"Some Days You Just Can't Get Rid of a Bomb!"
Updated: 13 hours ago
Originally published in Gotham City 14 Miles: 14 Essays on Why the 1960s Batman TV Series Matters (Sequart Research & Literacy Organization, 2010), edited by Jim beard. Keep in mind that Hollywood's attitudes about comic books ha changed significantly since I wrote this essay in 2009, two years before Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) hit the theaters and kicked the the Marvel Cinematic Universe into high gear.
“Oh, my.”
--Leonard Goldenson, ABC Television President, in response to the pitch for the Batman television show
When that first episode of Batman aired on January 12, 1966, I was ten and one-half years old. I was already a hardcore comic book reader and something of an accumulator, if not quite yet a collector, of as many comics as I could lay my hands on.
I was the audience for that show, eager, no dying to see another of my four-color heroes come to life on the TV screen, like The Adventures of Superman, the 104-episodes of which originally aired between 1952 and 1958 and continued on and on in daytime syndication during my childhood on New York’s WPIX-TV, Channel 11.
Pow! Zap! Bam!
Yes, I recognized they were making fun of Batman, but so what? Grown-ups always made fun of comic books. My father, himself a reader of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Conan, and G-8 and His Battle Aces in the pages of the ten-cent pulp magazines of the 1930s, who brought home the 1960s Ace Books editions of the Tarzan novels with the gorgeous Frank Frazetta covers for his sons to read, who nurtured the creative instinct in the three of us, all of whom went into some sort of creative field, my father, who must have understood the appeal and certainly never discouraged our interest in comic books, nonetheless called the four-color pamphlets my older brother and I separately hoarded by the hundreds “Popeyes,” as in Popeye the Sailor Man, whose name became the noun for all comic books. “You left a pile of your Popeyes in the car,” he would say. “When you’re finished reading your Popeyes, would you take out the garbage?” Most adults just called them “funny books.”
And even in the ghetto of Pop Culture, comic books were the lowest of the kid stuff. Dangerous, even, if the doomsayers of the 1950s witch-hunts against the evils of comic books and their damaging effect on young minds were to be believed. And even if not dangerous, certainly disposable. To modern collectors in their Mylar bags sealed between slabs of plastic, the notion that a comic book was rolled up and stuck in the back pocket of an eleven year-olds jeans before and after being read (repeatedly, and by many kids) is sacrilegious, but that was exactly what we did. That issue of The Amazing Spider-Man I romped around with in my back pocket in 1964 is worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars today, but back then, it was the center of my universe and, until I learned better a couple of years later, I ran around with it, or another one like it, rolled up in my pocket, where I could bring it out any time to read again. A copy of The Flash Annual from around the same period will forever carry the grit of New York’s Reis Park beach sand ground into its square-bound spine from that summer when it was the comic book I could not go anywhere without.
Pow! Zap! Bam!
Comics did not get respect before Batman and, aside from the recognition of comics during the run of the show, was no better off after than before. Respect was too much to ask of a funny book. The comics had been effectively neutered by the 1950s and were unlikely to feature anything capable of offending anybody (although there’s always someone ready to be offended by anything), but Senator Kefauver’s Congressional hearings into the link between comics, juvenile delinquency, and childhood emotional problems were only a decade in the past. These hearings were inconclusive and came up with no result other than the creation of the industry’s self-policing agency, the Comics Code Authority of America. The bad taste had nonetheless been left behind in everybody’s mouth and, in their memory of the hearings, comics had been officially stamped “garbage” by the U.S. government. What other proof did they need?
When it came to picking from this heap, Hollywood had not always approached it with such trepidation. In the 1940s, superheroes were successful on the radio (The Adventures of Superman on a three-times a week program on the Mutual Network) as well as on the big screen as serialized adventures, ten or twelve fifteen-minute weekly shorts, each with a cliffhanger ending to draw the kids back to the theater to see how the hero gets out of this one! Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Blackhawk, and others from the comics were made into serials, while a series of Superman cartoon shorts produced by the Fleischer Studios (creators of Popeye and Betty Boop before the Man of Steel) for Paramount are still considered classics of animation. The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves was, despite, the nostalgic chuckles it elicits today, a very faithful and, for the most part, straight adaptation of the Superman then in the comic books, scaled down from his skyscraper-lifting level of four-color power to a syndicated TV program’s budget. But, of course, the program was produced by DC Comics, its stories overseen by comic book editors-turned-producers Whitney Ellsworth and story editor Mort Weisinger. They were company men playing with company toys and they were very careful not to break anything.
The one thing all of the above have in common is that they were created as and always intended to be for kids. Serials were shown on Saturday mornings, along with cartoons and other kid stuff. The Adventures of Superman radio program ran for eleven years in a late afternoon timeslot. The Adventures of Superman TV show, though its first two seasons, in black and white, are darker and more serious than the later color seasons, was always a kids show, right down to its sponsorship by Kellogg’s cereals.
Comics only started getting into on-screen trouble when someone decided to do a TV show for grown-ups without first getting over their embarrassment of the genre.
One always has to start from the premise that the people adapting comics to the screen, big or little, do not have any respect for the material, certainly not then and, comics overall public relations progress to the contrary, not still. (Note from 2025: I believe attitudes have, for the most part, changed, and those producing superheroes today do so with, again for the most part, some respect for and better understanding of the source material.)
