To The Batpoles! Batman 1966

The appearance of Biljo White 's fanzine BATMANIA was well timed. Not only did it contain coverage of, and fan reaction to, the New Look Batman of the comics, but also covered the mid-sixties resurgence of the 1940s Batman serials , and meteoric rise and fall of the '66 TV show . While some Batmanians accepted that Hollywood was never going to give them a better filmed Batman than this, others rai...

BATMANIA was a well-made fanzine that was started by Columbia, MO, fireman Biljo White in 1964, concurrent with the introduction of New Look Batman by DC . Reading it revealed so many interesting things about the Batman fandom of the sixties that we can't cram it all into one episode! So this time, in part one of our examination of BATMANIA, we (gasp!) set the TV show aside and focus on explaining...

Surf's Up, Joker's Under is perhaps the most polarizing episode of Batman . Some call it their favorite of season three, or even of the whole series, while Joel Eisner has called it "by far, one of the worst Joker episodes," and even '66 Joker himself Cesar Romero didn't like it. Why is this episode so divisive? Why do the villains in season three keep thinking that taking over one small segment o...

In late in 1965, writer Peggy Shaw (a.k.a. Peggy O'Shea ) submitted a Batman script called Fashions in Crime . It was based on a story of the same title from Batman 47 (1948), but naturally much expanded, and it shows signs that Shaw must have been reading Lorenzo Semple Jr. 's early Batman scripts (e.g. Hi Diddle Riddle and The Joker Goes to School ). While parts of the script fit the tone of Bat...

Burt Ward 's 1995 memoir Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights , while it does give us some insight into what it was like to go from nothing to superfame to typecast purgatory, is indisuputabily full of inaccuracies and hyperbole -- not to mention much more (in terms of both quantity and cringe-inducing detail) about his sexual conquests and misadventures than there is material of use to Batman '66 schola...

The season three episodes The Ogg and I and How to Hatch a Dinosaur are a two-parter in which the parts have virtually no common story elements, only the same villains: Egghead , and Olga, Queen of the Cossacks . Both actors, Vincent Price and Anne Baxter , do a great job but ultimately aren't given much to work with. In this episode, we discuss the original arrangement of the three Egghead/Olga e...

Louie, The Lilac is a surprising episode for how un-Uncle Milty-like Milton Berle 's performance is. It's also uneven, with some nice camera shots, but also many poorly-presented plot points — and some that aren't presented at all! We do get a few scenes of Gotham City's flower children — and just what is the show's take on that movement? How much social commentary might there be hiding among the...

The 1989 Batman movie was the result of a decade of pitching, rewriting, and personnel changes. It made a Batcave full of money, but is it a good Batman film? Tim and Paul revisit Tim Burton 's first try at Batman, starring Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton , after not watching it since it was first run in theaters. Does it look any different now? Does it look any better than it did? How were the...

In 1966, after being the writer and script editor who got the '66 series off the ground, Lorenzo Semple Jr. yielded his chair to Charles Hoffman . What would a look at the draft of a season two Semple script reveal about how Hoffman edited Semple? That was the question Ben Bentley , a moderator of the '66 Batman Message Board ( bow like Ewoks , everybody!), wondered, so when Tim was asking for sug...

The debut of Batman '66 caused a backlash among Batman nerds, who subsequently demanded Batman comics that reverted to the dark, sullen loner version of the character. But why did the nerds (and Bob Kane himself!) expect a version of Batman who really hadn't been seen since Robin came on the scene in 1940? While Batman as played by Adam West is funny in spite of himself, does this mean the show wa...

Why on earth does " The Unkindest Tut of All " feature a King Tut claiming to have precognitive abilities? Could it be because Stanley Ralph Ross wanted to use a certain jokey title for the episode? Why is Batgirl such an afterthought here? In this episode, we take a look at this season three episode alongside Ross' ten-page treatment for the story (originally titled " Swami, How I Love Ya "), whi...

In 1965, Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote the first scripts for the Batman series. Any Bat-fan knows that the Hi Diddle Riddle and Fine Feathered Finks arcs were the first to be written and first to be broadcast. What many of us didn't know was that The Joker Goes to School was also part of that set, received by Howie Horwitz just 20 days after Finks . In this episode, Tim and Paul look over that first dr...

