Post by ferrari512s on Mar 23, 2014 19:11:02 GMT -5
Batman TV Series
Batman is a 1960s American live action television series, based on the DC comic book character of the same name.
It stars Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin — two crime-fighting heroes who defend Gotham City.
It aired on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network for three seasons from January 12, 1966 to March 14, 1968.
The show was aired twice weekly for its first two seasons, resulting in the production of a total of 120 episodes.
According to Adam West, "I think of our Batman as the Bright Knight".
Of his many moral accomplishments, The Bright Knight famously championed the importance of using seat belts, doing homework and drinking milk among children.
Genesis of the series
In the early 1960s, Ed Graham Productions optioned the television rights to the comic strip Batman and planned a straightforward juvenile adventure show, much like Adventures of Superman and The Lone Ranger, to air on CBS on Saturday mornings.
Former American football linebacker and actor Mike Henry was originally set to star as Batman in a more dramatic interpretation of the character.
Henry reportedly posed for publicity photographs in costume but didn't land the role.
Around this same time, the Playboy Club in Chicago was screening the Batman serials (1943's Batman and 1949's Batman and Robin) on Saturday nights.
It became very popular. East coast ABC executive Yale Udoff, a Batman fan in his childhood, attended one of these parties at the Playboy Club and was impressed with the reaction the serials were eliciting.
He contacted ABC executives Harve Bennett and Edgar J. Scherick, who were already considering developing a television series based on a comic strip action hero, to suggest a prime time Batman series in the hip and fun style of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. When negotiations between CBS and Graham stalled, DC Comics quickly reobtained rights and made the deal with ABC, which farmed the rights out to 20th Century Fox to produce the series.
In turn, 20th Century Fox handed the project to William Dozier and his Greenway Productions.
ABC and Fox were expecting a hip and fun—yet still serious—adventure show.
However, Dozier, who had never before read comic books, concluded, after reading several Batman comics for research, that the only way to make the show work was to do it as a pop art camp comedy.
Ironically, the Batman comic books had recently experienced a change in editorship which marked a return to serious detective stories after decades of tales with aliens, dimensional travel, magical imps and talking animals.
Originally, espionage novelist Eric Ambler was to write a TV-movie that would launch the television series, but he dropped out after learning of Dozier's camp comedy approach.
Eventually, two sets of screen tests were filmed, one with Adam West and Burt Ward and the other with Lyle Waggoner and Peter Deyell, with West and Ward winning the roles while Waggoner would get his chance to appear in a superhero series 10 years later as Steve Trevor in Wonder Woman.
By that time, ABC had pushed up the debut date to January 1966, thus forgoing the movie until the summer hiatus.
The film would be produced quickly to get into theatres prior to the start of Season Two of the television series. Lorenzo Semple, Jr. had signed on as head script writer.
He wrote the pilot script, and generally wrote in a pop art adventure style.
Stanley Ralph Ross, Stanford Sherman, and Charles Hoffman were script writers who generally leaned more toward camp comedy, and in Ross's case, sometimes outright slapstick and satire.
Originally intended as a one-hour show, ABC only had two early-evening time slots available, so the show was split into two parts, to air twice a week in half-hour instalments with a cliffhanger, originally to last only through a station break, connecting the two episodes, echoing the old movie serials.
The Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, and Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter, all of whom are regular Bat-Villains, appear in the series, which was deliberately villain-driven as well as action-comedy-heavy.
Plot Summary - Teasers
The typical story began with a villain (often one of a short list of recurring villains) committing a crime, such as stealing a fabulous gem or taking over Gotham City.
This was followed by a scene inside Commissioner Gordon's office, where he and Chief O'Hara would deduce which villain was responsible.
Commissioner Gordon would press a button on the Batphone, a bright red telephone located on a pedestal in his office.
The scene would then cut to 'stately Wayne Manor' where Alfred (the butler) would answer the Batphone, which sat like a normal everyday telephone on the desk in Bruce Wayne's study.
Frequently, Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson, would be found talking with Dick's aunt, Harriet Cooper, who was unaware of Bruce's and Dick's secret identities.
Alfred would discreetly interrupt so they could excuse themselves to go to the Batphone. Upon learning which criminal he would face, Wayne would turn a switch concealed within a bust of Shakespeare that stood on his desk.
This would cause a bookcase to slide back and reveal two fireman's poles. "To the Batpoles!" Wayne would exclaim, and he and Grayson would slide down to the Batcave, activating an unseen mechanism on the way that dressed them as their alter egos. The title sequence often began at this point.
The title sequence featured animated versions of Batman and Robin, drawn in the then-current style of the comic books, running towards camera and then fighting an assortment of villains (including several "marquee" villains like the Joker).
Plot
Similar in style and content to the 1940s serials, Batman and Robin would arrive in the Batcave in full costume and jump into the Batmobile, with Batman in the driver's seat. Robin would say, "Atomic batteries to power...turbines to speed." Batman would respond, "Roger, ready to move out."
With that, after fastening their seatbelts, the two would drive out of the cave at high speed.
As the Batmobile approached the mouth of the cave (actually a tunnel entrance in Los Angeles' Bronson Canyon) a camouflaged door would swing open and a hinged barrier outside the Batcave would drop down to allow the car to exit onto the road.
Scenes of Batman and Robin sliding down the Batpoles and getting into the Batmobile, the Batmobile exiting the Batcave, and the arrival at Commissioner Gordon's building (while the episode credits are shown), are reused footage utilized in nearly all episodes.
After being summoned to Commissioner Gordon's office via the Batphone, the initial discussion of the crime usually led to Batman and Robin conducting their investigation alone.
