Regarding anti-Japanese racism in the first serial...
In the introduction to "The Golden Age Of Marvel Comics Volume 1," Roy Thomas makes the following statement regarding the negative stereotyping of Germans and Japanese in the Golden Age stories, and the decision not to censor said stereotypes.
Quote:
...most Timely heroes had been fighting the Nazis since 1940, but now the gloves were off, and Cap, Torch, and Namor were the triple-spearhead of some of the most virulently anit-Axis comics of the War period. If the Japanese, and even the Germans, were caricatured in a stereotyped fashion in some of these stories, it's lamentable, but these tales reflect, for better or worse, the American public's reaction to the horrors of war in general and to known Japanese atrocities in particular. To censor or pretty-up these stories for a later generation would be to falsify the past, something there's already been far too much of, so they've been repritned just as they originally appeared.
And he's absolutely right. On those same grounds, the original Bat-Man serial should be released uncensored, not to promote anti-Japanese sentiment, but because we shouldn't try and pretend that some of the less favorable aspects of our history and culture didn't happen.
On the other hand, I wouldn't buy the original "Bat-Man" serial, censored or uncensored, on the grounds that it sucked. Columbia, the stuido that made both "Batman" serials (as well as the abysmal "Shaodw" serial) were notorious for making crappy serials, and "Bat-Man" was no excpetion.
"Batman & Robin" is even worse - maybe even worse than the Joel Schumacher debacle of the same name. There's a cliffhanger where Batman is standing on the edge of a cliff holding a metal bar, and the villain electrocutes the bar from a distance. Batman's knees wobble in a gut-bustingly hilarious dance that puts Adam West's Batusi to shame, and falls off the cliff.
