Batman Battles the Sputnik

I always say that popular culture is a funhouse mirror view of society — what’s reflected in it is really there, but exaggerated and distorted. Take Sputnik, for example — the first artificial satellite, launched in April 1957 by the Russians. The idea that it was somewhere up there overhead, circling the Earth invisible, spooked the hell of Americans, sparking what President Eisenhower called the “Sputnik crisis.” And here, in early 1959, this satellite fear invades even Gotham City.