The people who make movies and television shows, who stage Broadway shows and publish literature are embarrassed by the source material, whether they will admit to it or not. They voice a love and admiration for this true American art form, but if what has hit the movie and television screens is the result of love, hate me, please. Even the best of them can’t help metaphorically winking in uncomfortable acknowledgment of the source. The subtext may be Shakespearean in scope, but the brilliance is clad in primary colored spandex that overwhelms even the strongest message. (These same dramatists forgetting that Shakespeare was the equivalent of a TV writer of his time, the legends and tales of the era serving as the source material for his plays, written for the enjoyment of the patrons in the cheap seats.)
But no message, as it turned out, would ever be stronger than this:
Pow! Zap! Bam!
It made the Batman. It was, the first time it hit the screen that January night in 1966, a self-announcing visual punch in the nose. It made mom and dad laugh. It was kitschy, campy, and in tune with the “pop art” movement popularized by commercial artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, both influenced by comic art, Lichtenstein, indeed, lifting, without credit or remuneration, entire panels from romance and war comics to recreate as such paintings as “Drowning Girl” and, more to the point of Pow! Zap! Bam! Whaam! Marvel Comics, which, under the creative direction of Stan Lee and his co-writing artist cohorts Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and others, had bumped up the level of comic book sophistication with continuing stories and heavy doses of soap opera elements inflicted on superheroes whose secret identities lead less-than-perfect lives, even went so far as to change its corner symbol identifying their titles as “Marvel Pop Art Productions” for four or five months during 1965, riding the wave of a trend their existence helped to set rolling.
“Pow! Zap! Bam!” was brilliant, an inclusive nod to the source material. Sound effects have long been a vital part of the vocabulary of comics. A picture of a fist in the vicinity of a chin is only half the story. The “WHAM!” of the knock-out punch or the “whoosh!” of the fist sailing past its target tells the rest. Hand-lettered onomatopoeia was straight out of the newspaper comic strips and comic books the chuckling adults had read as children. It was self-referential and precious, and it was exactly the right touch of gentle mockery to catapult Batman into a full-blown, two-year long bona fide fad.
The only problem was, even after Batman was gone from the airwaves, it left “Pow! Zap! Bam!” behind.
“Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore”
--1980s Comic Book Industry Advertising Slogan
I wasn’t analyzing the pop culture iconography that permeated Batman. My ten-year old ears heard the dry delivery of Adam West and the over-the-top cartoon dialogue that razzed the conventions from which it sprang, but beggars can’t be choosers and, when it came to live action superheroes, Batman was hands down better than nothing. I saw Batman, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, the Riddler and the rest of the comic book characters looking as they were supposed to look, acting more or less as they were supposed to act, and it was enough to satisfy my pre-adolescent sensibilities. I would have liked a little respect, sure, but it is likely a Batman that took itself seriously would not have lasted, much less caught on and become, for much of its two and one-half seasons, a cultural phenomenon embraced by tens of millions of viewers. Viewers who wouldn’t have dreamed of picking up an issue of the Batman or Detective comic books no matter how much they loved the TV program. Comic book heroes were fine for television, but the general public wanted no part of them in their natural habitat.
That’s how I knew that the Caped Crusader and his Rogues Gallery did not really belong to them, the civilians who watched TV. Comic books had always been a niche market; the size of the niche has been shrinking steadily since its peak during World War II, when titles such as Superman and Captain Marvel sold a million-plus copies an issue, and every kid, it seemed, read comics. While television undeniably took a chunk out of the comics reading population, those numbers were in decline long before TVs were in enough homes to make a difference. Were post-war children growing too sophisticated for comics, or had they just been a fad that had begun to lose steam? If the latter, the slide in circulation still grinds slowly towards ever diminishing returns, with publishers seeing sales of 10-15,000 copies of individual titles as sustainable and anything breeching the one hundred thousand mark as a runaway success.
Around 1964, with sales hovering around the low side of half a million copies an issue, Detective Comics was in danger of being cancelled. One of the flagship characters of DC Comics (then known as National Periodical Publications or NPP) who, along with Superman and Wonder Woman alone among the countless superhero titles available during the war, had managed to stay alive while all around them the rest of the heroes gave way to romance, funny animal, crime, western, teen humor, and horror titles.
Comic books have been a constant in my life for as long as I can recall. Issues of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, a Christmas annual by the incomparable Sheldon Meyer published by National and wholesome comics from Dell starring the Disney menagerie always seemed to be around, due in part to a brother two years older and an uncle living in the next apartment building who was ten when I was born. Coverless copies of Wonder Woman, also a National publication, were another early favorite. At the time, under the editorship and writing of Robert Kanigher and the art of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, her adventures had taken on a fairy tale quality, introducing younger versions of herself (Wonder Tot and Wonder Girl) who interacted with a variety of Mer-Boys, Bird-Boys, Genies, and dinosaurs on the mythical Paradise Island, home of the Amazon women. I was five, maybe six at the time. What was there not to love?
I discovered Batman a little later, in the waning days of the editorial reign of Jack Schiff. Under his stewardship, Batman and Robin was pitted against aliens and monsters and weird manifestations of science gone wrong. They were surrounded by Batwoman and Batgirl, owned Ace the masked Bat-Hound, and were constantly bedeviled by Bat-Mite, an other-dimensional imp with magical powers whose attempts to help the Dynamic Duo usually caused near disastrous results which taught the imp a valuable lesson...until next time.
