Yeah, don't worry about the title - it doesn't make much sense. (Grabbed your attention though, didn't it?) Look at the above photo - I can't help but think that it actually goes some way to capturing the dark and mysterious aspect of BATMAN as he was originally envisioned. It makes me wonder what the result would have been had the TV Producers decided to go down that avenue instead of the one they ultimately chose. Would it have been as successful as it was? Who knows? One thing's for sure, however - the childhoods of kids in the '60s would have been markedly different. Anyone got any thoughts on the matter?
4 comments:
As a child, I totally failed to spot the campiness of Adam West's Batman and thus spent every episode gripped by the drama of it all.
As did I - but I still wonder what impression it might have made had it been done 'seriously'.
IMHO, the show probably would have bombed if it had been played straight. Camp comedy mixed with action-adventure was the fad in 1966. That may have started with the James Bond series; the Bond movies and their imitators (Flint, Matt Helm) were played tongue-in-cheek. The popularity of Batman influenced other TV shows, too. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Wild Wild West, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E. all got sillier and more juvenile as time went on. Although, I have to confess that I, too, thought that Batman was a straight action show when I was seven or eight. Many years later, in reruns, I caught the jokes that had gone over my head before.
Funny how our perceptions change when we're older, eh?
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