The Cat's Miaow - Catwoman On Screen #1

Over the last while, The Bear and I have been working our way through the Adam West Batman series from the 60s. I was given the box set as a present a while ago and let me tell you, it is a DELIGHT. However, it was only over the weekend, in episode 19 of the first series, that Catwoman made her first appearance. And if there's one thing I love, it's a bit of Catwoman. As such, I've decided to take you through this most illustrious of episodes, aptly titled "The Purr-fect Crime".

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Also, I've had to set up a new Facebook page for the blog, as I've been locked out of the account I had been using, due to my name not actually being Kitty Catastrophe in real life. Boo. So if you wouldn't mind liking this one, I'd appreciate it muchly!
www.facebook.com/redlemonadeblog 
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Before we begin, I just want to point out how Catwoman looks in the cartoon titles of the show:


i.e. AMAZING. Look at that collar! The scowl! The mask! Love it. However, it's nothing like she looks in the show, so I do wonder if they just threw her into this title sequence well before figuring out how they were actually going to approach the character, considering it takes eighteen episodes before she turns up. Interestingly, it's actually not unlike how Catwoman currently looks in the DC comics universe. In any case, onto the episode in question!

We begin in the Gotham City museum, with a security guard patrolling in front of a golden cat statue. He hears a miaowing sound, and when he asks "What's that?", the reply is the business end of a whip, cracking the gun out of his hand, followed by a cat that's definitely just been thrown at his face by someone offscreen.

Our first glimpse of Catwoman is a gloved hand with claws so sharp they can slice open the glass cabinet containing the cat statue before reaching in and stealing it, because girlfriend is on-brand and don't you forget it.


In the next scene, Commissioner Gordon receives a kitten in the post, with a clue tied to its collar, leading him to believe that Catwoman, or The Catwoman, as they keep calling her in this episode, is after the fortune of the owner of the cat statue.

BAT-TIME.

Cut to Wayne Manor, where Bruce is schooling his young ward Dick Grayson in the ways of chess. Four-tier chess to be precise. I have no idea why. 


"It's actually quite rudimentary, Dick. You just have to think fourteen moves ahead." Helpful.

Commissioner Gordon summons Batman and Robin to his office, where he fills them in on Catwoman's plans, in which she's going to steal a matching golden cat statue from the Gotham Exposition. Before speeding away in the Batmobile to put a plan into action, Batman delivers a quick lecture on road safety to Robin, who hasn't fastened his Bat-Safety Belt. Bat-safety first, kids.

Also, the Bat-Safety Belts are pink! PINK! Stick that in your dour gritty remake FACE, Christopher Nolan!

Meanwhile, in a gauze-curtained lair, hidden in the Gato & Chat Fur factory, Catwoman plots with her tiger-stripe sporting henchmen, Leo and Felix. Julie Newmar enters the room with a crack of her whip, looking like fine-ass gold-leaf champagne. She's reading up on the lost treasure of Captain Manx and laughs maniacally to herself, with a miaow thrown in at the end, because #personalbrand


Batman and Robin arrive back to the Batcave, where they use the atomic reactor to charge up the Batmobile. Robin could use a bat-safety lecture here too though, as the big pipe he's plugged into the back of the car is leaking that shit everywhere.

Holy radiation poisoning, Batman!

Batman does a spot of chemistry with the beakers and tubes that appear to be constantly bubbling and giving off smoke in the Batcave, while wearing a pair of gloves OVER HIS GLOVES. BECAUSE OF COURSE.


He's preparing a radiation spray that they're going to coat the second cat statue with in order to track it. Who needs a regular old tracking device when you've got all this spare radiation lying around?

Batman and the Boy Wonder head to the Exposition, conscientiously insisting that they pay for their tickets "just like any other citizen" and lie in wait for Catwoman. After spraying the statue with the radiation-spray, of course. When Batman leaves Robin alone with the statue to check the exits ("I'll be back in three minutes and twenty seconds"), Catwoman strikes via the medium of another leaping cat, which again looks like someone has thrown it, knocking Robin unconscious because it was a POISONED CAT.

Let's just take a moment to appreciate Julie Newmar's face in that cat-mask.

Batman returns just in time to see Catwoman make off with the statue and set her henchmen on him. After some CRRAACK!ing and OOOF!ing, Batman sees an unconscious Robin tumbling out of a sarcophagus (and falling perfectly within the illuminated circle of a spotlight, because he gets it) and rushes to his aid, while Leo and Felix take off.


Luckily, Batman has Universal Antidote Pills in his utility belt, so he revives Robin and they set off to track the statue from the Batmobile's Batometer.