Covers were fantastical displays pitting Batman and/or Robin against scaly aliens, strange creatures, or unexplainable manifestations of themselves or their friends. A particular favorite was Detective Comics #324 (February 1964), depicting Batman and Robin trapped inside a giant robot head, visible through its giant eyes as the head fills with deadly gas. “The Menace of the Robot Brain” indeed! I snatched that issue off the Brooklyn candy store magazine stand and dropped my 12¢ on the counter faster than you could say “is this the end of Batman?” and dove into that story without really knowing whether or not the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder could find a way out of this trap. I was eight years old, and I loved those issues of Batman and Detective Comics (which featured the green-skinned sleuthing Martian Manhunter in a regular back-up feature) above any others at the time
What I didn’t know was that those stories were completely absurd. Not in the good “absurdly fun” way but, in context of the character of Batman itself, just as far off the creative mark as could be. They were to the core concept of Batman what a box of Captain Crunch is to nutrition.
I had no way of knowing at the time that this wasn’t really Batman. This Batman who could be hit by a ray that gave him a giant head or who traveled through time to meet cavemen and Arthurian knights was some bizarre twist on the original conceit, but it was my only exposure to the character.
The real deal was created by Bob Kane (with heaping helpings of creative input by writer Bill Finger and writer/artist Jerry Robinson) as a shadowy, avenging creature of the night. Having witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his parents as a child, he vowed, according to the first telling of his origin in Batman #1 (Spring 1940) “by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.” He gave up any semblance of a normal life in the pursuit of this goal, mastering the sciences, “training his body to physical perfection until he is able to perform amazing athletic feats.” His earliest adventures were dark and atmospheric, inspired by the pulp magazines and the black and white horror and suspense films of the 1930s.
Only later was a conscious effort made to soften the character, beginning with the introduction of Robin the Boy Wonder and a gradual turn towards a Batman who not only appeared routinely in broad daylight, but who held press conferences and seemed to be grand marshal for every parade held in Gotham City. How he turned from even that, a sunny, smiling Captain Marvel with a kid sidekick and no residual trauma from the murder of his parents (except when called for in the rare story probing his history) to a science fiction character could probably be explained by the popularity of the genre in the mid- to late-1950s. Sci-fi movies were the rage and, though performed on shoestring budgets, also popular on television, from the aforementioned Superman to Captain Video for kids to Outer Limits and Twilight Zone for their parents.
Conversely, the otherwise science fiction-based Superman comic book franchise under editor Mort Weisinger surged through the same era with stories wherein the god-like Superman mostly confronted gangsters in suits—much like the situations on the TV show; not a shock as comics editor Weisinger was also the story editor of the program—mindless monsters, mythological strongmen, magical threats, and elaborate schemes in which Lois Lane tried to prove Clark Kent was Superman or Superman pulled some stunt to convince Lois he wasn’t Clark Kent; it was, shrewdly, the ten-year olds idealization of what kids themselves would do with such magnificent powers: Fight the bad guys and the monsters and play tricks on their big sisters and moms).
By 1964, Batman was a Dark Knight out of his noir.
His editors had done what the Joker and Catwoman had failed to do: “They were planning,” according to Bob Kane, as quoted in Les Daniels’ Batman: The Complete History (Chronicle Books, 1999), “to kill Batman off altogether.”
Daniels writes: “Today’s fans often look back with affection at the sheer zaniness of the stories from the late 1950s and early 1960s, but the seemingly endless array of stunts designed to prop up the hero had nearly done him in. There was no core character left, just a hollow man being battered from place to place by whatever gimmick could be concocted, and sales were dropping drastically. Things looked bad.”
Jack Schiff’s successor, Julius Schwartz was sent in to patch up the Caped Crusader and get him back on track. Schwartz, who began his career in the 1930s as a science fiction literary agent to such names as Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, and Robert Bloch, whose original working knowledge of comic books came from the three he read on the subway ride to his job interview at All American Comics (a predecessor company of what was to become NPP) in 1944, was by then one of the leading editors in the field. His had been the editorial hand behind the revival of superhero comics beginning with the 1955 Silver Age revamp of the Flash, followed by Green Lantern, the Atom, the Justice League of America, and many others. While admitting to having no knowledge of Batman or feel for the character (his interest lay with the science fiction titles he edited), he did, according to his 2000 memoir, Man of Two Worlds: My Life in Science Fiction and Comics (Harper Collins, 2000), recognize that “Batman in the years prior to my tenure had strayed away from the original roots of the character.”
Schwartz discarded the giant-headed aliens and the rest of the science fiction trappings and made a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn taking the character back to his “dark-mystery roots” and reviving the death-traps that writer Bill Finger had used so successfully in the Dark Knight’s earlier, grittier days. He brought in his top writers, John Broome and Gardner Fox, and his most cutting edge penciller, Carmine Infantino, and put them to work redefining the creaky old bat. The result was the “New Look Batman,” and “to set off for history the start of my term as editor on the title, I had them incorporate an oval around the bat emblem on Batman’s chest, so there would never be any question as to when the Julie Schwartz Batman came into being."
Schwartz can be forgiven his ego because he came through. His Batman was the real deal. And readers noticed. This was a much better comic book, far more in line with the times and exploring, ever so cautiously, the fringes of the more “mature” (i.e. aimed at college students instead of sixth graders) storytelling developing under Stan Lee and company at Marvel. Story lines continued across several issues, long-range plots were allowed to develop over time, and characters tried, at least, to relate to one another as human beings and not just as springboards to explain or further the plot. Had something resembling those stories been translated to television, it would have come closer to Christopher Nolan’s later Dark Knight rather than the Saturday morning cartoons with which it self-consciously shied away from identifying.
