If you guys are fans of vintage toys, I highly recommend following @KennerToys, an account that posts several images a day from the toy company’s long history of making many of the toys a lot of us grew up on. While scrolling through some recent posts, I was reminded of the epic Legends Of Batman line that I did a previous TCT on back in 2012. Well, it seemed like a good enough time to dip back into that well and I came up with a pretty killer bail of liquid, toy commercial gold.
There are three crazy things about this 30 second spot. First, you’ve got the action figures which include Samurai, Silver Knight and Flight Pack varieties of Batman along with the Riddler figure, the last of which I think I owned. These three figures take the theme of the line — Elseworlds versions of Batman — and run with it perfectly. Heck, that Flight Pack Bats is actually pretty rad and I kind of wish I owned him.
And then there’s the CGI. Wow. Sure it looks very Reboot or Beast Wars to our eyes now, but that would have blown me away as a kid (I don’t ever remember seeing this ad, for what it’s worth). But, for me, the craziest part of this commercial is how they tried to make it look like that Silver Knight Batman comic was a real thing. As a huge fan of the Bat books of this era, I saw immediately that they just overlaid the CGI version of the medieval Dark Knight on top of the existing cover of Detective Comics #682. This was an important issue (you could tell because it was embossed) because it it introduced Batman’s all black costume. For reference, compare the cover to the image seen around the 5 second mark of the commercial.
