#adam west batman
The thing you have to understand about the Adam West Batman is that it was regarded essentially as a live-action cartoon even by 1966 standards. It was made in an era when expectations for naturalistic production values in television were practically nonexistent, and it still managed to baffle those expectations. Nothing about the show was obliged to be Like That as a product of its time; it’s Like That by choice.
Like, you’ve gotta understand that this is a show that signed on Cesar Romero and put him in a clown suit. The Joker has gone on to be one of Romero’s most iconic roles, so it’s difficult for modern audiences to appreciate just how fucking bizarre that casting was at the time. This is a production with a definite artistic thesis, is what I mean to say.
@whydotheycallmedarrenreplied:
I feel like people who haven’t really watched it that the people making it didn’t realise quite how campy they were being, but, though it’s been a few years since I’ve seen the show, the film at least is just about the most ‘in on the joke’ thing you could ask for
To be fair, it’s not just Batman. There’s a broader tendency in popular culture to assume that people of the past were gormless dipshits who enacted their cultural practices by rote with no understanding of their purpose or significance; while that’s more usually something you see folks complaining about in the context of anthropology, it also crops up in media interpretation in the form of people acting like they think irony was invented in the 1990s.
(I’d actually be kind of fascinated to see what that looks like twenty or thirty years from now, when the window has shifted to push the irony event horizon into the post-2000 era. Like, imagine some shmuck in 2044 attempting to interpret Shrek as an example of unintentional comedy!)
Please remember that the 1966 Batman TV show’s primary audience initially was children. It had a 7:30 pm time-slot on Wednesday and Thursday nights. That was so grade school kids could watch it before bedtime. Watch the first couple of episodes and you’ll see it was done completely seriously. The writers and actors inserted silly throwaways for the adults in the room but they never expected that grownups would like the campy dialouge and action sequences more than their children.
The Batman TV series was a cultural phenomenon. Everyone already knew the characters so it was able to take off quickly. Kids loved seeing a comic book brought to life and the adults enjoyed the A list celebrities who flocked to guest star in it. Think Sharknado but place it in the 60s.
Like any cultural flash in the pan the novelty wore off quickly. That’s why it only ran for 3 seasons. The damage was done though. Dick Grayson was now a teenager wearing booty shorts and pixie boots (Holy softcover porn, Batman!). The character of Batman would take over a decade to rehabilitate. They only good thing to come out of the series was the introduction of Batgirl.
Remember that it premiered over 55 years ago. The world was a very different place back then. What was hip and groovy then looks bizarre today. Take Batman 66 for what it is- a microcosm of a society in transition from the conformist 1950s to the revolutionary rejection of social norms that began in the mid to late 1960s. It’s history in living color.
