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It may come as a surprise to some of you, but ADAM WEST and BURT WARD reprised their BATMAN and ROBIN roles more than once over the years, and not just for cartoons either. In 1979, they appeared alongside other DC heroes and villains in a couple of TV Specials called - wait for it - LEGENDS Of The SUPERHEROES.
The other heroes were CAPTAIN MARVEL, The FLASH, The HUNTRESS, BLACK CANARY, GREEN LANTERN, and HAWKMAN, while the super villains were MORDRU, SOLOMON GRUNDY, The RIDDLER (yup, Mr. FRANK GORSHIN), The WEATHER WIZARD, Dr. SIVANA, SINESTRO, and GIGANTA.
The ATOM and AUNT MINERVA turned up in the second Special, but I have to be honest and say both episodes are excruciatingly awful, and you should all count yourselves lucky if you've never seen them. Shot on videotape, with a laugh-track (yup, they're meant to be funny - but aren't) these two low-budget shows are the way not to do superheroes. And here's why:
You never see The Flash run, Hawkman fly (or even flap his wings) and Green Lantern merely points his power ring at himself and disappears. Captain Marvel does a spot of flying, but it's a poorly executed piece of back (or maybe front - what do I know?) projection for a few seconds. You have to hand it to Adam West for throwing himself into things, but he really should have tucked the neck of his mask inside his cape, like in the '60s TV show.
Take it from me, you can safely give these two shows a miss - unless you're a diehard fan of 'car-crash' TV. They're both genuinely execrable, though the second one, The ROAST, is even worse than the first, The CHALLENGE. I suppose if there's anyone you really hate, you could give them this as a present, secure in the knowledge that they'll lose the will to live while watching it.
But no - that would surely be too cruel! (Remember the rumours of torture at GUANTANAMO BAY? They were true - they showed this DVD to the detainees.)
8 comments:
Nowadays Adam West is the voice of Mayor West in "Family Guy".
And he's also the voice of Batman in a new cartoon. Burt Ward and Julie Newmar reprise their roles (Robin and Catwoman) as well.
I knew Adam West and Burt Ward did the voices for a Batman cartoon series in the late 1970's, and they played themselves in that lousy made-for-TV movie (IIRC, it was called "Back To the Batcave") sometime around 2003, but I didn't know they played the characters again in live action.
West and Julie Newmar voiced Bruce Wayne's parents in a 2010 episode of Cartoon Network's Batman: The Brave & the Bold (a flashback sequence retelling Batman's origin).
My favorite animated cartoon appearance by West, though, was a 2003 episode of Disney's Kim Possible. He played Timothy North, a retired actor who had gone bonkers and believed himself to be the Fearless Ferret, a superhero that he had played on a 1960's TV show.
West was also offered a cameo role as Bruce Wayne's father in the 1989 Batman movie, but declined as he wanted to play Batman in it. Actually, Back To The Batcave is a masterpiece of entertainment compared to Legends of the Superheroes. I'll keep an eye out for that Disney episode, TC.
I got this on tape. The intro was quite good. For about two minutes.
I thought it was all mince - intro and all.
Sorry, I missed this post the first time around. I remember seeing this advertised in TV Guide and one of my friends and I sat through every awful moment of the first episode. I made it about ten minutes into the second one. It was all we had pretty much.....by then Marvel had started doing the Spider-Man series and I think the Hulk series wasn't far behind, then the Captain America/Reb Brown movies. We had to take what we could get back then
Indeed, G, but some of what we could get wasn't worth having, unfortunately.
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