As well as to characters just like the Penguin, Catwoman, and Max Schreck, early drafts of “Batman Returns” additionally attempted to pack in but every other foundation tale, for Batman’s devoted sidekick Robin. Waters and Burton hashed out more than one concepts for how to write him in, together with an intensive remodeling the place he would had been an grownup mechanic performed by way of Marlon Wayans (nonetheless with the “R” logo, as a part of his uniform coveralls).
Burton admitted in “Darkish Aspect of the Knight” that he in the end made up our minds to kick the can down the street: “At this level, I feel Warners noticed it as this doubtlessly ongoing factor, possibly,” he defined. “So there was once at all times this, ‘You understand, if we do not do it on this one, we’re going to do it within the subsequent one’ more or less deal.” And that was once precisely what took place, with out Burton, when Joel Schumacher solid Chris O’Donnell because the Boy Surprise in “Batman Perpetually” (Wayans, in the meantime, was once nonetheless accumulating residual assessments as overdue as 2009 for a task he was once shriveled for however by no means performed).
The Robin query will have influenced every other primary a part of “Batman Returns,” on the other hand: The Penguin travels with a gang of circus performers, one thing that had by no means been a part of his comics interpretation. Nevertheless it was once a big a part of Robin’s, as a kid acrobat who joins forces with Batman after his folks are shot off their trapezes.
