Batman TV Series 60th Anniversary

It was 60 years ago today, Wednesday January 12, 1966 when I was 10 1/2 years old, that the new Batman TV series premiered that night at 7:30 pm. Today, we celebrate the Batman TV series 60th anniversary!

Batman TV Series and Batman: The Movie

The Batman television series premiered on January 12, 1966, and ran until March 14, 1968. It starred Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin during the first two seasons, then added Yvonne Craig as Batgirl in the third and final season. Over its three-year run the TV show aired 120 episodes.

For the first two seasons, the show aired twice a week on Wednesday and Thursday nights. The Wednesday show always ended with a cliffhanger that found The Dynamic Duo in danger of dying with the announcer ominously urging viewers to tune in the following night “Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel” to see if Batman and The Boy Wonder could escape certain doom.

The third season reduced their show to once a week, but added the extremely attractive Batgirl to the mix in an effort to retain or draw in the young males in my age group who might have been moving into puberty or growing tired of the TV series. Or both.

In July of 1966, after the first season had ended, a Batman feature film was released in movie theaters across the country. Batman: The Movie saw our heroes facing four of their major villains, The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin, and Catwoman, all at the same time. The film also introduced the Batcopter, Batcycle (with sidecar for Robin), and the Batboat as new vehicles for transporting The Caped Crusaders in their crime-fighting efforts.

Oh, and it famously debuted the renowned Bat-Shark Repellent Spray which Batman always kept in his utility belt.

The first TV season and the summer movie were such popular hits that huge (at the time) Hollywood luminaries such as Victor Buono, Liberace, Otto Preminger, Anne Baxter, and Carolyn Jones, among many others, were banging on the door trying to get parts in the second and third seasons. Some were cast as villains, some were content with a simple cameo of them opening a skyscraper window to peer out and engage the heroes in a short conversation as Batman and Robin “climbed” up or down the side of the building. It was actually a set building exterior turned on its side so that West and Ward could easily walk while pretending to pull themselves up on their Batropes, with their capes held out streaming behind them with a string to make it appear the capes were being pulled downward by gravity.

Batman And Me

Along with Superman, Justice League and Flash, from DC Comics, I had been reading Batman and Detective comics for about 4 years at that point. I’d already watched the live-action Superman show starring George Reeves from the late 1950’s every time an episode aired, so I was very excited to see The Caped Crusader make his live-action debut.

And I had seen ads, of course, for the upcoming TV series of the new Batman show, in comic books and TV Guide, so I was more than ready to see another one of my comic books heroes come to life on the small screen.

Naturally, as a 10-year old superhero fan, I ate up the TV series each week and yes, if you had peeked inside our TV room you would have seen young Jeff punching the air, leaping over the chairs, tumbling across the room, and pretending his 4-year old brother was Robin.

As I wrote in this blog post, that first Halloween after the premiere of the TV show my costume was, of course, Batman.

I even had a Batman lunch box the next year that I proudly took to school each day.

So while Batman was never my number one (or even numbers two three or four) superhero, I still enjoyed the TV series and movie, like most 10 year olds did.

Batman Cultural Impact

The Batman TV show was quite different than the older Superman show. Superman had some humor in it, of course, but Batman was played as “campy” which Webster defines as “absurdly exaggerated, artificial, or affected in a usually humorous way.” If you’ve ever seen the show, you know what I mean. Batman, as portrayed by Adam West, was SO serious and staid while surrounded by craziness as to be laughable. Yet he always got the job done and good triumphed over evil.

The show was meant to appeal to kids who read the comic books, of course, but also to their parents who could laugh, out loud or quietly, at the inside jokes and humor that was presented to them. Not that I EVER recall my parents watching the show.

But that campy style made it a hit! Batman on TV entered the cultural zeitgeist in a way that Batman in the comics never did up to that point. In fact, the comic books were in danger of being cancelled for low readership when the TV series premiered and breathed new life back into that medium.

Suddenly the “Pow” and “Bang” and “Zwonk” that flashed on the screen during the obligatory fights between our heroes and the villains found Batman on the cover of obvious publications like TV Guide and Photoplay, but also famously on the cover of mainstream Life Magazine.

And Robin’s catchphrase of “Holy (whatever they were dealing with at the moment), Batman!” became the catchphrase of every kid who wanted to BE Robin.

Thus, Batmania spread across the country in a manner similar to K-pop the past couple of years.

About 12 years ago the entire series was released on DVD. I have it, but I haven’t watched it yet. Maybe this is the year.

Batman TV Series 60th Anniversary

Batman has undergone many different changes since his TV debut 60 years ago today, as any longtime fan can tell you. The character has been in serious movies, comedy movies, Lego stop-action movies, animated movies, animated TV series, and appeared in multitudes of comic books, both his own and as a guest star in others.

He has been known as Batman, THE Batman, The Dark Knight, The Caped Crusader, The World’s Greatest Detective, The Goddamn Batman (his own reference to himself), The Gotham Guardian, Bats, and The Bat. But no matter what Bruce Wayne calls himself (or others call him) he will always be the little boy who witnessed the murder of his parents and dedicated himself to becoming a force for good and justice in the world.

So today, on the Batman TV Series 60th Anniversary, we celebrate what Adam West, Burt Ward, and Yvonne Craig brought to us those many years ago in all its forms.

Or, as Robin would say, “Holy 60th Anniversary, Batman!”