Adam West as Batman, and Burt Ward as Robin
In DC Comics, June 26 is the anniversary of the day that Dr. Thomas Wayne and his wife Martha were murdered in Gotham City, in front of their son, Bruce, usually suggested to be 8 to 10 years old at the time. This inspired him to wage a war on crime, using the family fortune and his indomitable will to become the superhero Batman. Bruce usually accesses the Batcave by opening a secret passage in his study, doing that by moving the hands of a grandfather clock to 10:47, the time of night when the murder occurred.
On January 12, 1966, the TV series Batman premiered on ABC. Before series star Adam West suits up as Batman, we first see him as a grown Bruce Wayne, telling of how he is using the family fortune to help alleviate poverty in Gotham City, in the hopes that people won't turn to a life of crime, so that others won't suffer the way he did, "when my parents were murdered by criminals."
The murder was mentioned only once more in the series. This was an earlier time, when darkness in TV shows was frowned upon, and actors whose characters were shot dead did not fall in a bloody mess. This was a TV show aimed at children and families, and so this was not a "film noir" version of Batman.
Top 5 Reasons Why the 1966 Batman Show Was Ridiculous (And 5 Why It was Underrated)
10. Ridiculous: The Names. No, I don't mean the names of the characters. I mean the names of places in and around Gotham City. While most outdoor shots show coastline and/or mountains, reflecting the fact that the scenes were shot in and around Los Angeles, the establishing shots at the beginning of every 2-part episode were of New York City, from which the fictional Gotham got its name. Usually, the shots are of Midtown Manhattan.
Across the Hudson River from New York City is New Jersey, which was named for Jersey, in Britain's "Channel Islands." The other major Channel Island is Guernsey, and so, across the Gotham River is "New Guernsey."
To get there, as stated in the episode "The Bookworm Turns," you cross the Amerigo Columbus Bridge -- named for Amerigo Vespucci, for whom America was named even though he only went to South American, not North America; and Christopher Columbus, who "discovered America," even though he never set foot on the U.S. mainland, although he did reach Puerto Rico.
At the time, the Mayor of the City of New York was John Lindsay. Gotham had Mayor Linseed. The Governor of the State of New York was Nelson Rockefeller. Gotham's State was never named, but it had Governor Stonefellow. The movie based on the show replaced the Pentagon with the Hexagon, and the United Nations with the United World.
9. Underrated: Batgirl. A relatively recent addition to the comics, the producers thought the addition of Batgirl might appeal to teenagers, and it did. And while she did occasionally get captured by the villains, she was no "damsel in distress": She was smart -- in her real identity, she was Barbara Gordon, a librarian and the Commissioner's daughter -- and she was tough. Yvonne Craig was a professional dancer, and incorporated high kicks -- while either standing or swinging from something, like a chandelier -- into her fighting skills.
What could have looked like a desperate attempt to goose up the ratings -- which it was -- turned out to be a smart, stylist, and very sexy addition to the show.
8. Ridiculous: The Gotham City Police Department. It might bother me a bit more that Chief Miles O'Hara, a character created for the show and played by Stafford Repp, was so much of an "old Irish cop" stereotype if I were Irish meself. But what really bothered me is that the Gotham police, rather than being hopelessly corrupt -- except for Commissioner Jim Gordon and a few others that he trusted -- seemed here to be hopelessly incompetent.
In the 1st episode, in his office and surrounded by uniformed policemen, Gordon, played by Neil Hamilton, said, "Gentlemen, I don't know who he is under that mask, but he's always there when we need him, and we need him now!" It would have been better to have him say, "Gentlemen, this is the best police department in America. But there are some things that are beyond us. And this case is one of them." -- and then gone into how they needed Batman.
Hamilton as Gordon (left), Repp as O'Hara
7. Underrated: The Technology. Telephones in cars weren't very common in 1966: Only rich people could afford them. Batman had a phone in the Batmobile. More about this later.
In one episode, the Clock King (in the comics, a villain more associated with Green Arrow), played by Walter Slezak, disguised himself to pull off a crime. Batman used a printer in the Batmobile, and a pen, to prove that it was Clock King. It was an early form of facial-recognition software.
And both the Batcave and Commissioner Gordon's office -- in 1966, mind you -- had flat-screen TVs. Oddly, the living room of "millionaire Bruce Wayne" had a regular old curved-screen TV.
6. Ridiculous: The Campy Episodes. They weren't all campy, but they seemed to get campier as the show went along. "Surf's Up! Joker's Under." Batman and the Joker, surfing (off the coast of Gotham City?), wearing swimming trunks over their full costumes? Holy wipeout!
Cesar Romero as the Joker (left), and West as Batman, dude.
"The Londinium Larcenies," their only 3-part episode, had its moments. But it indulged every English stereotype, and, I'm sorry, but Rudy Vallée could not pull off the role of a crooked English lord. "The Sport of Penguins," with Batgirl (in costume) and Robin (not in costume but in his regular Dick Grayson persona) as jockeys in the Gotham Handicap, a race fixed by the Penguin, with assistance from a girlfriend played by Ethel Merman? There truly is no business like show business.
Vincent Price made an interesting villain as Egghead, but with Anne Baxter, as Olga, Queen of the Cossacks, rendering him a secondary villain, made for a stupid pair of episodes. Let's face it: Star Trek's budget-slashed 3rd season had nothing on Batman's budget-slashed 3rd season.
