Adam West 86 on Batman 66

Adam West, now 86, spoke to the LA Times to promote the Warner Home Video release of the entire 1960s Batman series on Blu-ray and DVD.

As a young actor in Hollywood, West got a call about playing the DC Comics’ superhero in a new TVseries. He was hesitant. At least initially. “I thought, ‘I’m trying to have a serious career,'” he recalled.

But he read Lorenzo Semple Jr.’s script for the first two episodes. “I fell down laughing,” said West. “I said, ‘I have got to do that.’ It was easy. Your sense memory comes back to when you were a kid playing Batman.”

…It wasn’t until about 18 months after he got the part that he found out why. “They had seen a commercial I had done. I was doing a spoof on James Bond. I did a character called Captain Q for Nestle’s Quik. Those commercials were kind of funny.”

The entire series of 120 episodes has been digitally remastered. Bonus material includes three hours of cast interviews and screen-test footage.

3 thoughts on “Adam West 86 on Batman 66

  1. Those were fun. But while I do have a number of old TV shows from that era on DVD, I don’t plan to buy these. I still remember, when I was 15, anxiously waiting for the first show. Then the animated opening threw me off. But, I thought, maybe I could get into it. Unfortunately, the rest was history… this wasn’t Batman at all … it was a snide, adult sneer at the entire idea of comic book superheroes, in which a nerd of indeterminate sexual identity (he might have been an old lady) ponced around in lavender tights, foiling villains who couldn’t successfully burgle a gum machine, apparently oblivious to how stupid it sounded to name everything he owned the “bat-something-or-other.” I managed to enjoy Batman anyway … and I don own a copy of that archly-horrible movie made for the big screen … but I just don’t feel like collecting it the way I collected Bewitched, the Addams Family, Dick van Dyke or even Get Smart.

  2. I pass on this. Liked the show as a joke. And the Dynamic Duo was constantly being upstaged by the villians.

    The word Taral is looking for is “bat shit”. The guano this show provided was fetilizer for later projects.

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