With the hoopla over The Dark Knight still running high (and with good reason––$350 million worldwide in ten days is, like, kind of a big deal), it seems like as good a time as any to take a look at the most viewed Batman-related original video on YouTube, and its maker.
Batman Theme Song is the work of LA actor and comedy writer Andrew Goldenberg, and it’s a sterling example of what Goldenberg does: he takes the orchestral themes from much-beloved blockbusters, writes his own Sondheim-esque overlapping lyrics related to the plot of the film, and then performs the songs (playing various characters, harmonizing with himself) in front of green screen-ed backdrops whilst wearing a variety of costumes.
Goldenberg’s given this treatment to Jaws, James Bond and –– my personal favorite –- Back to the Future (refrain: “Oh! Great Scott/My own mom thinks I’m hot/But she doesn’t know we share a chromosome!”) These videos routinely garner over a million page views each on YouTube. Batman is not the most viewed of Goldenberg’s clips (Superman Theme Song, his first production, is by far his most successful, with 2,460,556 views and counting), but it’s one of the most satisfying for sure, equally accomplished in terms of both music and imagery. Running on the refrain “you killed my parents,” with most of the lyrics focusing on how Batman has no superpowers beyond Bruce Wayne’s money and proficiency with a computer, it’s the least overtly jokey of Holdenberg’s parodies––it feels more like an homage to the spirit of the franchise than a spoof of it.
Since he began making and sharing these clips two years ago, Goldenberg has been able to trade his job recruiting audiences for test screenings for a writing gig with National Lampoon Lemmings. It’s nice that the videos are working for Goldenberg as a reel, but some of them are just so well done and fun to watch that they weirdly make me wish that the web video world worked a bit like more like the independent film world––I wish that there was a real studio system in place that could pay someone like Goldenberg to just make these for a living.
