the art department on some of the TV series like Teen Titans and Batman: The Brace And The Bold and directing episodes of Beware The Batman and Green Lantern, so he has a good sense of what a project like this needs to work as he's clearly well versed in the source material. As such, all of the animated characters in the movie look quite a bit like their real life counterparts from the TV series. The pacing is quick and the feature delivers a nice mix of the humor that was such a trademark of the sixties run with some preposterous but no less entertaining action set pieces.

Anyone looking for Christopher Nolan inspired Dark Knight material should look elsewhere. This project was intended to bring back the lighter side of Batman's history, and while it accomplishes it quite admirably, it is meant to be funny and as such, no one should even be trying to take this in the least bit seriously. In place of a brooding and tortured hero we get some seriously chaste good guys and the complex villains are here reduced to over the top caricatures, but the constant breaking of the fourth wall reminds us a few times that everyone involved was in on the joke. Which is as it should be. This is fluff, sure, but it's really fun fluff and there's nothing wrong with that at all.

Video:

Warner Brothers brings Batman: Return Of The Caped Crusaders to Blu-ray in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.78.1 widescreen on a 25GB disc. Despite the low bit rate on the disc, there aren't any serious compression artifacts to note (surprisingly the seventy-eight minute feature takes up only 11GBs of space on the disc). Black levels and color reproduction are quite good and the transfer reproduces the sixties comic book style animated quite nicely. Detail is solid, and as this was a digital source brought over to Blu-ray, obviously there are no problems with any dirt, debris or print damage of any kind.