Batman

TV Milestones

Series Editors

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski

Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

BATMAN

Matt Yockey

TV MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press

Detroit

© 2014 by Wayne State University Press,

Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3817-9 (paperback)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013944342

ISBN 978-0-8143-3818-6 (e-book)

To Eric Yockey

for leading the way

CONTENTS

Introduction: Batman Begins

1. Bat-Civics

2. Bat-Difference

3. Bat-Casting

4. Bat-Being

Conclusion: Batman Forever

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Introduction

Batman Begins

Dear Sir:

Batman is the silliest, stupidest show on television and I love every minute of it.

Yours truly, Ricky W., Chicago, Ill.¹

A little over a month after ABC’s action-comedy series Batman debuted on January 12, 1966, Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin bemoaned that the highly rated show had been merchandised beyond the dreams of avarice . . . shaping our televiewing for years to come and was a tasteless, witless . . . bore . . . born of a devout and monumental cynicism toward the television audience.² Champlin’s screed confirms how some critics, patrolling the border between high and low cultures, were aghast at the show’s explosive popularity. At the same time, Champlin also betrays a marked misunderstanding of the show and its audience. What he saw as a cynical manipulation of the television audience was, in fact, a turning point in the evolution of the relationship between the producers of television content and its viewers. Batman worked not because its audience was slyly duped by Hollywood tastemakers but because viewers were encouraged to be engaged participants in the show’s skillful deconstruction of the tropes of television, the superhero genre, and America itself. In artfully blending a dual address to viewers—both children and adults—eager to embrace the show’s broad representations of good versus evil, Batman was the first television program to tap into the increasingly strong undercurrents of ambivalence about postwar American culture. Batman was a unique and significant series because it allowed that the audience wanted to both endorse and critique traditional American values that were intimately linked to an equally conflicted sense of personal identity—a first in the history of American television. As a national phenomenon, Batman allowed audiences the safe confines of mass culture in which to understand themselves and the nation as social constructs during a period in which social meaning was increasingly contested in America.

Such work required that Batman be highly formulaic because it was within those fixed and familiar boundaries of television genre form and content that ambivalence could be safely expressed. Each episode follows a clear template: in a pre-credit sequence a dire threat to Gotham City from a nefarious villain is established. Police Commissioner James Gordon (Neil Hamilton) contacts Batman (Adam West) by way of an emergency Bat-phone that links his office with (unbeknownst to the commissioner) stately Wayne Manor, the home of millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, his youthful ward Dick Grayson (Burt Ward), and Aunt Harriet (Madge Blake), who seems to exist in a perpetual benign fog, oblivious to the superhero identities of Bruce and Dick. Bruce Wayne’s English butler Alfred (Alan Napier) takes Gordon’s call and discreetly informs Masters Bruce and Dick that their services as Batman and Robin are required. The two, usually involved in some absurdly mundane activity with Aunt Harriet, such as practicing birdcalls on the balcony, make a hasty excuse and slip into the study. There they activate a secret panel and slide down twin Bat-Poles (helpfully labeled Bruce and Dick) to the Batcave. This action cues the credit sequence, which features a series of stiffly animated cartoon images of Batman and Robin battling a criminal cohort while the infectious theme song plays. The body of the episode then features a criminal plot that the Dynamic Duo work to thwart, allowing Batman to demonstrate his keen skills of detection and Robin his knack for solving childish riddles and interpreting bizarre clues (all the while qualifying his exclamations with Holy!). With an arsenal of Bat-branded equipment at their disposal, most notably the atomic-powered Batmobile, Batman and Robin pursue their criminal target. After a fight with the villain and/or his or her henchmen (complete with onomatopoeic visual effects to punctuate the kicks, punches, and belly flops), one or both of our crime fighters is caught in a seemingly inescapable trap, such as being dipped in a vat of boiling wax to be made into a giant candle. As the episode ends, a voice-over narrator (executive producer William Dozier) breathlessly advises viewers to tune in tomorrow at the same Bat-time, same Bat-channel to see if our heroes make it out alive. The follow-up episode sees their successful escape and ultimate defeat of the villain, who is sent off to Gotham State Penitentiary with a stern admonition from Batman about the inevitable failure that comes from a life of crime. Order is restored, at least until next week’s double episodes.

