Word: batmanic
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...BATMAN (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* By day he is Foppish Playboy Bruce Wayne, but at night he dons his puce long johns and his black bat hat and makes war on the diabolical denizens of the dark underworld. Adam West plays Bruce/Batman, and Burt Ward is Dick Grayson (alias Robin the Boy Wonder) in this revival of the 1940s comic strip. Premi...
...cared for Yvonne deCarlo. Speaking of television, we think of escape, and our first thoughts must turn to Bogart. Everyone knows how and where Bogey was revived, but last year, we witnessed the resurrection of another escape. Literally dusting off an old can of film, the Brattle lifted "The Batman" out of a celluloid cemetery. Shortly thereafter, someone in film-land (who undoubtedly had read the Time article about camp) spliced this 1943 serial into a four-hour-and-eight-minute feature. Needless to say, the show was a smash in a number of midwestern college towns. Hence...
Neanderthal Roars. Some oldsters come because "I saw one episode when I was eleven and wanted to know how it came out"; the majority are meeting the movie Batman for the first time. In either case, the reaction varies in pitch from light snickers to Neanderthal roars. Audiences giggle at Veteran Overactor J. Carroll Naish's portrait of Dr. Daka, boo the opening episode's racist slurs: "A wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs." But by the time Batman lies trapped in a pit with knife blades converging on him, the audience stops laughing, starts chanting...
Richest sources of comedy are the stars, Batman (Lewis Wilson) and Robin (Douglas Croft). As Socialite Bruce Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson, the two actors draw sneers every time they appear in their '40s street clothes (huge, wide-brimmed fedoras, oversized suits with cantilevered shoulders); when they change to their fighting costumes (masks, jersey pajamas, capes, Jockey shorts and boots), Wilson and Croft prompt more laughter than any other pair since Laurel and Hardy...
Their puffy, unathletic leaps are a satire of comic-book prowess, and the plots are at the same level. Why should Batman's badly produced, amateurishly acted one-reelers do so well 22 years after they were released? Offered one Columbia executive: "Comic-book heroes are the only heroes we have nowadays." Said one Batfan: "It's pop art." Says another: "Where else can you get entertained for four hours for a buck and a quarter...