Clearly Bruce Wayne was a scientific genius before his time, whose talents were largely wasted in twentieth century Gotham against a host of B-list villains. So what if you took the 60s television show, replaced Star Trek TOS (or Lost In Space) with it, and had Batman in SPAACE!?
For example, The Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder would fly around the galaxy in their Batship, beam down to planets using the Batporter (or take the Batshuttle), save the day by configuring the emitter array to generate a beam of Bat particles, etc.
Well, the Justice League of America has a satellite headquarters, and a teleportation device to pop there and back…so DC has already done much of what you suggest!
I believe that Green Lantern has taken Batman off into deep space for adventures and missions far, far away. (I consider this a little silly; Batman’s skill-set is pretty limited, and very tightly focused on Gotham City. But he is the World’s Greatest Detective, so if you’ve got a mystery on a distant world, he might solve it for you.)
On a vaguely related note, the animated film Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders will be on limited release on Monday, October 10th. Check your local listings. It looks like an animated adaptation of the 1960s TV show, with original cast members Adam West, Burt Ward and Julie Newmar lending their voices.
It will be released on Blu Ray/digital download this month and on DVD in November if you miss it in the theaters. I’ve seen a couple of clips from it and I’m stoked.
By the way, there will be a sequel and
[spoiler] William Shatner has been announced to play Harvey Dent/Two-Face.
If you want to see Batman- in SPAACE you can look up the animated Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Based more on the silver age Batman, it does feature several adventures where Batman is flying the Batship out to fight evil in SPAAACE!
One of my favorite Brave and the Bold stories (the comic book, not the TV cartoon) was #173 from 1981, in which the Guardians of the Universe (Green Lantern’s bald, blue-skinned bosses) summoned Batman to solve a mystery for them. It seems that there was one too many members on their council, and since (at the time this story was written) they were all physically identical and had no individual names, they needed a detective to determine which one of them was the impostor.
I’m not going to spoiler this anymore because most people probably have heard about Shatner being in the sequel by now. Shatner and West co-starred in an unsold TV pilot called Alexander the Great in 1964. It aired in 1968 to capitalize on the success of the two actors. The complete pilot episode is on YouTube.
I never saw that episode of the animated series, but in the original comic book story (in Batman#81, February 1954), it was a giant silver dollar that Two-Face tied Batman to, not the giant penny.
As I recall, in the comic, Batman and Robin were tied to one side of the giant coin, which was going to be flipped onto a set of large steel spikes. Robin recognized early on that their weight would bias the coin, making the flip unfair. The duo hastily rigged their portable radios to create a repulsive magnetic field (!) so the giant coin landed with them away from the spikes, which cut the ropes binding them, allowing them to escape and overpower Two-Face’s gang.
