Holy Batshit, Batman!

There's very little to say about William Dozier's mid-Sixties Batman series that hasn't been already said. A pop-cultural tour de force that managed to ape its source material, while somehow remaining truer to the spirit of it than anything that has come after. In the interest of full disclosure, Adam West's Batman has been my favorite television program, and "thing", period, since I was old enough to be cognizant of it. I don't know when I first saw it; I know I was very young, and would watch it from the kitchen table of our tiny house on West 7th Street, in Winona, Minnesota, on the even tinier television perched atop the (presumably standard size) refrigerator. The very idea that Batman was a thing outside of an illustration on a pair of pajamas (I surely wasn't old enough to have or know what comic books were at that point) exploded my brain like six packets of Pop Rocks® and a jigger of Coke® taken all at the same time! 

To make a long story short, it's something that I've carried with me into my forties, and, in a sense, it has carried me as well. And as we age, if we're not strictly seeing things through the distorting lenses of nostalgia, we find new facets to the things that we've kept with us since childhood, or pick up on certain themes or nuances that were maybe aimed at a more adult portion of the audience, that we couldn't process at the time.

Of course Batman was nuts. There's all kinds of insanity going on, all of the time. Folks will often site the Season 3 episode "Surf's Up!", in which The Joker, played by Cesar Romero, challenges Batman to a surfing competition. The hope is by besting Batman in a surf competition, he will become surf master of Gotham City, which, in turn, will win him the allegiance of all hip Gothamites, and then, of course the world. Nuts. It makes no sense, whatsoever, but the way it's executed is fun as hell. There's the statue of Khnum that King Tut puts in Gotham Central Park, in the episode "The Curse Of Tut", which Batman describes as "An exact replica of the sphinx at Giza," which it isn't, obviously. Nobody points out what most grade school children know to be wrong, to the greatest detective in the world? And then, of course, there's the sexual tension between Batman and Catwoman, which comes to a (figuratively speaking) head in the two-parter "Catwoman Goes To College" and "Batman Displays His Knowledge." When Batman confronts Julie Newmar's Catwoman in the second episode of the adventure, she propositions him with the line: 

"Batman, let's throw caution to the wind. I mean after all we are two adult human beings and we're both interested in the same thing. Happiness. I can give you more happiness than anyone in the world."

It's not just the line that pauses the Biff! Pow! comic book shenanigans, but the delivery. There's a significant pause between "thing" and "happiness". It has less subtlety than a Desiree Cousteau performance, and may be the single horniest thing I've ever seen put to film. 

Still, all of the wackiness of the most discussed bits of the series, all of the grease paint-coated mustaches, sexagenarian thugs in sweater vests and Bat Anti-Penguin Gas Pills aside, may be trumped by a two-parter from Season 2, featuring a seemingly disposable, and largely forgotten villain called Shame. The episodes are titled "Come Back Shame" and "It's How You Play The Game," and aired on Novermber 30th, 1966 and December 1st, 1966 respectively. Shame is an ornery hombre deftly played by Cliff Robertson, and his game, so to speak, is rustlin' up some specialized engine parts from various vehicles around Gotham City to build a super fast engine for his truck. Why? Well, he plans to steal some prized cattle, and wants to be able to outrace the Batmobile when the Dynamic Duo inevitably give chase. But that's merely a formality before which all kinds of insanity plays out.

First of all, Robin gets shot. Not by colored gas, not with a tranquilizer dart, not with a confetti bomb or freeze gun; he gets genuinely plugged with a slug from a revolver. Granted it's off camera and in the heel of a foot, but for a show that generally reduces the real world threat and seriousness of violence to being trapped in a giant clam, or potentially hacked apart by a massive Calder-esque pop art mobile, the Boy Wonder out-and-out getting a bullet in him seems so out of the rhythm of the show that it genuinely gave me pause on rewatch. Double that with the fact that Batman then puts a piece of metal between Robin's teeth so he won't bite his tongue off when he extracts the bullet with his Bat Pocketknife. Yes, the extraction is done just below frame, yes Robin is rushed back to the Batcave, where he's given Batcillin, which has him hopping on his feet pain-free in one jump cut, and yes, it's obviously an homage to the western films that the writers are playing with the tropes of for the episodes, but, wowza! Not something I necessarily processed when I was watching as a five year old.

Cliff Robertson as Shame.

Secondly, the guest stars. Our main villain, Shame, is played with cowboy cliché camp by Cliff Robertson, who would win an Academy Award just two years later for his performance in Charly, the 1968 film adaptation of the Daniel Keyes story "Flowers For Algernon". His gal pal in crime, Okie Annie, played by Miss November 1958, Joan Staley, is also the female lead in my favorite movie of all time; the Don Knotts vehicle The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, which came out the same year as these episodes. While they do a great job, there are some other folks who pop up which provide a much more perplexing insanity to the show. 

