VintageNewscast.com

Well, I thought it would be fun to do a mini tribute to on-screen Catwomen. Today, so much emphasis is put on the Batman, that we forget how much the Catwomen have contributed throughout the years (both comics and film) as well. However, Catwomen has changed greatly over the years, and has had many incarnations. Catwomen has gone from, hetero-male’s I candy to vixen, to sex symbol. To be a Catwomen gave actresses a rare opportunity back then, to really explore their feminine sexuality to the fullest extent, while being powerful and in control all at the same time. I find it interesting because, when I look back in retrospect, a good Catwoman was more important than even having a Batgirl. If we examine the Adam West’s Batman series, the Catwomen on those episodes had incredible bodies (i’d like to also add that they also healthy full-figured women, not the twinkies we so often see on-screen today), Batgirl wasn’t nearly as voluptuous as all the Catwomen in the entire series put together!

Since the comic book creation of Catwomen, I’ve always interpreted her as a spoiled teenager that never grow up. Doing all kinds of “feminine” type of mischief. And I say “feminine mischief” because back in the 50′s there were definitely a set of codes that women lived by, and these codes became distinct characteristics of women. Same was true for me too. I don’t mean to offend any catwoman fans, but, in this comic, she looks like a very young June Cleaver in a mask and boots LOL. This is the kind of mentality that existed, that was put on comics.

I found that with so many incarnations of Catwomen that came out of DC comics, that it became very difficult to keep up with story lines/epics, unless you were on top of them every month. This is also true, as with each incarnation, she was made more voluptuous by the comics.

Not sure of the time frame when DC gave her this look. I know there were great efforts by DC to try and make her look more modern. I’d say she looks very much like a an average New Yorker here.

Julie Newmar / Batman TV series (1960′s)

Lee Mariwether / Batman TV series (1960′)

I don’t care what anybody says, in my eyes, not only was Eartha Kitt the best Catwoman of all times, she also was the first and only BLACK catwomen EVER to appear on screen (at least on a major TV show like this one, this was equivalent to the cabbage patch kids in the 80′s if not bigger. Batman paraphernalia was everywhere). In my opinion, I don’t think she got the credit she really deserved.

I’ve watched a couple of Batman documentaries and they never mention Eartha Kitt. Why, her cat purrs alone was what helped make that show what it was.

In Batman Returns, Michelle Pfeiffer made this movie what it was. Although Danny Devito was great as the penguin, Pfeiffer helped to add a lot of excitement to this movie. I think what made her so exciting is that her character did not appear predictable the way the penguin was. She was the naughty cat everyone wanted to know what she was going to do next. By the way, Michael Keaton was a horrible Batman. Every time I saw him our ot costume, I kept thinking “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice”!!! LOL.

Out of all the on-screen vintage Catwomen, I think that Michelle Pheiffer’s performance in “Batman Return” was closest to Lee Mariwether. Michelle kept that same feline sexual energy, but took it one step further. Although it appeared at first that Michelle also had Eartha’s power and control, but what was kinda disappointing to me was, towards the end of the movie, you can tell that Michelle’s power did not come from having control per-say, it came from her anger issues with men. There is a lot of hidden stereotypes in her character as well.. LOL

I think Halle Berry did a much better job than I thought she was. If you don’t like Halle in superhero/villein movies, you should at least watch Catwoman (2004) just to see the fight scene with her and Sharon Stone. A lot of people did not give this movie a good rating, however, most of the people that gave the bad rating are hardcore comic book fans, who absolutely hate to see anything that veers away from the comic books.

Now, you guys may hate me for this, but……. Although many of you may not have liked Halle’s Catwoman movie, I think the CGI graphics looked a lot more believable in this movie than “The Hulk (2003)” I must admit, Halle’s costume could have been better too. I guess this is supposed to be a more realistic Catwoman for our time.

Anne Hathaway is in Dark Knight Rises (2012), however I have not seen this movie in it’s entirety. The little I did see, I knew I would not liked it. So I just never got it. I hated her costume, it made her look more like a black reptilian than a cat. What made it even worse was the big-ass motorcycle; it looked like she should have been driving it on water.

Salutations Guys,

I remember when the world’s first affordable home PC (Personal Computer) came on the scene (I believe it was Radio Shack’s Tandy 1000 back then… Damn I’m old LOL…). I had one given to me when I was little. It had two 5.25 floppy disk drives, one was for your program application, and one was for your storage. It used MS DOS operating system. Back then, MS DOS did not give you the ability to create directories, so it made it difficult to organize our documents (then again, there was only so much you could put on a 5.25 floppy anywayz.. LOL). Before the terms single, double and high density came-about, 5.25 floppy disks could only hold less than 720kb; later on it was up to 1.2 mb. The floppy disks were sooo flimsy, if you were not careful, the slightest bend, would destroy the entire floppy. As a kid I thought MS DOS was the greatest thing since “slice bread”. This was because it actually became an ego booster for me, reason being, you had to know what the DOS commands were and how to use them. The commands were not really hard back then, but my family thought I was a genius LOL. My first and I think only game was “Wheel Of Fortune”.  It had a built in CGA adapter, and offered very little visual color. Actually I think the only color I remembered displayed was emerald green. I used to laugh at how Vanna White used to look like in the game (I think it was Vanna White, not sure when and now long was on the show). The game was actually a lot of fun, and because it was the world’s first home PC (I think), There were no other competing computers around to compare bad graphics to, so all were good to us back then.

Shortly, after more and more competing companies try to take a piece of this “then” new market, and that’s when “Platform Wars” have emerged. What do I mean? Well, “Platform Wars” were and are in essence people’s personal opinions turned political madness. It was about which operating system (ie apple, IBM, Unix, OS/2, Linux, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, etc), or line of technology individuals felt was the best. For most of us who were not in the technical industry per-say, many of us based these opinions on our personal experiences, others will base their opinions on sheer market shares and company growth. Literally in some settings, it becomes like a war between republicans and democrats. Today computers has changed our lives in such a big way, I personally don’t believe we should be basing our beliefs solely on a company’s numbers, we should be looking at how well it can do the job in addition too. I’ve spent a lot of money on good brand stuff, and they’ve turned out to be crap..

Having said this, I never really had a preference for any particular operating platform or technology. However, as the result of the technology wars, it has made it indirectly difficult for me personally, in terms of entertainment. How? Well, some of you already know that, metaphorically, I am a classic carnivore. The older the music or movie the better; but unfortunately the harder it is to find digitally. Trust me, i’ve digitized a lot of my albums, but it is waaaaay too much work, i’d rather buy mp3s than to encode all of my records and tape collections.

I often run in to 3 annoying problems. The first is DRM, this pisses me off to no end, because often you can only use it with one type of device, or software player (although their are ways of getting around this, its still a pain). Second, streaming services like Rhapody and Spotify have only matched less then half my digital collection (not including most of my physical albums and tapes). Now, technically, considering how old most of my music is, that’s still very good, but at the same time I feel that the music streaming services is large enough now that it should found almost all, in my opinion. lastly, I am flipping back and forth between apple, android, and amazon. There are musics that Amazon has that Apple doesn’t and vise verse. There are music that Google has that neither Apple or Amazon have. It makes you realize how much cinematic and musical history the world has, we just can’t contain it all (either that, we realize how old we are.. LOL).

© 2013 VintageNewscast.com / Yogi