Sociable Climbers

Adam West’s Batman TV series in the 1960s was known for its many quirky and campy motifs, including Batman and Robin’s habit of bantering with the guest celebrities who hailed them from windows as the Dynamic Duo were scaling buildings en route to fight crime.

This YouTube video contains all 14 window cameos, featuring these stars.

Jerry Lewis
Dick Clark
Green Hornet (Van Williams) and Kato (Bruce Lee)
Sammy Davis Jr.
Jose Jimenez (Bill Dana)
Howard Duff as Detective Sam Stone on “Felony Squad”
Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer)
Lurch (Ted Cassidy)
Don Ho
Andy Devine as Santa Claus
Art Linkletter
Edward G. Robinson
Suzy Knickerbocker
Carpet King (real name unknown)

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian for the story.]

6 thoughts on “Sociable Climbers

  1. Cyril Lord of Cyril Lord Carpets, Ltd. was “The Carpet King.” There were enough clues to find his Wikipedia entry.

  2. I remember the TV show, but not the “guest appearances”. Very funny. I prefer Adam West’s Batman to those that have come since.

  3. I think these scenes were cut out of off-network broadcasts of the Batman show to make room for more commercials, so it’s fun to see them again after more than 40 years. I notice the guest stars often give the appearance of poking out horizontally from their window, as if they were standing on a wall (cause, I suspect, by the set being turned on its side to allow Batman and Robin to rappel across the wall easily).

  4. Yeah, those scenes were shot horizontally–that is, B & R were walking or backing, crouched down, across the horizontal “wall” in the studio–but were shown vertically. B & R’s capes were held out by threads so as to appear to hang down vertically when broadcast, so to give “verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing narrative.”

  5. I think I was 15 when I saw those TV episodes. It took perhaps 1/3 of a second to figure out that the window scenes were shot with a sideways camera. Worse, I understood instantly that they were a copy of similar scenes from “Laugh In.”

    It would be fun to be a villain in that Batman universe. You could outsmart that Dynamic Duo while asleep. And a pair of girl guides could have beaten them up. You could really imagine yourself danging Ward and West over a giant bowl of cold noodles Afredo and giggling, “Kill you Batman? Why? You’re too much fun!” But, of course, if they ever got to be too much of a nuisance you’d just capture them in the first part of the two-part episode and shotgun them.

  6. The TV show was a place where the worst excesses of the 1950’s magazines with Batman and Robin were given life outside thse comic book frames. And it was funny and bad.

    Burt Ward many years later complained and explained his delivery: Adam West would speak slowly and clearly, and leave Burt Ward with a few seconds to add to the dialog, so he had to do it quickly. Retakes? What’s that?

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