In light of the popularity of the syndicated series The Adventures of Superman (1952–1958), ABC first considered producing a live-action Saturday morning Batman series in 1963; however, the project lay dormant until 1965 when the network approached William Dozier, head of Greenway Productions at 20th Century Fox, about producing a Batman show for prime time. To better familiarize himself with the Batman character, Dozier, a former producer at CBS and Screen Gems, Inc., bought a clutch of Batman comic books and read them on a flight from New York to Los Angeles. According to his daughter he was laughing out loud . . . and . . . [got] the idea to do the show just like the comic books. He was almost the inventor of camp humor.³ Dozier contacted Lorenzo Semple, Jr., a New York playwright who previously had written scripts for Greenway Productions. Recalls Semple, Bill Dozier and I had seen millionaire Bruce Wayne and his Bat regalia as classy comedy, hopefully appealing to kids as an absurdly jolly action piece and to grown-ups for its deadpan satire.⁴ Coincidentally, while Semple was writing his first script in the fall of 1965, the 1943 Batman movie serial was re-released theatrically, and adult audiences roared with laughter at its unintentionally funny take on the Caped Crusader. Likely emboldened by the campy reception of the serial, ABC, which was a distant third in the ratings war behind CBS and NBC, accelerated production of Batman. Rather than release it for the 1966–1967 season, as originally planned, it was scheduled as a mid-season replacement for Shindig (1964–1966), a pop-and-rock music program that aired twice a week. Thus, in part due to an accident of programming, the show duplicated the cliff-hanger structure of the serial, further aligning it with a camp spirit of the era linked to the Pop art movement.

This spirit is evident in the show’s use of such aesthetic devices as canted angles for the villains’ lairs and bright colors wedded to the double register spelled out by Semple. In the episode The Riddler’s False Notion (28 April 1966), for example, Robin is tied up and pushed off the top of a building by the Riddler (Frank Gorshin), only to be saved at the last instant when he clasps with his teeth the Batrope thrown to him by Batman. When he is pulled to safety, the Boy Wonder exclaims, Holy molars, am I ever glad I take good care of my teeth! Batman responds soberly, True. You owe your life to dental hygiene. It is not difficult to imagine young viewers uncritically absorbing the combination of high drama and hygiene lesson while the adults around them burst into laughter. At the core of this effect is the show’s hybrid identity as an action-comedy series, a hybridization that segments its audience by age via its blended genre codes. Yet, the laughter of adults is generated by the friction produced in the intersection of their adult sensibilities and the memories of their own childhood fantasies of fair play and good citizenship. As a theater manager observed about the reception of the re-released 1943 serial, The audiences were mostly college students or people in the 21–35 age bracket. Some came just to laugh—the film is bad—and some came for sentimental reasons.⁵ The show’s popularity with adults is thus based in part on its appeal to a nostalgic vision of childhood remediated via the mass culture parody of a signifier of that childhood. Accordingly, Batman was important as a self-reflexive television text that both its producers and many audience members used to critique a number of culturally induced binaries: child/adult, producer/consumer, and past/present.

Certainly in 1966 Batman was significant to many Americans as an easily recognizable pop culture icon strongly attached to the personal but also deeply embedded in a collective experience as both a commodity and as a signifier of hegemonic national values. Unlike most superheroes, Batman has no special powers, marking him as a more accessible representation of American values. Implicitly he has earned his status as a superhero. In their study of the ways in which original juvenile viewers of the series recalled it as adults, Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins observe that their subjects variously used their memories to sustain progressive and conservative interpretations of their experiences with the series. Importantly, these recollections were all highly personal and articulated according to a relationship of adult authority to the child viewer. In remembering, the boundary between adulthood and childhood is simultaneously confirmed and crossed. This process is the springboard for engaging within the public sphere, for, according to Spigel and Jenkins, memories are one of the rare common grounds upon which people think about the present-day world.⁶ As they argue, this practice was principally sanctioned by the show’s deployment of a Pop art deconstruction of critical hierarchies linked to a camp sensibility. In a 1966 collection of essays, Susan Sontag famously defined camp as a new, highly reflexive mode of production and consumption in the postwar era: Camp sees everything in quotation marks. . . . To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.⁷ This present monograph critically examines the significant ways in which the show skillfully exploited this notion of Being-as-Playing-a-Role in its reflexive take on citizenship within its diegesis and, by extension, shifting notions of American identity tied to postwar consumerism amidst the radically polarized political landscape of the mid to late 1960s. By appealing to juvenile viewers’ desire to participate in the adult sphere of citizenship and to adult viewers’ nostalgia for their own childhoods, Batman conflates a public history (both cultural and political) with individual histories. As Sontag notes, camp uses the old-fashioned objects because we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.⁸

Camp counselor: William Dozier (center) confers with Adam West (left) and Burt Ward (right). (Courtesy of John Stacks)

In this light, it is worth noting the tremendous popularity of comic books in America, particularly during World War II, when the superhero genre dominated the medium. By the close of the war, 70 million Americans (half the population of the country) read comic books.⁹ In this period the superhero, a utopian figure of great value at a time of national crisis, was strongly linked to American ideals of individualism in defense of the status quo. Bradford W. Wright has characterized the earliest generation of superheroes, of which Batman is a member, as super-New Dealers who, during World War II, championed a loosely defined Americanism synonymous with lofty ideals like democracy, liberty, and freedom from oppression.¹⁰ Yet there is also a strangely appropriate duality to the superhero as a national symbol. As cartoonist and author Jules Feiffer contends, "The advent of the super-hero was a bizarre comeuppance for