We're back! In the thick of the 1966 Batman boom, Ledger Syndicate and DC debuted a new Batman comic strip. Written by Whitney Ellsworth and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff (and, in turn, by Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella ), the early strips seem to want to simultaneously imitate the 66 TV show, and differentiate itself from it. In this episode, we talk about IDW 's collection of the early strips in Ba...

TO THE BATPOLES! returns this Thursday, March 15, with our long-promised discussion of the 1966 Batman comic strip! Next up, a look at the draft script for THE JOKER GOES TO SCHOOL! Still time to look it over and give your comments before we record that episode -- follow the links below! "The Joker Goes to School" PDF script "The Joker Goes to School" thread on the '66 Batman message board

"To the Batpoles!" is taking some down time. Listen for the details.

In the first two-parter of season three, Penguin and Lola Lasagne horse around with the Wayne Foundation 's charity horse race. Before getting in the saddle, Tim and Paul first look at some background on season three: shooting order of episodes, the reasons for multi-part season three stories, etc. The Sport of Penguins and A Horse of Another Color are a rather strange pair of episodes. In spite o...

  At first glance, Stanford Sherman 's draft script of Pop Goes the Joker doesn't seem to vary much from the final. A few minor oversights of Sherman's were fixed (Oh, there are signs on the Batpoles?), and there were the usual cuts to lines to keep within the allotted time. But look a little deeper, and there are places where decisions by director George Waggner hurt or helped the arc, some inter...

Bat-fans with any awareness of which writer wrote which Bat-script have long had a love-hate relationship with Stanley Ralph Ross , one of the most prolific of the show's scribes. In season one, he co-wrote one of the most acclaimed arcs of the series, "The Purrfect Crime"/"Better Luck Next Time" . On the other hand, he's also responsible for such disasters as the Archer story, and played a large...

When you want analysis of Joan Collins ' appearance as the Siren , there's only one man to call: High C ! He's a mainstay of the all-seeing, all-knowing 66 Batman message board , and has made "The Wail of the Siren" a focus of much research. In this episode, we have him on the show to discuss the various versions of the script, at least one scene that was filmed and not used, the provenance of the...

It's time to dig into another draft script, and another by Stanley Ralph Ross : That Darned Catwoman ! We find many things that were left out of the broadcast version—some to our regret, others to our relief! In place of Pussycat , we have Poison Ivy . Is this the Ivy of the comics? Why might the character have been changed to Pussycat? We additionally see how Ross' attempts at cinematic set-piece...

At last, Batman '66 faces Two-Face ! Adam West 's final turn as Batman pits him against his classic-TV contemporary, William Shatner , in the animated release Batman vs. Two-Face ! Producer James Tucker has said that last year's Return of the Caped Crusaders imitated the feel of seasons 2 and 3 of the original TV show, while this one has a season-one tone... but Tim and Paul beg to differ. The fil...

Frank Gorshin returns for one more round as the Riddler . Is he as good as ever, or down for the count? Does Joan Collins ' appearance as Siren steal Gorshin's screen time? Is Riddler's alias Mushi Nebuchadnezzar meant as a Muhammad Ali reference? Is Batgirl way smarter than the Dynamic Duo , or is she just written that way? In our Camping Trip, Paul notes how the brisk pace of season three episod...

It's time to dig into another script: Stanley Ralph Ross 's first draft of Shoot a Crooked Arrow/Walk the Straight and Narrow (take a look at the script here !). Most bat-fans agree, this is a less-than-satisfying arc for a number of reasons, from the casting of the villain to some seemingly nonsensical plotting late in part one. Reading the script helps us understand what was supposed to happen t...

In 1949, six years after the wartime Batman serial, Columbia Pictures tried again with New Adventures of Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder , with a completely new cast and somewhat changed bat-tableau. Typical of that era's serials, the production values are cheap, the script is full of illogical behavior and red-herring "clues", and the acting is something well short of Olivier . But it's instructi...

It's Batgirl ! She's in Gotham City , and she's here to save the Batman TV show! (Did it work? Spoiler alert: Not so much.) We look at the process that brought the Barbara Gordon iteration of Batgirl to the comics and to the screen, and give our impressions of the unbroadcast pilot and the first Season Three episode, Enter Batgirl, Exit Penguin ! Then, Tim at last describes his visit to the Americ...