In Defense of the 1966 Batman Television Show

Alright alright, I know this isn't going to be as bold a stance as
defending the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, but I still feel it's a defense that needs to be made. I saw at least one person talk about the show as having little to no cultural impact and that made something in me snap. This article didn't take much new research for me as I had previously toyed with making a whole podcast based around the cultural footprint that television shows left on comic characters and vice versa. The most obvious example is the character Harley Quinn - originally created for the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn quickly jumped onto the comic sheets and has been a fan mainstay. Since then, she's become a major character in the comics and in movies. I mainly shelved the podcast because I asked myself "do we really need another white dude talking with false confidence about a niche topic?" I said no, saved your RSS feed the psychic damage, but still had material for this article.

Friends, I present to you: the Batusi.

So the 1966 Batman television show is remembered either famously or infamously for concepts like Bat Shark Repellent, "Holy Contributing to the Delinquency of Minors!", and the Batusi. It was campy and in the 1960s, that's what it needed it to be. However, it made it into syndication in the 70s and 80s and a whole swath of Gen X and Millennial grew up on it too young to understand the camp and just naively absorbed it much like the audience in the 60s had absorbed the Silver Age of Batman comics - with nerdy zeal. I can tell you I watched more than my share of the 1966 Batman show and ate it up. For a show that only had three seasons and a movie it's actually flabbergasting how big a cultural footprint it has. But such is the power of the Bat.

I have to apologize for anyone reading that didn't fully understand what the Silver Age of comics was. It's worth explaining the eras of pre-modern comics include a Golden Age, Silver Age, and Bronze Age, and the Batman comics are an exemplary model to examine. In the beginning, Batman was super bonkers but also dark. The creators, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, borrowed heavily from contemporary comics and films to create Batman and Gotham. The city of Gotham itself was heavily influenced by German Expressionist films such as Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Joker legit killed people. On panel. Catwoman was super sexy - and she exploited men with their weakness over her. I could go on, but just know that a lot of weird, fun, experimental things were going on in comics at the time. Then in 1954, almost two decades of Batman later, Fredric Wertham wrote Seduction of the Innocent about how comic books were corrupting the youth. Unfortunately, it caught the attention of lawmakers who started heavily censoring comic books with the Comic Code Authority. Eisner-award winning comic writer, Saladin Ahmed, actually did an amazing job talking more on how cool, weird, and diverse the Golden Age of comics was and the impact of the Comic Code in this article. I heartily recommend it.

I don't know what I love more: Eartha Kitt being
so amazing badass by pulling the gun or how
absolutely bored the cat looks.

In the Silver Age is where you see more goofy comics like Joker threatening to squash Gotham with a massive pie. Unfortunately some characters just faded away from the comic pages in fear of being banned. The most famous was Catwoman. The Comic Code was very anti-strong-women and as a seductress and not just a damsel to be saved she was frowned upon. This is the era that idiots that think comics are just from boys look mostly fondly back on. The Bronze Age is where comic writers start experimenting in subverting the Comic Code, but that's mostly in the late 60s and 70s, so outside the scope of this article.

Alright, enough background! So where the heck does Batman 1966 fit into all of this? Well, as you can guess, it leaned heavily into the Silver Age of things with surfing contests, everything in the Batcave similarly having a Bat-prefix, and an Adam West that could never bring himself to strike a woman or a man in glasses. But despite seemingly embracing the Comic Code, it actually was a touch subversive with great ripples. The biggest one was the revival of Catwoman. Comics because of The Code was a lot more strict in its censorship than television, so the show was allowed a strong woman villain. Writers from the show revived Catwoman. While folks today still argue which performance was best (it was Eartha Kitt and it's not even close) it allowed DC Comics to be a little bold and follow suit with a revival of their own. I was shocked by this but if you look in her comic appearances, her last one was September 1954 (the year the Comic Code became law) with November 1966 when she finally returned. She may have been toned down from her original appearance but her sex appeal was one of the elements that remained intact and that was one of the things the show seemed to enshrine. I'm certain that a popular character like Catwoman wouldn't have been killed off permanently by the Comic Code but I'm grateful for the Batman show for assisting in preemptively bringing her back.

Frank Gorshin brought so much class and
mania to the show.

