West and Ward are antipodal to every subsequent incarnation of Batman and Robin. But Dozier wanted camp, and West won the part after his audition with Ward. The original choice to play Batman was former linebacker Mike Henry, who would’ve offered a more dramatic, and more muscular, rendition. William Dozier, producer of the TV show, wasn’t a comic fan he felt that the only way to transcribe Batman for a modern audience was to create a pop-art romp in the vein of Jerry Lewis by way of Andy Warhol. Even Clooney’s Batman has discernible similarities to the Batman of the 1950s, the era of giant bugs and diabolical scientists and zany colors. And, of course, Joel Schumacher’s Batmen are bad jokes, with Val Kilmer obviously zoned out, counting the zeros on his paycheck in every shot, and George Clooney appearing embarrassed.īut West’s Batman is the only one that bears absolutely no resemblance, save for his pointy ears and cape, to his comic source, seemingly spitting in its face. And Christian Bale, in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, so gravel-throated and pious, represents Batman at his most solemn his Bruce, however, is a billionaire playboy whose Tom Ford suits and voluptuous arm-candy veil his heroic lunar activities, whereas Keaton seemingly spent his free time alone. Keaton is mysterious, his black-velvet voice and vacuous eyes drawing you in as his Bruce Wayne nearly puts you to sleep with his banality. Indeed, West’s Batman remains the outlier in the Bat-canon. What they got instead was something out of Bob Kane’s nightmares, more akin to Frank Miller’s Reagan-era neo-anarchist freedom fighter. People associated his pot-bellied hero with onomatopoeia and Robin’s pasty thighs, and more than 20 years later, when former funnyman Michael Keaton took up the cowl for Tim Burton’s blockbuster, people expected more shenanigans. West’s stagey, straight-faced turn as the caped crusader was, for several generations, the only version of Batman that non-comic-readers knew. Replete with double entendres for the parents and giddy inanity for the kids, it’s everything Susan Sontag loved and loathed about camp amalgamated into a half-hour lark. Starring Adam West and Burt Ward, two unknowns cast largely for their affable faces, the series ( now available for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray in a snazzy, wallet-purging boxed set from Warner Home Video) remains one of the format’s great cultural touchstones. The television series Batman, which ran from 1966 to ’68 on ABC, knowingly acknowledged and lampooned Wertham’s seething, masturbatory harangue in a way that defied the era’s TV standards. His book claimed that comics were sinful trash that converted the children-by God, the children!-into homosexual deviants. That time was 50 years ago, when the ripples of Fredric Wertham’s despicable anti-comic diatribe Seduction of the Innocent were still being felt. It’s easy to forget that there was actually a time when Batman was fun.
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