YMMV / Bat Out of Hell

• Accidental Aesop: "Bat out of Hell": The dangers of distracted driving. "But I can't stop thinking of you / And I never see the sudden curve till it's way too late."
• Awesome Art: All three Bat albums, but the original is one of the most iconic album covers of all time.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The spoken word intro to "You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)". Besides having nothing to do with the lyrical content of the song, its horror undertones also don't really fit in with the style of the song, either.
• First Installment Wins: While the other albums in the trilogy were pretty well received, the first album's iconic status has made it so it will pretty much always be considered the best, and Meat Loaf's most popular album overall.
• Funny Moments: In "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", Meat Loaf reminisces about how he once swore he would love his girl until the end of time. Now that the relationship has turned sour, he's "praying for the end of time" to arrive.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Bat out of Hell is the all-time best-selling album in Australia, having gone 25-times Platinum there (in comparison, it's gone 14X Platinum in the US). This is because the country relied on video promotion at the time because American and British artists rarely toured there back then.
• Narm Charm: AllMusic's retrospective review posits that the album's enduring appeal is because of the melodramatic songwriting and arrangements combined with Meat Loaf's over-the-top vocals. "This is Grand Guignol pop — epic, gothic, operatic, and silly, and it's appealing because of all of this," Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote. Todd Rundgren signed on to produce because he thought the project was so "out there" it was brilliant.
• Signature Song: The most popular song here is very likely "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", although the Title Track is very close behind, and also "You Took the Words Right out of My Mouth" and "Two out of Three Ain't Bad" are widely regarded as classics.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: It’s pretty much impossible to ignore the similarities between the album’s title track and Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”. Critics at the time made a lot of how the album as a whole resembled Springsteen’s Born to Run, where “Thunder Road” appeared; however, as many pointed out, the songs on Bat Out Of Hell were written years before Born to Run came out.

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