Victor Buono played a distinguished history professor who, due to an accident had come to think of himself as King Tut, the ancient Egyptian Pharoah, and that he was now destined to rule the modern world. Tut's plots actually had some logic to them, despite the character's inherent mental illness. After all, the man behind the persona was still brilliant.
But Buono was one of those gay actors who seemed to be in a closet with a see-through door, and everything he did, including the King Tut character, was over-the-top. Had a more serious actor -- say, a pre-Airplane! Leslie Nielsen -- been cast, a proper balance between serious and silly could have been found, and the character might have seemed like more of a threat.
5. Underrated: Social Responsibility. In his last years, in response to fans' demands for an ever-darker Dark Knight, Adam West began to call his version the Bright Knight. And while most versions suggest that Batman is "the man's real personality" and Bruce Wayne is "the mask," West never forgot that the character was Bruce Wayne first: When we first see him in most 2-part episodes, he is out of costume, either trying to teach Dick Grayson something, or doing some fundraising for the Wayne Foundation's charities.
And he never speaks of any criminal, not even the Joker, as hopeless or irredeemable. He shows sympathy for the bereaved Mr. Freeze, for the mentally ill King Tut, and for the various henchmen, especially the henchwomen, believing that they can be rehabilitated. A couple of times, as Bruce, he spoke of prison reform, believing that making prisons more comfortable would lead to an easier transition when the criminal's sentence was complete. And the show never mentioned Arkham Asylum, the comics' hospital for the criminally insane.
I looked for a photo of Adam West and Michael Keaton together.
Sadly, I couldn't find one.
This would have been better with the Christian Bale
or Ben Affleck version.
Also, while, in the days before one could answer a car-phone by pushing a button, Batman would pick up the receiver of the Batphone in the Batmobile in the comics, he didn't do that on TV. Whenever West was driving, and the Batphone rang, it was always Robin who picked it up. And this would be the only time Robin would answer the Batphone: In Wayne Manor above or in the Batcave below, when it rang, it would be Bruce who picked up and said, "Yes, Commissioner?" Dick would only do so in costume, as Robin, in the Batmobile, so Batman could concentrate on driving.
4. Ridiculous: Bat-Everything. The movie took it to an extreme, with Bat-Shark Repellent and a Bat-Dust Separator. On the TV show, he always seemed to have exactly the Bat-Gadget necessary for the situation, sometimes even Bat-Pills to counteract the effects of whatever smoke bomb or other weapon was used.
3. Underrated: The Stories That Hold Up Well. Most of these were in the 1st 2 seasons. One of the darkest episodes, and one of the least campy, was the 1st appearance of Mr. Freeze, played by George Sanders. He appeared to have frozen Batman and Robin to death. They couldn't get out of it themselves, and were very carefully thawed out by doctors.
There was a plan to feature Two-Face, and Clint Eastwood, just becoming a big star with his "Man With No Name" Western movies, was approached to play him. But the makeup department couldn't make a mask that made former District Attorney Harvey Dent's acid-scarred left profile not look too scary for kids. Nor did Clayface appear, and the special effects for his appearance would have stretched the show's already stretched budget.
So, with Two-Face and Clayface not viable options, a new character was created: False Face, a master of disguise who could be anybody, including a Bat-ally, and was listed in the opening credits of both parts, and the closing credits of the 1st part, as simply "?" The closing credits of the 2nd part revealed the actor's name: Malachi Throne. False Face's shtick was counterfeiting -- not just money, but creating fakes of other things of value. That was a story that holds up.
Roddy McDowall played another character created for the show, the Bookworm. But, aside from the initial shock of a rather silly look, this master thief was very clever, an intellectual match for Batman on the level of the Riddler. His episode was dark, as it began by having him appear to have masterminded Commissioner Gordon's assassination, and it held up throughout the two-parter that this guy was no joke -- if not quite a Joker.
Van Johnson played the singing criminal the Minstrel, whose plan to bankrupt the Gotham Stock Exchange presaged Bane's plan in the 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises. And, in the series' most-watched episode, Liberace played twins: Chandell, a renowned concert pianist, and his brother Harry, who used his brother's image (figuratively and literally) to commit crimes, assisted by a trio of women, musically named Doe, Rae and Mimi. A Batman '66 episode with Liberace in it? Surely, this must be the campiest episode of them all. It wasn't: It had an interesting pair of villains, a serious character study (Chandell was a reluctant criminal), and a pretty good plot.
2. Ridiculous: How Easily They Were Caught -- and Escaped. In order to keep ratings up, most stories were two-part episodes. At the end of the 1st part, Batman and Robin -- or, one of them, with the other looking unlikely to be able to save them -- would be rather easily captured by the villain. For modern Batfans, this seems impossible. He's the Batman. Batman always wins. No, he doesn't always win, but when he doesn't, he survives, and usually wins the rematch.
And the ways in which the Dynamic Duo got out of these traps usually held up scientifically no better than the traps themselves did. But these stories weren't meant to be scientifically accurate. Nobody cared about that in the late Sixties. They were meant to be entertaining. And they were.
1. Underrated: The Show Saved Batman. The comics' sales had been dropping for years, mainly because the character had gotten a little silly. But that was perfect for television, and the show exposed Batman, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, and the various villains to a wider audience than ever. It restored Batman's popularity, and, if Batman is, today, more popular than Superman, the show is a big reason why.
Ironic: The most-easily-captured Batman saved the comic character, the world's greatest detective and the world's greatest hand-to-hand combatant -- and from an enemy more powerful than the Joker or any other that the original Caped Crusader had ever faced: Irrelevance.