From Joan Staley's 1958 Playboy pictorial. 

Staley with Don Knotts in The Ghost And Mr. Chicken. Staley
famously had to wear a brown wig for the role because her 
naturally blond hair made her "too sexual."

First of all, the infamous window cameo–in which a celebrity pops out of a window to have a back and forth with the Dynamic Duo, as they scale the side of some building–is Werner Klemperer, in character as Colonel Klink from the television series Hogan's Heroes. One might think ABC, the network behind Batman, was trying to cross promote television programs, since Hogan's Heroes was on the air at that time, but oddly enough, Hogan's Heroes was on CBS, a rival network. Even more head-shaking, is the fact that Klemperer doesn't appear as himself, undoubtedly a household face, if not name, at the time, or as some other random business man or Gothamite, but as the Nazi Colonel who oversees a Prisoner Of War camp! Batman pauses to caution Klink/Klemperer to be careful not to get caught by Chief O'Hara, and "sends his regards to Colonel Hogan", which is its own mindfuck, because Batman is definitely rooted in "present-day" 1960s, and Hogan's Heroes is inarguably set in 1940s wartime Germany. Wouldn't Batman aid in the capture of a Nazi colonel? Even an escaped one? The allusion that the second World War was still going on, or at the very least that the Nazis were still in power and operating P.O.W. camps in 1966, in nuttier than a goddam squirrel turd! And the fact that Batman acknowledges he's aware of both Colonel Hogan and his status as a prisoner in Klink's camp, is equally bananas! He traveled to Londinium in Season 3, is Batman above traveling to Germany to liberate American soldiers? The whole thing is asking for a suspension of disbelief light years beyond a man escaping a shark attack with handy can of Bat Shark Repellent. 

Minner (center) with Jan & Dean.

In addition to Klemperer, we have actress Kathryn Minner, aka The Little Old Lady From Pasadena, herself. That's right, the white haired granny that had a minor period of fame as the face of a Dodge commercial campaign from 1964 to 1969, and appeared on the cover of the 1964 Jan & Dean album "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", which featured the hit single of the same name. In the second part of the two-parter, "It's How You Play The Game", we see Minner hagling with Laughing Larry, a used car dealer who happens to be in cahoots with Shame. And yes, she gets to mention "I had to come all the way from Pasadena!" before speeding off the lot. It's true that surf and hot-rod culture were still percolating in the pop consciousness in 1966, but twangy surf guitar and songs about carburetors were more or less giving way to fuzzy frat rock and stream of conscious psychedelia at this point. I don't know if Dodge was a sponsor of Batman at the time, but it seems like such an odd inclusion to shoe horn into an episode, especially since the Jan & Dean tune was considered something of an oldie at that point.

Minner buying a new hot rod from Laughing Larry.

Perhaps the oddest, or at least most annoying inclusion into the mix, is a little boy named Andy Stevens, who wanders in and out of the affair, begging Shame to come back (hence the title of the first part). The tiresome tyke is played by a child actor named Eric Shea, who did a fair amount of work afterwards in television shows and Disney pictures through the early Seventies. His wandering in and out of the thick of the two episodes, shouting out his lines as a sort of comic relief character that, I guess, adds a soft touch to Shame, showing he's not just a cold-blooded cowpoke, makes relatively little sense. And, believe it or not, Andy's transistor radio is a major/minor plot point. All in all, these two episodes aren't just a Mad magazine parody, they are the parody plus the Sergio Aragones margin doodles all crammed into two 22 minute television show episodes. 

Andy decides he doesn't want to be a cowboy any longer,
he now wants to be an upstanding citizen, instead.

Add to all of that the fact that the final showdown at the Gotham Corral finds Robin riding one of Shame's henchman like a bucking bronco, shouting "Giddyup!" makes for a truly surreal viewing experience. No to mention Bruce and Dick lingerie shopping for Aunt Harriet!

Looking at the credits for the episodes, it's hard to suss out exactly why this two-parter seems so much more intensely nuts than others. They were directed by veteran series director Oscar Rudolph, who directed 36 episodes of the show, and the scripts were written by series regular Stanley Ralph Ross. Weird choices were made, to be sure, but I stand by my claim that whatever shenanigans The Joker, The Riddler or Catwoman may have gotten our Caped Crusaders up against, it ain't a ping in the spitoon compared to Shame.

* On an unrelated note, the magic of home video technology has finally allowed me to answer one of the lingering questions about the Batman series that I've had since day one: What the heck are we seeing when they do the spinning scene transitions? The red and black one appears to be the ignition button for the Batmobile, and the multi-colored one appears to be an image of Batman and Robin looking down at something. Now if I can find out why the hell there are always clouds of smoke wafting into view from the left-hand side of the screen every time the Batmobile pulls up in front of City Hall, I can die unburdened.