Back in her lair, Catwoman is putting a plan in place for Batman and Robin's arrival, as she's expecting them to follow her and the statue to the factory. She then dismisses her ludicrous henchmen, swiftly followed by:

"Oh and Felix? You can brush my pussy willows before you leave."

WAT. I don't think anyone but Julie Newmar could deliver that line.

Check out that sweet cat-phone!

The Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder arrive at the Gato and Chat Fur Company, opening the door with the Bat-beam, in case it's booby-trapped. It was, and a bit of it explodes when opened.

Robin: "Right again Batman, we could have been killed!
Batman: "Or worse."

Huh?

When they step inside, Catwoman informs them via intercom that she's got a wonderful evening planned for them and a trapdoor opens under their feet. Textbook villainy. The Dynamic Duo (there are so many different names for these guys) find themselves in a room with rapidly closing spiked walls, while Catwoman taunts them as she watches on a television screen.


Gasp! Bat-gasp! But wait! The spikes are made of rubber and Catwoman was just fucking with them! Oh that tricksy kitty. She then sends a big Hunger Games tube down from the ceiling around Robin and steals him away from Batman. "You feline devil!" Catwoman then reveals two doors for Batman to choose from. She's behind one, but the other will release "a ferocious Batman-eating tiger".

Batman thinks for a moment, and presses a button to open his chosen door. But UH OH! IT'S TIGER TIME. Will Batman survive a tiger? What will happen to Robin? So many questions!


 SAME CAT TIME, SAME CAT CHANNEL. YASS QUEEN.

Glamour and Glitter, Fashion and Fame! And A Bunch of Dudes In Charge

As surely everyone is aware by now - or at least everyone who'd be interested in such a thing - a live-action Jem and the Holograms film is in the works. (Also, thanks everyone who sent me links to the news, I kinda love that people associate me with Jem, Sweet Valley High and zombies. Three of the Best Things Ever.)

Anway, Jem! She of the truly outrageous pastel pink hair and blingy Eighties fashion and damn catchy songs and secret double life!

Me, on hearing the news.

I've written about the wonder that is Jem here before and have been hooring my way through episodes of it on Netflix, often while tweeting my appreciation of things like ALL OF THIS AMAZING ZEBRA PRINT.

Oh, The Misfits. Never change. And your songs ARE better.

However, the more I've heard about the film, the more cautious my excitement has become. In fact, you might say that I'm downright skeptical of the whole thing. One of the reasons for this is the bro trifecta that appear to be in charge of the endeavour.

Namely, Scooter Braun (Justin Bieber's manager), Jon M. Chu (director of two Bieber documentaries, Step Up 2: The Streets, GI Joe: Retaliation and other mediocre-at-best films with colons in their titles) and Jason Blum (producer of the Paranormal Activity franchise). HMMM.

Maybe it makes a kind of commercial, tweeny-pop sense for such Bieber-associated involvement, if that's the demographic they're hoping to snag with the film, but I can't help scrunching up my face at the very notion, seeing as Bieber is essentially the Joffrey Baratheon of this decade. Even Sansa Stark said so.

And considering that the majority of the show's existing fans are women around my age who think Bieber is an entitled little shithead who would benefit hugely from a root up the hole, I know I'm not alone in my unease about the whole thing.

Secondly, the original Jem creator and writer, Christy Marx has been left out of the whole process, which is some Grade A bullshit. So not only are a bunch of dudes taking over telling the story of Jem, Hasbro have shut out the WOMAN WHO CREATED IT.

I know, Donna. I know.

Considering how female-centric Jem and the Holograms is - an all-female band with a lead singer who's also a record executive and den mother to a home full of orphaned girls, not to mention the legit awesome all-girl rival band of punky bitches - why the hell aren't there any women involved in developing the movie?

I feel you, Kimber. Jem would have to hold me back too.

Also, they're "crowd sourcing creativity" for the film, with an open call for ideas for costumes, casting, songs and even audition tapes, as confirmed in their dumb announcement video, where one of them keeps randomly firing some kind of Nerf gun for no goddamn reason. Can you tell I'm not overly fond of them?



The "if you have a cool mom, she'll definitely know what it is" bit really rankled me for some reason. I think I told the video to fuck off at that point.

Anyway, I really want to be excited about a Jem film and maybe they'll get a whole bunch of female writers on board and it won't suck and it might turn out to be a really fun film, in which case I'll gladly stand corrected. But right now I'm apprehensive as hell.


I'll leave you with a Misfits classic. Good luck getting it out of your head for the next four days.

