vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above is a vintage Japanese poster for Batman the movie, which we discussed in detail here. If you haven’t seen this insane campfest, just stop everything you’re doing and rent, borrow or steal it. It gives new meaning to the term “jumping the shark.” Batman premiered in Japan today in 1967.
Cover of the National Enquirer published today in 1966, with a feature on Adam West, who was banking serious dollars on television’s campy superhero series Batman. By the way, we often see West referred to as the original Batman, but that isn’t true. This guy is the original Batman.
Is the original Batman movie cheesy? Well, let’s just say that’s like calling a truffle mildly flavorful. In one scene Batman needs to dispose of a smoking bomb. He runs along a wharf, but no matter which way he speeds with this thing he cannot unload it. Everywhere, innocent people are obliviously threatening to become collateral damage. Nuns stroll, lovers neck, marching bands play, women walk with babies. The Caped Crusader is blocked on all sides as he runs every which way like mad, and the scene just goes on and on. Thwarted at last by a school of ducks, he sighs and says to himself—but also to his audience—“Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”
More than any other, that line sums up Batman. Plot? Sure, there’s a plot. Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, and Riddler join forces to rid Gotham of the Dynamic Duo. Cast? Absolutely. You’ve got Lee Meriwether, Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, Cesar Romero, and the immortal Adam West as Batman. But don’t worry about that stuff—just watch the film. Its cynicism-free humor is almost unrecognizable as such in our modern, jaded age, but even so, it will knock you out of your chair laughing at least once. We guarantee it. And if it doesn’t? Well then, you’re a soulless zombie. Batman was released in the U.S. today in 1966. 
Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia, which features eight animated segments set to classical music, is first seen by the public in New York City at the Broadway Theatre. Though appreciated by critics, the movie fails to make a profit due to World War II cutting off European revenues. However it remains popular and is re-released several times, including in 1963 when, with the approval of Walt Disney himself, certain racially insulting scenes were removed. Today Fantasia is considered one of Disney’s greatest achievements and an essential experience for movie lovers.
British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men are found frozen to death on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, where they had been pinned down and immobilized by bad weather, hunger and fatigue. Scott’s expedition, known as the Terra Nova expedition, had attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole only to be devastated upon finding that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by five weeks. Scott wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place.”
Hugh Gray takes the first known photos of the Loch Ness Monster while walking back from church along the shore of the Loch near the town of Foyers. Only one photo came out, but of all the images of the monster, this one is considered by believers to be the most authentic.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai massacre, which had occurred in Vietnam more than a year-and-a-half earlier but been covered up by military officials. That day, U.S. soldiers killed between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians, including women, the elderly, and infants. The event devastated America’s image internationally and galvanized the U.S. anti-war movement. For Hersh’s efforts he received a Pulitzer Prize.
Germany signs an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside of Compiègne, France, ending The Great War, later to be called World War I. About ten million people died, and many millions more were wounded. The conflict officially stops at 11:00 a.m., and today the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is annually honored in some European nations with two minutes of silence.
