Television: Holy Flypaper!

• Share

The good old American comic strips have long served a dual audience: kids read them for yuks, while grownups pretend to absorb all sorts of profound meanings from the billowing balloons. Television, on the other hand, has stuck to a single standard: simple-minded cartoons for kids, simple-minded programs of every other variety for grownups. Now all that is changed. Television has brought the comics to adults. It comes in the form of Batman, a new twice-a-week hyperthyroid series on ABC. Produced with an enormous amount of pulp and circumstance, it has become an overnight smash.

Batman would have attracted nobody but preschoolers were it not for ABC's ingenious promotion efforts. Skywriters emblazoned BATMAN is COMING in the heavens above the Rose Bowl game. Every hour on the hour, television announcements bleated the imminent arrival of the Caped Crusader. Hordes of people who recalled Bob Kane's comicbook creation as well as the 1943 movie serial (TIME, Nov. 26) pushed their toddlers out of the way to get a good look at the TV set. Among other things, they saw a mesomorph in cape and cowl expostulate: "My own parents were murdered by dastardly criminals" and "I'll stand at the bar—I shouldn't wish to attract attention," while Batman's sidekick, Robin, a wide-eyed adolescent, stood at the ready with such replies as "Gleeps!," "Holy barracuda!" and "Holy flypaper!"

Penguin & Joker. Was all this to be taken seriously? By the kids, yes; they will watch anything. The grownups are supposed to see Batman as camp, a sort of tongue-in-chic philosophy of pop culture, which decrees that anything that is really bad must be awfully good. In this case, Batman is so really bad it is terrible.

The man who brought this parody of a parody to the TV screen is Producer William Dozier, 57, who in more golden times was associated with Studio One, Playhouse 90 and You Are There. In addition to filling the script with clichés of word and action, Dozier determined that his stars must be absolute dogs. Accordingly, he handed immobile-faced Adam West the Batman role and directed him to give the cameras "eternal squareness, rigidity." The instructions, from the evidence, were hardly necessary. To play Robin, Dozier chose Burt Ward, a 20-year-old water skier whose reading of "Gleeps!" will not be matched in this age, moving one acting teacher to call Batman "a film anthology of things not to do." For arch-villains in subsequent episodes, Dozier has signed Burgess Meredith (The Penguin) and Cesar Romero (The Joker). The talk of the trade is that Frank Sinatra is furious: he wanted to play The Joker.

Hornet in His Quiver. The real joker is that Batman has already hit the top ten in the ratings, and the spin-offs have begun. Discothèques have kicked off a new dance, the "batusi," and five recordings of the Batman theme song have already been rushed to stores, along with a single called Batman and Robin. There is even every expectation that grown men will be showing up at Andy Warhol's next party dressed like the Batman.

There is much more to come. Warns Dozier: "If Batman does well, I have the Green Hornet and Wonder Woman in my quiver." Small wonder that kids are wondering what's to become of the older generation.