William Dozier, however, was reading the older, goofy Batman edited by Jack Schiff’s. It’s likely he would have been predisposed to taking the tongue-in-cheek road regardless of what version of Batman he first saw. The subject was comic books and comic books, after all, were not to be taken seriously.
“When I was growing up, I read David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and the things you are supposed to read.”
--William Dozier, quoted in 1986’s, The Official Batman Batbook by Joel Eisner
In 1964, Batman was on the skids and even a dramatic change in the creative direction was no guarantee that the franchise could be saved.
William Dozier was a Hollywood veteran with Paramount and RKO before his move to TV as CBS’s executive producer of dramatic programming in 1951. In 1959, he became vice president in charge of Columbia Picture’s TV division, Screen Gems and, in 1964, left that position to form Greenway Productions, his own production company. ABC had acquired the rights to Batman from DC Comics and offered it to Dozier to develop.
Dozier and the smash hit he created from that offer were the subjects of a 1966 episode of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s news and interview program, Telescope With Fletcher Merkle. On it, the executive producer of Batman discussed the genesis of the program, but before he could have his say, host Fletcher Merkle introduced the piece by observing, “Suddenly a few years ago, pop went the easel of many a North American painter. Then, snapping at the heels of pop art and crackling with novelty, pop went mass culture all over the continent and beyond the seas. Batman is part of pop, though neither art nor culture. If it’s the worse program on the air these days, and some say it is, at least it is bad on purpose.”
Merkle went on to point out that the associated “Bat-merchandise” was worth “a gross in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions,” and, without any further ado, “Zap! Pow! Blam!…” he introduced the self-proclaimed “super Bat-chief” of this phenomenon.
The report is far gentler than one would expect from so obviously a biased reporter, but Merkle was not the only voice expressing, if not contempt, than at least distaste for the source material.
“I had never had a Batman comic book in my hands,” Dozier told Merkle. “I of course was aware there was such a thing, but I had never read one. When they first came out in 1938, ’39 I had an eight, nine year old son and I was busy making a living for him and his mother and myself.”
After meeting with ABC executives, Dozier hunted up some back issues (“it took quite a bit of doing to get some of the older ones, they cost three, four dollars apiece”) and proceeded to do his research: “I took them on the plane with me and flew back to Hollywood. I was sitting in an aisle seat doing my homework, with five or six copies in my lap and reading one, not thinking how this would look to somebody and, sure enough, a friend of mine in the ad agency business in New York was on the same flight. He tapped me on the shoulder, and he said, ‘Well, I guess those scripts do get dull after a while.’ I couldn’t tell him why I had a lap full of comic books because it was a big secret.” In another telling of the same story, as related in Joel Eisner’s The Official Batman Batbook (Contemporary Books, 1986), Dozier added, “I felt a little bit like an idiot.”
Embarrassed even to be seen in the company of comic books, Dozier took the bold step of embracing everything he thought a comic book was and laid that down as his foundation: “The fairly obvious idea, it seems obvious now, at least,” Dozier told the Telescope audience, “to make it so square and so serious and so cliché-ridden and so overdone and yet do it with a certain elegance and style that it would be funny. That it would be so corny and so bad that it would be funny. That appealed to me, and I began to enjoy it.”
What better way to get around the perception of the material than to make the perception into the joke and laugh at it before the audience has a chance to laugh at you.
“I knew kids would go for the derring-do, the adventure, but the trick would be to find adults who would either watch it with their kids or, to hell with the kids, and watch it anyway,” Dozier said in The Official Batman Batbook. And the biggest wink and nod to the grown-up viewers who were, after all, the ones with the money to spend on the products to be advertised on Batman, was “zap and pow.”
Dozier recalled pitching his concept of Batman to the ABC executives, explaining how young Bruce Wayne had been orphaned and taken an oath to avenge their deaths. “They looked at me and they thought I was a little crazy. I said, ‘That gentleman, is his motivation, and he dedicated his life to fighting crime.’ Then I explained how we were going to do it—that we were going to have ‘zap and ‘pow.’ And I remember Leonard Goldenson (president of ABC) said, ‘We are going to have, right on the screen, “zap” and “pow”?’ I said, ‘Yeah, and a lot more, Leonard.’ ‘Oh, my,’ he said.”
Oh, my, indeed.
In Batman: The Complete History, Les Daniels said, “the idea that something could be amusing because it was corny or ridiculous was essential to Pop and its allied aesthetic, camp.”
Batman was corny.
Batman was ridiculous and, Fletcher Merkle aside, was not only Pop Art, it was high art that evolved into the poster child for the Camp movement. Suddenly, everything was Camp...even staid Archie Comics sold poorly done re-launches of their stable of 1940s superheroes as “High Camp Superheroes,” an unfortunately too apt description of well-intended but poorly executed material. Camp was appealing or collectible for its bad taste and ironic value, a reverse snobbery appeal deliberately pretentious and artfully naïve, like pink plastic lawn flamingoes. Camp as an aesthetic value originated in the early 20th century as a term for exaggerated and affected gay behavior, bad boys in ostentatious drag that informed everything from Liberace to John Waters’ Hairspray. The exaggeration and ostentation lived on in Batman, which flaunted its lowbrow origins by openly wearing them while sashaying down Main Street at the head of the parade.
