When Kenner took over the Batman movie toy license in 1990 from Toy Biz, it was a very welcome change. It's not that I hated the Toy Biz stuff. It's just that it was pretty clear that things could have been done better.... and Kenner delivered.Kenner used to pack these cool little catalogs in with their larger toys like playsets and vehicles. This one is kind of an "all-purpose" catalog that shows several toy lines (as you can see by the cover of the catalog, above). I still can't believe that Kenner produced a childrens' Robocop toy line... those films were pretty hardcore and deserved the R ratings that they had. At any rate, I thought it would be fun to show these very first Batman movie toys from Kenner's catalog.
Here's the first wave of figures and couple of cycles. Kenner liked to reuse molds from older toy lines and retool them a little bit for new ones. Batman's cycle uses a mold from the Robocop line and I believe Joker's does, as well.The figures were pretty much all-new. They were based on the Super Powers Batman body but were obviously retooled for this line. I have to give them credit for producing pretty decent masked and unmasked sculpts of Michael Keaton.
Here are some vehicles. The BatJet was originally seen in the Silverhawks line of toys... and I believe the Batcopter is a "repaint" from the Super Powers line. However, the Batmobile and Batwing are all-new sculpts and are fantastic toy-counterparts to the "real" vehicles from the film.
In this page, you can see that Kenner reused a portion of the Star Wars Laser Rifle for the Sonic Neutralizer weapon.
Lastly, I love this kids' costume on this page. That would be a neat set to have in a Batman collection.Can anyone else hardly believe that this toy line was released over twenty years ago?!!
