On the surface, there don’t appear to be a huge number of straight lines that can be drawn between The Beatles and Batman, but John Lennon had other ideas when he ruminated on the connection between the Fab Four bringing musical slapstick to the masses in 1965’s Help!.
In the sort of psychedelic combination of concert film, documentary, and performance piece that could only have emerged from this particular band during that particular decade, the plot finds the group falling afoul of a cult-like religious group when a sacrificial ring gets sent directly to Ringo Starr by an enthusiastic fan.
From there, The Beatles need to hit the road, travel the globe, belt out some of their most iconic tracks, and try to stay alive and one step ahead of the cultists. Unsurprisingly, the connections do not apply to the iterations of the comic book icon realised on-screen by Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan, Zack Snyder, or Matt Reeves, and it’s surprisingly not Joel Schumacher, either.
Instead, Lennon was philosophising on how Help! may have inspired Adam West’s kitschy caper that premiered in January 1966, mere months after The Beatles’ movie hit cinemas. Famous for its infuriatingly catchy theme tune, hefty reliance on elaborate wordplay and terrible puns, and, of course, the fight scenes spruced up with nonsense captions being emblazoned across the screen; it was very much a product of its time.
Ironically, West once reflected that, at the peak of the show’s popularity, he was right up there with the lads from Liverpool as a cultural icon. “In the late ’60s, there were the three B’s: The Beatles, Batman, and Bond.” Funnily enough, if the stylish sequences and fantastical set pieces of Help! were married to the debonair gadgetry of Sean Connery’s early 007 vehicles and then viewed through the prism of a campy episodic superhero story, the end result wouldn’t be too far off the actor’s TV series.
Fittingly, then, Help! was also partially inspired by the globetrotting Bond saga with a dash of Marx Brothers thrown in, although according to Lennon, that wasn’t made entirely clear to the group by director Richard Lester. In the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, he reflected on how the feature-length romp may have been so far ahead of its time that it played a part in some of the Batman show’s most well-known iconography.
“Dick didn’t tell us what it was about, though I realise, looking back, how advanced it was,” the musician explained. “It was a precursor for the Batman – ‘Pow!’, ‘Wow!’ – on TV, that kind of stuff.” Throw in the urban legend that Revolver track ‘Taxman’ may or may not have been directly inspired by the theme tune of West’s starring vehicle, and there might even be more synergy between The Beatles and Gotham’s most famous son than first thought.
Watch the trailer for Help! below.