This next bit is more my favorite bit of trivia but it still shows the impact the show had on the comics. Frank Gorshin was a big thing in the 1960s. He was hanging out with and opening for Frank Sinatra. He was a funny guy and it was hard to not be a fan of him. He was grew up a total comic book nerd, picking up what comics he could in Pittsburgh and quickly became a fan of Batman. When the show was being made he pushed hard to get cast and even was nominated for an Emmy for his performance as The Riddler. Nowadays, The Riddler has two outfits we're familiar with - the classic leotard, covered with question marks, and the domino mask as well as the more classy suit and bowler hat, also covered with question marks. Until the 1966 show, only the leotard costume existed in the comics, so it was the intended outfit on the show. That latter outfit was specifically requested by Gorshin and who were the folks at Batman to say no? Now it's as iconic as the character and used more in contemporary stories than the classic leotard. However it didn't cross over to comics until a 1989 comic penned by none other than Neil Gaiman. So, not as important as reviving the character like with Catwoman (the Riddler was popular in the Silver Age as he was in the Golden Age) but still, a fun bit of history on the character.

There are so many horror stories of the filming
of the episode of Mr Freeze with Otto Preminger.
He did NOT want to be there.

I saved my last two bits of info for last. And they are none other than Mr Freeze and Batgirl. For Mr Freeze, before the Batman 1966 show... he arguably didn't exist! There was a Mr Zero who had the "air-conditioned suit," inability to live in normal temperatures, and freeze gun but he was in a single comic before he was discarded, presented as a joke villain. He was revived in the 1966 Batman show three times with three very different performances but all with the new name of Mr Freeze. The first was with George Sanders who primarily walked around in a grey spacesuit looking outfit, until he was in a refrigerated area. He was given a tragic backstory that Batman was actually the reason for his changed state, something Freeze lorded over Batman and manipulated him with. It showed a shocking depth of relationship between the hero and villain, not one that you can really find elsewhere in the show. When Otto Preminger (yes that Otto Preminger) was cast he rejected the old outfit saying he wouldn't be able to be heard through the space helmet. He was given a ring emitting a mist around his neck, now called a "frost collar," that would give the feeling that he was still kept frosty. It's a look that was lifted by Joel Schumacher for Batman and Robin. Eli Wallach brought an fun intensity to his performance that neither Sanders or Preminger had, embracing the campiness. Its odd the range of which Mr Freeze was performed. He doesn't really get any credit anywhere, but Max Hodges is the writer he brought Mr Freeze back and wrote four of the episodes (as each appearance is a two-parter). He deserves some recognition for molding Mr Freeze into something more palatable for comics. Freeze was quickly picked up and given some toyetic redesigns over the years until the Animated Series gave him his final face lift and truly tragic backstory as Victor Fries. But the 1966 show was a major inflection point for him.

The amazing Yvonne Craig.

And last of course, is Batgirl! Now the character of Batgirl predates the show, but she was a character named Betty Kane back in 1961 when she was created but shortly vanished again in '64. Throughout the history of Batman 1966, there seemed to be a push for more female characters, be it reviving Catwoman, introducing side characters from the comics like Aunt Harriet, or Batgirl. Instead of introducing a new character backstory, they opted to include their Batgirl on someone else's story - primarily the bumbling police commissioner, James Gordon. And hence was born Barbara Gordon, introduced in the comics the same year as when she premiered on the show. For those fact checking me at home, you'll notice that the comic appearance of Barbara appears a few months before her episode. The Wikipedia still credits William Dozier, the executive producer of the Batman show of pitching the specific idea to DC of Batgirl being Commissioner Gordon's daughter. DC loved the idea they immediately started writing her. Comics seem to get produced quicker than television shows, so the comic won the race. Still, Batgirl definitely made a big splash in the show, played spectacularly by Yvonne Craig. Despite ratings flagging in the third and final season, she was easily a highlight.

The show sat at this interesting inflection point that was basically the death of the Silver Age and birth of the Bronze Age of comics. The show celebrated the Silver Age so the older fans, causal fans, or newer fans enthusiastically embraced it. In the world of comics, Dennis O'Neil and similar writers were already busy making comics grittier and bringing more relevant themes to comics. Seeing Batman run around with a giant bomb didn't fit into the new comic order. But still it resurrected some characters either from obscurity or a Comic Code related demise and the show's impact can still be seen celebrated either in the Schumacher films or the amazing Batman: Brave and the Bold animated series. The campiness of the Batman show has also been pointed out to by Bronze Age creators as the bright light they wanted to run from, being as much an indirect influence for the newer creators like Frank Miller and Alan Moore as O'Neil was a direct influence. And yet it's from Neil Gaiman, from that same generation of creators, that The Riddler got his bowler and suit brought over from the show. Maybe not all of them ran that far from it.