Batman

 

L to R: Director James Sheldon, Adam West, Burt Ward 

Batman was an American superhero comedy television series created by William Dozier based on the DC Comics character of the same name that aired on ABC for three seasons and 120 episodes from January 12, 1966, to March 14, 1968.

It stars Adam West as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Burt Ward as Dick Grayson/Robin—two crime-fighting heroes who defend Gotham City from a variety of archvillains. Among them: Mr. Freeze, a cool-thinker who can live only at 50 below zero; Zelda the Great, a Houdinilike escape artist who commissioned an absolutely escape-proof trap for Batman; The Joker, who plays hideous practical jokes; and The Penguin, a long-nosed fellow whose speciality is fiendish umbrellas.

An impressive gallery

They made an impressive gallery, and Dozier soon had some of the leading character actors in town eager to play his “special guest villains,” among them Burgess Meredith, George Sanders, Anne Baxter, Frank Gorshin and Cesar Romero.

Semple invented “camp” situations and dialog designed to make Batman into the most impossibly square hero ever. When he walks into a discothéque, resplendent in his Batregalia, he explains to the maitre d’ that he doesn’t want a table because “I shouldn’t wish to attract attention,” walks up to the bar and orders a large glass of fresh orange juice. When his “youthful ward” complains about his French lesson, Batman tells him, “I’m surprised at you, Dick. Language is the key to world peace. .. .” The Police Commissioner breathes arch put-on speeches into the “hot line” which connects “Wayne Manor, stately home of the scion of the Wayne millions” with the police station: “Whoever he may be behind that mask of his .. . our only hope is the Caped Crusader.”

Dozier, meantime, was busily building Batcaves, Batmobiles and other Batparaphernalia. In a Batepisode everything is labeled, the Batpoles down which the Dynamic Duo slides to get to the Batcave (one says “Bruce” and one says “Dick” and on the wall behind them it says, “ACCESS TO THE BATCAVE VIA BATPOLES”) and all the Batgadgets.

There is the Intergalactic Recorder, the Terrestrial Scanner, the Interdigital. Batsorter, the Hyperspectrographic Analyzer, the Chemo-Electric Secret Writing Detector, the Atomic Batpile, source of power for the Batmobile.

The Batmobile, especially built by a custom-car expert, is strictly Detroit Garish. It cost about $30,000, is built upon a Lincoln chassis, houses a supercharged Lincoln-Continental engine and runs in truth on something the existence of which the average Batfan barely acknowledges—gasoline.

Dozier was also building a cinematic style in which, in the words of line producer Howie Horwitz, “all the violence is good clean fun and no one— with the exception of Jill St. John in the pilot—ever gets killed.”

Meantime, ABC was the happy inheritor of some unexpected promotional windfalls. Columbia Pictures hauled out of its vaults an old-fashioned Batman movie serial which had been gathering dust since 1943, strung all its 15 chapters together into four hours and 17 minutes of absolute Batheaven, and released it in art houses in 20 cities. Holy barracuda! A smash!

The trade papers reported “booming sales” in all comic books, triggered by the Batman craze. The Batman theme by Neal Hefti began climbing on the record charts. A new rock *n’ roll group appeared called “Robin and the Batmen.” Three stereo record albums were announced. A New York art gallery pondered an exhibition of the works of Bob Kane, and Macy’s took out a full-page ad inviting its customers to meet “Batman’s creator” in its men’s store. The afternoon of the premieére, ABC set up a campily posh cocktail party at Harlow’s, the “in” New York discothéque, followed by a screening, in the hope of completely capturing the in-crowd. Arthur Murray invented a new dance, the Batusi, for the occasion. Andy Warhol, Sharman Douglas, Mrs. Herbert Bayard Swope, Roy Lichtenstein, Tammy Grimes, Roddy McDowell and about 500 other black-tied guests appeared, “vokking it up,” in the words of one seasoned observer, “at every well-oiled cliché.”

If the network thinkers were expecting the New York reviewers to dig the camp, they were to be bitterly disappointed. By and large, they thought it was one big yawn, with the possible exception of the New York Times, whose reviewer found the whole camp idea “amusing in spots, though the avant-campists might contend it really wasn’t bad enough to be excellent.”

Overnight samplings revealed that Batman in its early stages was drawing about a 50-percent share of the audience. However, no one knew exactly how well it would do in the long run. For the adults the joke could very quickly run thin, though the children, especially the younger set, seem to be hung up on the fantasy.

A synthetic art form

As one dissenter put it: “Every Zonk! is calculated. They are making fun of Batman instead of making him come off in his own terms.” To which the chain-smoking Lorenzo Semple replies, sadly: “Things that are really camp were never intended to be. So it is true; ours is a synthetic form of art at best. Perhaps we should have tried to make it really atrocious.” Some critics think Semple didn’t miss by much.

Out on the Batman set, such matters seem purely academic these days. Everyone is having a ball, from the “Batleader” (Horwitz) to the “Bat Bard” (Semple) to the “Super Bat Chief” (Dozier). Even the Batactors have a tough time finding anything to complain about. Adam West, the onetime bush pilot who plays the Caped Crusader in what has been described as the Early Deadpan style of acting, can’t understand the script. “But who cares?” he says.

The Batleader and the Super Bat Chief have instructed everybody to play absolutely straight, under pain of extinction. This is easy with Robin, played by Burt Ward, who has never acted before and is almost as earnest in real life as he is on the screen.

“But with Adam it’s different,” the Batleader cautions. “He wants to be Cary Grant. And the first time he gets cute and amusing, the show is dead. I have to tell him, ‘Adam, it’s Eagle Scout time, sincere and earnest and square as can be.’ Thank goodness he gets the message. It’s tough when you have a show with lines like ‘Which way to the Batroom?’”