Laughing with it or laughing at it, everybody was watching; an estimated thirty million viewers a week. In an unprecedented arrangement, Batman aired twice a week, one-half hour each on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, with a 1940s movie serial-style cliffhanger ending between them to draw you back for the second part. Viewers responded. So did Hollywood. It became a symbol of an actors hip or coolness factor to appear on Batman, either as a guest villain alongside such luminaries as Burgess Meredith, George Sanders, Tallulah Bankhead and Otto Preminger (“Even Eli Wallach phoned me up,” recalled Dozier in a 1968 interview with the Toronto Telegram, “he said he was a flop with his grandchildren because he'd never been on Batman”), or in a cameo, sticking their head out a window and making a quip as Batman and Robin climb by on their Bat-rope. The latter attracted the likes of Edward G. Robinson and Howard Duff to Jerry Lewis and Don Ho. It was a free-for-all, a campy romp that knew no boundaries and made everything into a “Bat-something,” with only the Beatles, James Bond, and, maybe, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in competition for most overexposed craze of the 1960s.
And the biggest joke, of course, was that this total disrespecting of the core of Batman, produced by a man who “felt a little bit like an idiot” when caught reading comic books by another adult, well, this is precisely what saved Batman from possible extinction via cancellation even as it provided comic books with a handy-dandy short-hand label that says, “no matter what we say, this is kid stuff that you don’t have to take seriously.”
“Pow! Zap! Bam!”
--Batman TV show, 1966-1968
The reaction was immediate and, in retrospect, predictable.
The media loves a label that conveys not only a name or brand but a value judgment as well. The campy, childish splash of colorful words across the television every time a punch was thrown summed it all up and was, on top of everything else, too clever for its own good.
And it worked!
Pow! Zap! Bam! and its sidekick, Robin’s breathless exclamation of “Holy (fill in the blank)” were shorthand for comics and comics were, as we all knew, the province of morons. In Artists And Models (1955), a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy set in the world of comic books (and using the theme that the comics were a corrupting influence on impressionable children), simple-minded, Jerry’s simpleton, nine-year-old character is addicted to the four color drug which causes him to have nightmares, the outlandish stories of which his partner sells to a comic book publisher.
Watch any episode of the 1960s bucolicomedy, The Andy Griffith Show; good ol’ boys Goober and Gomer could often be seen reading comic books while sitting around between customers at the filling station.
The Lawnmower Man (1992), marginally based on a short story by Stephen King, features a mentally challenged man who is made smarter through a series of virtual reality experiments. To symbolize his growing intelligence, he is shown giving away his comic books.
In A Few Good Men (1992), Aaron Sorkin’s military courtroom drama, one of the Marines on trial for a death during a hazing his lawyer knows was ordered by the base commander, is revealed to be simple-minded. One of the visual clues to his low intelligence is that he is reads comics.
To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield, “comics don’t get no respect,” especially in Hollywood. The embarrassment at being affiliated with such lowbrow material is certainly a factor; the temptation to “fix” the sillier conventions of comic book storytelling is always there for these moviemakers, both to elevate it to loftier levels and, because they always have to show the creators of the comics how to do it right. Sure, it’s arrogant, but Hollywood holds the card that trumps both common and creative sense: Money. A comic book costs a few tens of thousands of dollars to produce. Even a low budget syndicated television show is going to cost millions and forget about the upwards of a quarter of a billion dollars it can now sometimes cost to produce an epic superhero special effects flick. The only true value of a thing in Hollywood is its monetary value, ergo cheaply produced comics lose to even direct-to-video trash.
The list of movies and television programs based on comic books done correctly is minuscule (and, I will add, entirely subjective). A movie like Iron Man (2008), which treats the source material as an intelligent jumping off point, finds that it doesn’t need to jump far at all from the comic book character on which it is based. The filmmakers recognized that all the elements for a successful story were in the comics, and they merely needed to tweak things here and there in order to adjust for the difference in the media. The result was a rare case of a comic book movie that appealed to a mass audience, its highest priority, yet satisfied comic book fans by remaining faithful and respectful to the source, its lowest.
Batman gave the mass media the slug line it needed. From then on, it was a sure bet that any time a newspaper or magazine story appeared, or some unctuous local TV news anchor did the lead-in to a story that had anything at all to do with comic books or the people who created or read them, we would be treated to a “Holy this!” or a “Pow! Zap! Bam!” in one form or another.
Batman had not even made it onto the air yet on January 12, 1966 when the New York Times ran an article about the William Dozier, or the “Caped Crusader of Camp” as he is called (“I hate the word camp,” Dozier says in the piece, “it sounds so faggy and funsies”), that explained, “It is not for nothing that the Caped Crusader is called upon time and again by Police Commissioner Gordon, powerful antagonist of jaywalkers and litterbugs when evil is a-foot in Gotham City. WHAM! WOW! ZUP! BAM!” All it took was a single screening of the premiere episode for the critic to latch onto it, but being the first, he can at least be given points for originality. By the way, homophobia seems to abound for some reason in this piece; on top of Dozier’s remark, several paragraphs are devoted to the old charge that “Batman and Robin, cozily ensconced in Wayne manor... is like a wish dream of homosexuals living together’,” which is then followed by the producer’s assurance that our heroes’ sexuality will not be in question, and, finally, topped off by Adam West’s chuckling over the pseudo-Freudian interpretations of his character, adding, “With the number of homosexuals in this country, if we get that large audience, fine. Just add ‘em to the Nielsen ratings.”