Hey Girl

After completely forgetting to watch New Girl when it started on Channel 4 a few weeks ago, the Bear and I acquired all the episodes so far and happily ate them them all up over the course of a few evenings. It's no Community, but it's fun and cute and endearing, much like Jess, the new girl in question, played by indie hipster dreamgirl Zooey Deschanel.


Admittedly you have to get past the fact that everyone seems happy to pretend that Jess isn't actually ridiculously beautiful, but once you do, it's quite an enjoyable show. Although Schmidt gets most of the best lines and his bizarre, celebratory habit of rolling around on the floor and randomly jumping off things while shouting "Parkour!" totally cracks me up.


Another aspect that I like is the predictably gorgeous, liberally striped, polka-dotted and fun wardrobe that Jess has. I want everything she wears. And her magnificent hair too, please. I also totally dig the fact that she practically lives in flat shoes, as I own all of two pairs of (relatively low) heels and and for the most part, couldn't be fucked with the hassle of wearing them.


While I was doing a search for New Girl, a Sweet Valley Twins book called The New Girl kept popping up. Given my current Sweet Valley obsession, I immediately decided that I had to make this happen:

They Whip Their Hair

While I was jogging my memory for the recent She Ra post and perusing the lists of Adora's friends and foes, I came upon Entrapta. Another example of the She Ra creators' complete lack of imagination when it came to naming characters (Castaspella surely being the worst offender), her speciality was designing complex traps. However, Entrapta also has a special ability to mentally control her giant hair.


It's just as well really, there's so much of it that under normal circumstances the sheer weight of it would surely cause her to tip over.

There she is now, using her super-hair to pull levers that are RIGHT IN FRONT OF HER. Lazy cow.

As weird a superpower as prehensile hair is, the more I thought about it, the more I realised it's actually a recurring thing in loads of stuff. A trope, if you will. Reading about Entrapta's abilities reminded me of the character of Sindel from Mortal Kombat 3, who I LOVED when I was an eleven year old.

This is Sindel as I remember her. Pixellated and fearsome, with cat's eye flicks that out-Winehouse Winehouse.

She wore purple, which was already a bonus to me, but she was also a female character that looked completely different to the other lady denizens of Mortal Kombat. Kitana, Mileena and Jade were all essentially the same character, apart from the colours they wore, and Sonya Blade was boring (she wasn't even a ninja or anything - just go home, Sonya).


Sindel's special powers included levitation, a sonic banshee-type scream and BADASS KILLER HAIR. She could whip her hair around her opponent and slam them over to the other side of the screen, because you DO NOT fuck with the Queen of Edenia. Funnily enough, the day I decided to write this post and told the Bear about my idea, what was on telly that night? Only flipping Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, the film which features QUEEN BLOODY SINDEL. Which is great fun to watch. And by great fun, I obviously mean terrible.

The film version of Sindel and a recent videogame incarnation of her. She must have discovered bikini waxing in the meantime. Actually, and not to be gross, but I wonder if her ladygarden is prehensile too? How WEIRD would that be?

There's another scary-haired lady that I'm a fan of and that's Sedusa from the excellent cartoon The Powerpuff Girls. Sedusa is a mistress of disguise and generally scheming villain dedicated to making life difficult for the people of Townsville, USA. 


She also uses the best name ever while in disguise as a kindly sort in a Jackie O style suit. Ima Goodlady. Totally amazing.


It seems there's something of a pattern when it comes to prehensile hair, in that it's a decidedly villainous trait, reserved for the bad girls of the cartoon and videogame world. They're all quite sexy ladies too, even though Sindel has the look of a woman who eats souls for breakfast. None of these ladies seem like the type to rescue your cat from a tree with their tresses and would be far more likely to pick the cat up and fling it into your face for the hell of it. But they'd look SUPER COOL doing it.

(Speaking of things that aren't real, I recently wrote a guest post for the brilliant Beaut.ie, about things that I wish WERE real. I'm jealous of Hermione Granger and the secretary from Total Recall and you can read all about it HERE!)

Adora Borealis

On a recent night out, a conversation between The Incredible Mulq and I turned to She-Ra. What immediately followed was a spate of frantic Googling on iPhones in an effort to remind ourselves of character names and the fact that She-Ra was actually He-Man's twin sister and not his cousin, as we both originally thought for some reason. Halfway through the conversation I excitedly (read: slightly drunkenly) proclaimed that I would write a blog post about She-Ra. So here we go!


Princess Adora is She-Ra's real identity. She was given the Sword of Protection, which enables her to transform into She-Ra, via the powers of the mystical Castle Grayskull. Interestingly, while He-Man used to shout "By the power of Grayskull!", She-Ra's battle cry was "For the honour of Grayskull!" So her brother might have the power, but she'll honour the fuck out of that castle. Which is fine, I guess.


