The 1966
Batman series is a high point in television, a gloriously self-aware piece of multicolored, campy silliness, a cartoon made 3D, complete with an admirably laissez-faire attitude towards leotarded beer-bellies and a bizarre commitment to the phrase “youthful ward”.
It had, and continues to have, its detractors, and is arguably one of the factors in comics continuing to not be taken as seriously as a medium as they should be. Every six months, a newspaper will publish a piece with a title like “Biff! Pow! Whoosh! How Comics Are Growing Up”, using sound effects from a TV show broadcast fifty years ago to poorly make a point about comics being published now.
But it’s a glorious show, one that children can enjoy completely at face value and adults can appreciate the ridiculous tongue-in-cheek nature of. It presents a world where machines have enormous labels on the side of them detailing their purposes, where nobody ever murders anyone if they can put them in a big stupid f*cking trap then go off and run an errand assuming everything will pan out instead, where a baddie with a name like Egghead can turn up, speak entirely in egg puns, have henchmen named after different ways of serving eggs, and everyone is totally blase about it, like “Yeah, let’s stop him, let’s stop Egghead” instead of “Whoa, hang on, he’s… he’s egg-themed? He’s an egg-themed villain? That doesn’t make any sense.”
Here, a series of photos from the set of the classic old show:
 |
| On the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| Adam West (Batman) and Burt Ward (Robin) on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| Adam West on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| Adam West on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| Adam West on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| On the Batman set, 1966. |
 |
| Burt Ward (Dick Grayson/Robin) and unidentified woman on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| Burt Ward (Dick Grayson/Robin) on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| Adam West in costume on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| On the Batman set, 1966. |
 |
| Adam West on the set of Batman, 1966. |
 |
| Two bat people, Colin Wightman, 6, and Kitty Blumberg, 4, of New York, leap into action. |
(Photos: Yale Joel—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