Which begs the question: Was there anything about the concept of Batman that Dozier was comfortable with?
The condescension his discomfort spawned was everywhere:
In 1968, an article in the Toronto Telegram about the just-announced cancellation of Batman carried the headline, “Krunch! There Goes Batman!”
A blurb in a 1973 issue of Playboy starts off sounding like maybe someone was taking us seriously, but even the sophisticates at the Playboy Mansion had to take a last little dig: “Anyone who still considers comic collecting kid stuff should drop by Manhattan’s Commodore Hotel July 4-8 and dig the Sixth Annual Comic Art Convention that will be in progress. Hundreds of collectors will be there to swap and sell their wares, along with guest speaks...plus films, seminars, parties, lectures, art exhibits and MUCH, MUCH MORE! POW!”
An article about a producer who hoped to leverage the popularity of Marvel Comics into a multi-media powerhouse in the January 2, 1972 New York Sunday News magazine section began, “In the fantasy world of comic books, muscle-bound superheroes such as Spider-Man, Thor and Captain America strong arm their way through life with nothing more than a few well-chosen WHRRR-RAMS! BA-LANGS! And KA-BLOMS! What can you do against a KA-BLOM! anyway?” In the same article, Stan Lee is quoted as saying, “Most people feel you must necessarily be a moron to read comic books. They regard them in the same light as those published in the 40s. In those days, dialogue was corny, and story lines concerned monsters taking over the earth. Comic books are totally different nowadays. There’s a definite sense of reality running through all stories.” Un-huh...tell that to the hopeful producer who, the article tells us in closing, “certainly has plenty of PZAP FTAM! and ZASSK!”
An April 11, 1972 New York Post review of an exhibition at the city’s prestigious Graham Galleries on Madison Avenue of political and comic book art from Thomas Nast through the Underground Comics managed to get through a few hundred words without a hint of condescension, until the very last line: “The exhibition goes over with a bang. And a voom. And maybe even a Zap.”
An of Will Eisner’s The Spirit appeared as an ABC made-for-TV movie in 1987. It was lower budget than the later feature film, and, while not good in any sense of the word, it at least resembled the source material. The New York Times reviewed The Spirit under the headline, “The Spirit on ABC, (Based on Comic Book),” starting off by explaining some of the character’s back story but adding, “Actually, none of that matters; remember that this is from a comic book (italics mine).” The reviewer goes on to try and write about the lead character but, “Not being familiar with Mr. Eisner's creation...this viewer does not know how faithfully the actor Sam Jones captures (the Spirit), or even if there is anything to capture.” After all, this is from a comic book.
Examples abound in Times alone: Serious financial woes that nearly sunk Marvel Comics in the 1990s were reported as “Pow! The Punches That Left Marvel Reeling”; in the TV Notes section of Wednesday, October 4, 2000, an article on World Wrestling Entertainment is entitled “Bam! Pow! Zap! Do Not Underestimate The Lure Of Professional Wrestling”; the cartoonish nature of the James Bond franchise is quickly established in this capsule movie review from December 29, 2006: “Casino Royale (PG-13, 144 minutes) The latest James Bond vehicle finds the British spy leaner, meaner and now played by an attractive piece of blond rough named Daniel Craig. Zap, pow, ka-ching!”
Even when they are taking the topic seriously, the Times can’t help throwing in that little jab (Pow!): A report on a January 1999 University of Massachusetts seminar on the graphic novel (a fancy term someone in comic books came up with to make long-form comic book storytelling sound legitimate) was headlined: “Meeting of Comic Minds But No Bam! Splat! Zap!” The article posed the question everyone reading it (but none of the people participating in the seminar) would have asked: “Do comic books really deserve such sober treatment?” At some point, shortly after Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic memoir of his father’s World War II experiences as a Jew under Hitler utilizing metaphors from the animal kingdom to tell this otherwise true story, with the Jews represented as mice, the Nazis as cats, Ukrainians as pigs, etc., won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the question was being asked by serious critics and scholars.
Many of them were finding the answer was a curious yes. Maus was obviously a serious work of history being told through the different but no less legitimate medium of comics. Will Eisner, the grandfather of serious, thoughtful comic book storytelling and the man credited with inventing the graphic novel (he didn’t, but he was the first creator to adopt the format as his medium of choice and popularize it), had been doing stories for and about grown-ups since his A Contract with God in 1978. By the 1990s, a slew of creators were creating individual and unique stories whose only resemblance to an issue of Superman was that they were both drawings and word balloons printed on paper sharing a common visual and storytelling vocabulary
And yet, even the breakthrough Maus had to fight for respect: In the December 29, 1991 issue of the New York Times Book Review was a letter from the author saying that while he was grateful to have hit the bestseller list, “Delight blurred into surprise...when I noted that it appeared on the fiction side of your ledger…As an author I believe I might have lopped several years off the thirteen I devoted to my two-volume project if I could only have taken a novelist's license while searching for a novelistic structure.” Ever gracious, “The Editor” replied that as the book’s publisher listed it as “history; memoir” and The Library of Congress “also places it in the nonfiction category…this week we have moved Maus II to the hard-cover nonfiction list, where it is No. 13.”
