Audiobook: "Batman Meets Two-Face": the most gloriously hilariously terrible Two-Face origin ever?

A few months back, the intrepid killermoth alerted me to the existence of an obscure Two-Face/Riddler audio cassette that was released to tie in with Batman Forever, and he was awesome enough to mail me his own copy. This is by far one of the coolest things to have happened to me since starting this blog, so thank you again, Mothy! The tape was one of those audio drama storybook dealie-do cassettes that was released in that kind of thick, impenetrable plastic case that you couldn't open without tearing it to shreds, plus is supposedly came with trading cards, thus making it a doubly-dated 90's artifact.


Source: hux777, who is selling this card on eBay right now!

But most surprising, most intriguing, most goddamn exciting of all was the discovery that the stories on this tape are adapted from two of the very best stories for Eddie and Harvey: Questions Multiply the Mystery, and Eye of the Beholder.. I don't just mean that aspects from the comics show up in the stories, I mean that those two issues are directly, explicitly credited in the tape's liner notes as the source material for the adaptations! Holy. CRAP. The first one would have been intriguing enough, but an adaptation of EOTB? My all-time favorite comic, the one that set the standard for everything I love about Harvey to this very day? Ohmigodohmygodohmigod!



... So just how bad is it? I mean, that's probably what many of you are wondering, right? I know I was! Well, I suppose I should get the obvious disappoint out of the way: these are very, very loose adaptations of EOTB and QMTM, and what's worse, the Riddler segment is really boring and tedious all around, pretty much everything you might expect from such a tape. The Two-Face one, on the other hand, is gloriously, gloriously awful, so laughably acted and terribly written that I wish I had the Satellite of Love crowd to come and mock it with me. Thankfully, I have the next best thing: you guys!

As such, I have uploaded the entire "Batman Meets Two-Face" segment to SoundCloud for your listening pleasure! Go, go now! I tried it figure out how to embed it on LJ, but since LJ is--as Warren Ellis once said--run on steampipes and rubber bands, you'll have to visit my Tumblr to hear the whole glorious thing. But really, you folks should be following my Tumblr blog anyway, since I update it more often with neat little things and stray thoughts in between composing the bigger, more in-depth reviews over here. Speaking of which, let's tear into this bad (I mean, really, really bad) boy already!


( CURSE THAT STUPID JUDGE )

I really look forward to hearing what you folks come away with from this trainwreck. In a better world, this tape would become a meme right alongside the whole "DEUCES!" thing from that Batman parody musical thing that I still haven't been able to bring myself to watch. I'm just terribly afraid that I'm going to find it unfunny and hate the songs, since I've learned the hard way how much I hate superhero musical numbers which the rest of fandom seems to embrace.

If you'd also like to hear the Riddler segment, I've uploaded that too, but it's not nearly as entertaining. This is doubly disappointing since it's based on one of my favorite Riddler stories ever (which you can and should read at the link in its entirety while it's still up), and Eddie himself is played by a great playwright and actor named Everett Quinton, who created or co-created such awesome bits of insane theatre such as The Mystery of Irma Vep and wrote/starred in a one-man adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, as performed by a drag queen trying to entertain a crying baby. Fun IRL fact: my Mom saw a performance of that nearly twenty years ago now, and she still wants to see me in that role. I can already hear surrealname going, "Well, of COURSE she does."

Once again, major thanks to killermoth for bringing this to our attentions and for sending me the tape. It's certainly one of the most interesting and fun lost Bat-artifacts I've ever found. Ultimately, I just have to puzzle over what TimeWarner's logic was in making this, since I cannot imagine any actual child of the 90's preferring this take on Two-Face's origin to the powerful, haunting episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. I guess the lesson here is just to not underestimate the tastes of kids.




On the plus side, I do rather like the cassette art, even if Harvey does look like Treat Williams circa Deep Rising by way of the make-up work in Alex Winter's Freaked.




Why yes, I have wanted to mention how much I love the make-up effects in Freaked, and how they're proof that you could theoretically pull of an absolutely amazing Two-Face with practical prosthetics, but I've never found the excuse to bring it up until now, why do you ask?