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.

Burns: Shatner and West Together Again

By James H. Burns: Seeing your story about William Shatner and Adam West at the Salt Lake Comic Con spurred me to remember that this was actually a REUNION.

In the early 1960s, Shatner starred in a pilot for a TV series about Alexander the Great!  The film, entitled Alexander the Great, wound up appearing on ABC’s Off To See The Wizard, a 1967/68 Friday night series of family films, hosted by cartoon versions of L. Frank Baum’s characters…

The movie is odd, but certainly not terrible, and is easily available (although for many years, was actually quite rare). Shatner is in fine young athletic form, with Adam West as his best friend, General Cleander, and also features Joseph Cotten and a villainous John Cassavetes!

(Intriguingly, on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. DVD set bonus material, David McCallum remembers being offered the lead in a proposed Alexander the Great series, which may or may not have been this film! To go from the petite McCallum, to Shatner, seems much of a quantum leap!)

Also, the corridors of my own memory remember Shatner co-hosting one of those Battle of the Network Stars-type programs in the late ’70s (or possibly early ’80s), but one that featured the guests performing feats of derring-do.  I clearly remember an excited Shatner interviewing West, as the latter had just completed driving a race car.

One, or both, I believe, commented, kidding, something like it was a meeting of two 1960s pop culture heroes!