Holy stereotypes, Batman!
“The trick is to let the costume work for you.”
--Adam West, star of Batman
When Batman hit the airwaves, it sparked an interest in comics that did little to improve sales but everything to heighten public awareness of their existence, if not their current quality. “Oh, are those still being published?” grown-ups would say. Comics were a part of childhood, a happy memory that had been momentarily resurrected, and the adult television viewer was unlikely to have seen any difference between Batman and other adventures series, like Star Trek or The Man From U.N.C.L.E., both of which possessed all the qualities the general public perceived as belonging to comic books.
And comic books remained kids’ stuff, at least in the minds of that public and certainly to the press, who now had “Pow! Zap! Bam!” to fall back on so they didn’t have to look at what was actually going on but could continue to give the reader the message they expected to hear.
Batman’s onomatopoeia and Robin’s exclaimed “Holys” were literal brands seared into the hide of comic books. Forty-one years after Batman’s last new episode was broadcast, it is the show’s legacy, the knee jerk response to the mere mention of comic books.
Batman was originally broadcast at 7:30 p.m., in a timeslot known as “family hour,” reserved for kid friendly fare. The program also spawned a theatrical film in the summer of 1966 that cleaned up at the box office but only reinforced the show’s patent ridiculousness as the originator of such well-remembered clichés as “Bat-Shark Repellant” and the infamous line, spoken by Batman after spending several moments trying to dispose of a cartoon bomb in a heavily trafficked area, “Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb.” Was there ever a better metaphor for the bomb comics have been stuck with ever since? After the programs 120 episodes aired on first-run network TV, it went into daytime syndication, exposing it to subsequent generations of viewers, fewer and fewer of whom would ever read a Batman comic book and knew him only through the reruns and such Saturday morning cartoon shows as Super Friends.
Bat-mania, the media and merchandising craze resulting from the show, gave legs to the attention being received by Stan Lee over at Marvel Comics. Spider-Man’s teenaged existential angst and the Fantastic Four’s ever-exploding nuclear family had the intelligentsia thinking about comics. Batman wasn’t so much about thought as it was about nostalgia for the critics and grown-ups who gave any thought to it at all. Nostalgia, however, has a way of infantilizing its subject and Batman and its dated image of comic books has remained the public perception of the media ever since.
All this has done nothing to damage the commercial viability of Batman, the product. As early as March 29, 1966, two months after Batman debuted (and on the eve of the opening of the Broadway musical comedy based on another DC Comics property, It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman), the New York Times was reporting that Pop Art was taking over “the cultural, subcultural and pseudo cultural scene…Just now the principle pop focus is on the comic strip, which, in more forms than one can keep track of, is turning into the biggest bonanza of all.” Batman alone was pulling in an estimated $75 million a year in sales; Superman was expected to exceed that figure.
In the years since, Batman has never failed to provide his share of the rent money to DC Comics and its later parent company, Warner Communications (then Time-Warner, than Time-AOL, now back to Warner Bros). Batman reruns ran for years, although they have been missing from American airways for the last decade or so; rumors that this is because Warner Bros was embarrassed by the program and did not want its campy goofiness tarnishing its later blockbuster movie franchises is false. The show is available for syndication but has simply had no takers in the domestic market (it does run in several overseas markets). In the words of a Warner Bros executive, “we enjoy cashing checks on (Batman).” The Fox Corporation, which is the primary rights holder on the show, and Warner Bros have thus far been unable to work out an agreement that will allow the show to be released on DVD. (Note from 2025: This was resolved in 2014.)
Batman has led to a succession of successful, some even critically acclaimed (others deservedly bashed) movies, TV shows, and animated programs: Super Friends (1973-1986), Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (direct-to-video animated feature, 1993), Batman Forever (1995), Batman and Robin (1997), Batman Beyond (animated TV series, 1999-2001), Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (direct-to-video animated feature, 2000), Justice League (animated TV series featuring Batman, 2001-2004), Birds of Prey (TV series, 2002-2003), Teen Titans (animated TV series featuring Robin, 2003-2006), Catwoman (2004), The Batman (animated TV series, 2004-2008), Justice League Unlimited (animated TV series featuring Batman, 2005-2006), Batman Begins (2005), The Batman Versus Dracula (direct-to-video animated feature, 2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Batman: Gotham Knight (direct-to-video animated feature, 2008), Justice League: The New Frontier (direct-to-video animated feature, 2008), and Batman: The Brave and the Bold (animated TV series, 2008-present). Finding a day since 1968 when Batman did not appear in some shape or incarnation on an American television screen might prove to be a difficult task. A survey once revealed that the five most recognizable fictional characters in the world are Superman, Batman, Mickey Mouse, Dick Tracy, and Tarzan; one does not have to wonder how the Caped Crusader made it to this list.
Commercially, Batman’s legacy can be counted in the tens of billions of dollars.
It was the right program hitting the airwaves at the right time with just the right attitude to tap into the American gestalt. It was quirky and irreverent, at once celebrating the country’s strength and righteousness (it was, let’s not forget, the height of the Cold War with the evil Soviet empire) and mocking of its authority figures. The Man couldn’t handle the insanity of the bizarre criminals created in reaction to the old, authoritarian state so he had to call in the costumed outsider to save him. Batman didn’t need a badge, just the knowledge that he was on the side of good and justice. Batman was a kinder, gentler anti-hero, a primetime Children’s Hour version of Marlon Brando or James Dean.