Part of Adora's transformation into She-Ra included her horse, Spirit, who was upgraded to talking super-steed Swift Wind whenever she changed. When we were talking about her horse in the pub that night, I was recounting the fact that he had wings. When we looked it up, it transpired that not only was Swift Wind a talking flying horse, he was a GODDAMN TALKING FLYING UNICORN. I had completely forgotten that he was a unicorn. A UNICORN!


Another great part of the She-Ra cartoon was the vast array of friends and allies that Adora had, each with their own brightly coloured leotard, awesome hair and a handy special power of some sort. Kind of like Jem and the Holograms crossed with X Men. WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE? First up are mother and daughter duo, Queen Angella and Glimmer.


Angella has wings for some reason, but it appears that her daughter was genetically screwed out of an ability to fly. She does have lovely pink hair though and both of them have the ability to manipulate light, so they can fire lasers and shit (not actual shit - that would be horrible) out of their hands which is pretty cool.


Frosta is a blue haired ice queen with a deadly pointy cape. She's immune to cold temperatures (which is just as well, seeing as she lives in a snowy kingdom and her costume is a boob tube onesie) and she can freeze things at will with jets of ice. She also fancies the furry red knickers off He-Man. Castaspella is a sorceress with shiny gold bracelets that help her to focus her magic powers. The clue is kind of in the name with these characters.


Netossa doesn't really have a superpower, but she...erm...throws nets really well, which appears to be enough to help in the crusade against the Evil Horde. That and a costume that looks like you have wings on the side of your head. Mermista is a (guess, go on, guess!) mermaid (yaay!) who can turn herself into a human, can control water and has a telepathic connection to sea creatures. Not someone you'd bring to a sushi restaurant.


Scraping the bottom of the superpower barrel, we have Peekablue, who has a peacock tail that supposedly gives her enhanced sight, Perfuma, who can control plants, Sweet Bee, who is dressed like an Eighties club kid and is an intergalactic Bee Person (I don't even want to think about how that honey-making process works) and Flutterina, who has butterfly wings and may or may not get trapped behind windows.

The main villain was the gloriously wicked Catra. Captain of the Evil Horde, she can turn herself into a purple panther by pulling her cat mask over her eyes and has telepathic control over felines. She would eat those last four birds for breakfast given half a chance.

She's also sexy as hell.

As a child and without The Channels (i.e. anything other than RTE 1 and 2 - unless I was in my Nanny's house), my main source of reference in terms of She-Ra was a Ladybird book called Catra's Ice Palace. I'm sure it's since been given away, but during my hunt for She-Ra images, I happened upon scans of each page of that very book. EXCITEMENT SHE WROTE.


It's filled with all these gorgeous illustrations of Adora and her ridey friends, just look at Frosta being all brilliant with her magic sceptre and look at all that giant hair!


Castaspella puts in a brief appearance, although she looks nothing like she did in the cartoon, because continuity is for SQUARES. It also features Catra shaking her fist a lot.

Raaar!

There she is, all giant hair, spectacular cheekbones and fury. The big pink lion is her pet, Clawdeen, who is referred to as a she, even though she has a mane. It's all either a) a bit confusing or b) tremendously progressive and Clawdeen is actually a transgender character, which would be amazing. When I was small and in love with this book, I thought Clawdeen was the most fantastic name in the world and decided that if I ever had a daughter, that's what I'd name her.

Clawdeen, come in for your dinner!

Yeah, that totally works.

You Can Always Go...Downton

Late to the party as ever, I've been catching up with the rest of the world and haring through Downton Abbey recently in an effort to get it all watched before the Christmas special. I've only just started the second series so for GOD'S SAKE don't say anything about anything that happens in series two or I will end you.


Predictably enough, I'm completely enamoured with the show. The dresses, the impeccable hair, the elbow length gloves, the beautiful stately rooms, Thomas being such a BASTARD, Maggie Smith as Violet being so delightfully cutting, I love it all.


The costumes are so sumptuous it must be like wearing a diamond encrusted cake, or possibly something a little less messy. In terms of the characters, the rebellious, burgeoning feminist Lady Sybil was always going to be my favourite and it's to her that I can attribute the so-amazing-I-might-have-clapped-when-I-saw-it fashion moment of the series so far.


The blue outfit that shocks the entire house, as it incorporates PANTS, the feckless hussy. I just think it's supremely gorgeous. I don't even like harem pants but these are effing tremendous, not to mention the bodice and the headband. SMOKIN'. It looks like what would transpire if Princess Jasmine decided to try her hand at a lifestyle as a fledgling flapper girl.


Well played, costume people. Exceedingly well played.