With the Batman: Arkham Asylum game coming out this week (for PS3, Xbox360 and PCs), I thought I’d throw out another Batman-related album for you. When the Batman TV show came out it seemed like you couldn’t swing a dead bat without hitting some sort of Caped Crusader tie-in, and record albums were no exception. Some were pretty good. Some, not so much. I’ll let you judge where this one falls.
This first song is the Bat Boys’ version of the Batman theme song. This really isn’t too bad, with a nice swinging organ solo.
I hope you liked the previous song because, despite the name Batman and all the sound effects on the album cover, absolutely nothing else on this album is remotely Batman related! There’s not even any name checking in the song titles. What the songs I picked from this album do have in common, though, is that they’re jazzed-up versions of classical tunes. The first, “Uppercut Blues,” borrows heavily from “Flight of the Bumblebee” (which was actually the Green Hornet’s theme song). The titles of these songs seem to be pretty random. You can maybe imagine people punching each other while listening to this song, but there’s nothing bluesy about the song at all!
If you were a child of the ’80s, you or somebody you knew probably owned a Cabbage Patch Kids doll. They were so popular that stores were inundated with customers wanting them at Christmas. (For those of you too young to remember, imagine the frenzy of the Tickle Me Elmo and the Nintendo Wii Christmases put together.) The album Cabbage Patch Dreams attempts to put together a storyline for these characters.
Zoom was a children’s show on PBS (or whatever they called PBS back then) from 1972 to ‘78. The big draw of the show was that it was for kids, by kids: you could write a story or play or any sort of interesting idea and send it in, and there was a chance the cast would perform it on TV. They also sang a lot on the show; Come On and Zoom is a collection of some of those songs.
Here’s another album to go with the 
This first track has an intro reminiscent of the Batman TV show’s theme, which I would assume was the reason for the album in the first place. I did find one thing odd, though: on the show, I thought the Caped Crusader was always referred to as Batman, but on this record he’s always called the Batman. I know he’s called that 
It’s Tony from 
This week’s Way Out Wednesday is dedicated to Popdose’s own D.W. Dunphy who left this comment on my very first post back in January: “When are we getting those Kid Stuff Pac-Man songs?” Well, today’s the day! This album is Pac-Man’s Amazing Adventures and it’s produced by Kid Stuff Records, whose records one site describes as sounding like “children’s music made in a condemned elementary school boiler room, under the influence of extremely heavy psychedelics.” Considering the subject of my previous entry, E.T. I Love You and Other Extraterrestrial Songs, was also from Kid Stuff, it’s hard to argue that point!
Here’s a fun album from 1966 featuring songs sung about — and sometimes sung by — 
Okay, this one’s just downright freaky. It’s supposed to be songs inspired by the movie E.T. However, you won’t hear any songs remotely like this in the movie itself!
Holy moley! It’s more Smurfs! Yep, it’s another Way Out Wednesday with a second helping of those delightful little blue dudes, the Smurfs. I’m not really as attached to this one as I was to the Smurfing Sing Song album I put on here before. For one thing, I grew up with the Sing Song album, whereas I just got this one a couple of years ago. Secondly, I think this one relies too much on already established songs, like “Rock-a-Bye Baby” and “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” However, there are still some tunes that stick out on this one, and I’ll highlight them here.