Batman also made it possible for every superhero movie and television show that followed it. It proved that superheroes could be successful network fare (the 1950s Adventures of Superman had been a syndicated program), even if the networks still didn’t quite get what a superhero program should be. NBC responded to Batman in January 1967 with Captain Nice, a spoof created by Buck Henry, co-creator with Mel Brooks of Get Smart, and starring William Daniels as a bumbling police chemist who accidentally creates a formula which gives him superpowers. CBS was right there that same month (in fact, the same night) with Mister Terrific, wherein bumbling gas station attendant Stanley Beamish secretly fights crime for a government organization with the one-hour of superpowers supplied him by a secret “power pill.” In both efforts, hilarity did not ensue, and after seventeen episodes each, they had sunk into well-deserved oblivion. Batman caught the right tone to make it Pop Art; Captain Nice and Mister Terrific just missed the point.
Still, the list of television shows and major motion pictures made possible by the success of Batman is nothing short of amazing, with more than a few movies holding box office records as among the highest grossing films of all time. And ticket sales are only the tip of the monetary iceberg. If The Dark Knight grossed half a billion dollars in tickets, it likely quadrupled that number in licensing and merchandising revenues. Multiply those numbers by half a dozen successful Batman films, the Superman movies, the X-Men, Spider-Man and Fantastic Four franchises, add in licensing fees and revenue from DVDs and soundtracks, throw in animated shows that run for several years before going into syndication and being released on video…and we haven’t even gotten to the Underoos, the lunchboxes, t-shirts, backpacks, sneakers, night lights, belt buckles, car floor mats, electric toothbrushes, coffee mugs, mouse pads, costume jewelry, and pool cues, among the hundreds of licensed items available. The Licensing Department at DC Comics receives thousands of requests a year for deals, even without a movie or television show driving interest. Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman are what are known in the licensing business as perennials, or evergreens; the whole world knows who they are and they sell, year after year, on the strength of their own brand.
Much this, one can argue, is thanks to Batman.
Of course, there was the “Pow! Zap! Bam!” price to pay for comic’s newfound acceptance. Yes, the popular kids in mass media finally recognized comic books and invited them to sit at the cool table with them in the lunchroom...but not out of friendship. It was so they would have a whipping boy close at hand to make fun of and slap around. News stories connected to comic books, whether about a new movie, the attendance at a convention, the record price paid for an old comic, or a creator, will not fail to reference Batman in one way or another. One can’t, after all this, blame the show, which is, after all, nothing more than a fictitious construct. It did, after all, get the essence of Batman himself correct: a serious, sober man, the world’s greatest detective (and he was, finding and analyzing clues like nobody’s business and escaping cunning death traps). It played off his seriousness to create the comedy and used the pop culture of the moment for its style and tone. And if not for the pop sensibilities and Warholian irony, Batman would have been just another failed sitcom with a goofy angle, like Captain Nice or Mister Terrific. The only difference was, Batman was a pre-existing character from a medium with a rabid fan base to complain about the injury done to the object of their affection and who, as a whole, tend to be unable to separate events in the comic books, their medium of preference, from events or approaches to the material in other medium.
But except for some of the carry-over from the TV show to the comics at the time in an attempt to capitalize on Batman’s popularity, William Dozier’s version did little to the character itself. That damage has been done on that front by writers raised on Batman and subsequent bad interpretations of the Dark Knight is undeniable, but blaming Batman for that would be like holding the manufacturer of velvet responsible for the bad paintings of Elvis people have done on their fabric. The true culprit, and culprits there must be in a tale about superheroes, is mass medium, the lazy reporters, writers and editors whose imaginations are not equal to the task of headlining the imaginations of others.
A Google search of “pow zap bam” yielded 191,000 results. It’s likely easier to find a reporter who can tell you what the initials of Captain Marvel’s “SHAZAM” stand for off the top of their head than one who has not used the sound effect gimmick in a story about, however peripherally, comics. It is easier to buy off the rack than it is to make a new suit and so it is with newspaper and television reporters and clichés. Why take the time to research a story when you can produce one that meets the expectations of readers with canned phrases and pop references? Pat Johnson, in the Toronto Telegram, wrote “To the sad-faced man who puts the Pow! Wham! Zowee! in the Batman series, one cliché is just a cliché but 15 are good for a laugh—and millions of dollars.” Apparently, to Pat Johnson, a string of clichés was also a newspaper story.
But the producers of comic book movies and television are also to blame for providing the source of the clichés. Embarrassed to be associated with kid’s stuff, but unwilling walk away from all the money to be made from it. Only rarely—Iron Man and Batman Begins spring immediately to mind—do filmmakers make it through an entire movie without feeling the need to wink at the audience and slip in the self-referential moment that lets you know that they know that this stuff isn’t really to be taken seriously.
In interviews, Adam West was quick to point out that the mere act of putting on the costume, cape and cowl took a performance to a different level, essentially to a world in which one did things like put on a costume to go into the night and fight crime. “The trick,” he told one interviewer in 1966, “is to let the costume work for you.” In other words, inhabit the world the way the actor inhabits the costume. Treat it as real and with respect because for the purposes of this fiction, it is real.
West found the element that made his Batman believable and was able to give a performance free of any sign to the audience that he was embarrassed to be playing the role.
Holy Hollywood! Why is that so hard for the rest of them to figure out?
