Columbia Pictures' 15-part Batman serial from 1943 followed the introduction of the Caped Crusader in Detective Comics by four years but proved influential in its own right, adding innovations to the Batman mythos that would be carried forward over the course of seventy years. Batman creator Bob Kane (himself inspired by Roland West's 1930 whodunit The Bat Whispers and the silent swashbuckler The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks as a masked folk hero) visited the set of Batman during production of the chapter play's second installment, "The Bat's Cave." While the comics had provided Batman with underground passageways by which he could access the outside world, Kane saw the utility in a subterranean lair/laboratory and the Batcave (as it came to be known) first appeared in print in 1944. Picking up where "The Electrical Brain" left off, "The Bat's Cave" finds millionaire patriot Bruce Wayne (Lewis Wilson) and ward Dick Grayson (Douglas Croft) using their Batman and Robin alter egos to thwart Axis mastermind Dr. Daka (J. Carroll Naish), a Japanese agent hoarding radium to power an atom-smasher capable of demolishing America's "democratic force of evil." Best known at the time for his many B-westerns, director Lambert Hillyer was an inspired choice to helm the Batman serial, having overseen the Dracula (1931) sequel Dracula's Daughter (1936), as well as The Invisible Ray (1936), which featured Boris Karloff as an irradiated madman who just might have given the Batman a run for his money.

By Richard Harland Smith