Impressions here are based on the first three episodes, because that's as far as I've gotten so far. For starters, you gotta love anything that begins with pro-internment narration like, "After a wise nation finished rounding up the shifty-eyed Japs..." From there, we get the story of Batman and Robin, whose puffball hair makes him look sort of like a Chia-Boy-Wonder, battling an evil Japanese mastermind who lives in a posh secret lair hidden deep within a carnival house of horrors ride, though these are Japanese horrors, and consist mostly of dioramas of Japanese soldiers pointing bayonets at white people. The dastardly Japanese mastermind and his Occidental accomplices have invented a radium gun which, like most serial super weapons, seems ten times as problematic to use as a regular gun, while only being nominally more effective. Oh, he's also turning people into mind-controlled zombies.

Batman and Robin drive around in a standard-issue 1940s car and change into their superhero outfits (which they carry around with them in briefcases) while sitting in the back seat. Batman's outfit looks pretty bad, and the Dynamic Duo seem to lose every fight in which they get, even with regular thugs. The fights are the typically energetic and chaotic serial fist fights, with lots of people jumping around at random and being thrown across desks and falling over chairs. The cliffhangers are pretty silly -- Oh no! Batman gets thrown off the roof of a building! Oh, luckily there was a window washer's platform a story down! The yellow peril nonsense is so over-the-top as to practically play like parody in the context of today's sensibilities, o I can't muster up righteous indignation about all the "dirty Jap" business except to think that, despite all our problems, we really have come a long way relatively speaking.

Like all serials, even after three episodes, Batman gets repetitive, so you are best off watching no more than a couple episodes during any one sitting. It's really silly stuff, and the Batman and Robin outfits look ridiculous. The fake Japanese villain -- oh, excuse me, "We pwefer de term Nipponese" -- looks like a fat Clarke Gable in bad eye make-up. Still, there's plenty of fist-fights, goofy gadgets, and a seemingly endless array of secret passages and hidden doors. The guy playing Batman is pretty good in the role.

I'll tune in for the rest of the chapters.