This investigation usually resulted in a meeting with the villain, with the heroes engaging in a fistfight with the villain's henchmen, and the villain getting away, leaving a series of unlikely clues for the two to investigate.
Later, they would face the villain's henchmen again, and he or she would capture one or both of the heroes and place them in a deathtrap leading to a cliffhanger ending, which was usually resolved in the first few minutes of the next episode.
After the cliffhanger
The second part of the episode (until late in Season Two) would begin with a brief recap of part one. After the opening credits and the theme music, the cliffhanger was resolved.
The same pattern of plot was repeated in the following episode until the villain was defeated in a major brawl where the action was punctuated by superimposed words, as in comic book fight scenes ("POW!", "BAM!", "ZONK!", etc.).
Not counting five of the Penguin's henchmen who disintegrate or get blown up in the associated Batman theatrical movie, only three criminal characters die during the series: the Riddler's moll Molly (played by Jill St. John in Episode 2) who accidentally falls into the Batcave's atomic reactor, and two out-of-town gunmen who shoot at Batman and Robin but kill each other instead (toward the end of "Zelda The Great/A Death Worse Than Fate").
Twice, Catwoman (Julie Newmar) appears to fall to her death (into a bottomless pit and from a high building into a river), but since she returned in later episodes, it is presumed that as a "cat", she has nine lives and thus has several more left to go.
In "Instant Freeze", Mr. Freeze freezes a butler solid and knocks him over, causing him to smash to pieces, although this is implied rather than seen.
There is a later reference suggesting the butler survived. In "Green Ice", Mr. Freeze freezes a policeman solid; it is left unclear whether he survived.
In "The Penguin's Nest", a policeman suffers an electric shock at the hands of the Penguin's accomplices, but he is presumed to survive, as he appears in some later episodes.
In "The Bookworm Turns", Commissioner Gordon appears to be shot and falls off a bridge to his death, but Batman deduces that this was actually an expert high diver in disguise, employed by The Bookworm as a ruse (implying that the diver survived the fall).
Robin, in particular, was especially well known for saying "Holy (insert), Batman!" whenever he encountered something startling.
The series utilized a narrator (producer William Dozier, uncredited) who parodied both the breathless narration style of the 1940s serials and Walter Winchell's narration of The Untouchables.
He would end many of the cliffhanger episodes by intoning, "Tune in tomorrow — same Bat-time, same Bat-channel!".
Only two of the series' guest villains ever discovered Batman's true identity: Egghead by deductive reasoning, and King Tut on two occasions (once with a bug on the Batmobile and once by accidentally mining into the Batcave).
Egghead was tricked into disbelieving his discovery, as was Tut in the episode when he bugged the Batmobile.
In the episode when Tut tunnelled into the Batcave, he was hit on the head by a rock which made him forget his discovery and jarred him back into his identity as a mild-mannered Professor of Egyptology at Yale University.
While under the spell of the Siren (Joan Collins), Commissioner Gordon found the Batcave beneath Wayne Manor and deduced Batman's true identity, but Alfred gassed him to prevent his informing her, the memory of the discovery gone after leaving the Siren's spell.
The Batmobile History
In late 1965 20th Century Fox Television and William Dozier's Greenway Productions contracted renowned Hollywood car customizer Dean Jeffries to design and build a "Batmobile" for their upcoming Batman TV series.
He started customizing a 1959 Cadillac, but when the studio wanted the program on the air in January 1966, and therefore filming sooner than he could provide the car, Jeffries was paid off, and the project went to George Barris.
What became the iconic Batmobile used in the 1966–1968 live action television show and its film adaptation was a customized vehicle that originated as a one-off 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car.
It was created by Ford Motor Company lead stylists Bill Schmidt, Doug Poole Sr., and John Najjar and their design team at the Lincoln Styling Department.
In 1954, the Futura prototype was built entirely by hand by the Ghia Body Works in Turin, Italy, at a reported cost of US$250,000—the equivalent of approximately US$2 million in 2009.
It made its debut in pearlescent Frost-Blue white paint on 8 January 1955 at the Chicago Auto Show.
In 1959, sporting a fresh red paint job, the Futura was featured in the film It Started with a Kiss, starring Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford.
Barris was trying to get Hollywood's attention with the Futura, which he had purchased from Ford for the nominal sum of $1.00 and "other valuable consideration", but aside from its film appearance, the Futura had been languishing in his Hollywood shop for several years.
With only three weeks to finish the Batmobile (although in recent years Jeffries says that his car was dropped because he was told it was needed in "a week and a half", he was quoted in 1988 as saying "three weeks" as well).
Barris decided that, rather than building a car from scratch, it would be relatively easy to transform the distinctive Futura into the famous crime-fighting vehicle.
Design work was conducted by Herb Grasse, working as an associate designer for Barris.
Barris hired Bill Cushenbery to do the metal modifications to the car and its conversion into the Batmobile was completed in just three weeks, at a reported cost of US$30,000.
They used the primer-painted, white-striped car in October, 1965, for a network presentation reel.
Shortly afterward, the car was painted gloss black with "fluorescent cerise" stripes.
Barris retained ownership of the car, estimated to be worth $125,000 in 1966 dollars, leasing it to 20th Century Fox and Greenway Productions for use in the series.
When filming for the series began, several problems arose due to the car's age: it overheated, the battery went dead, and the expensive Mickey Thompson tires kept blowing.
By mid season, the engine and transmission were replaced with those of a Ford Galaxie.
The most frequent visual influence of this car is that later Batmobiles usually have a rear rocket thruster that fires as the car makes a fast start.
In November 2012 Barris Kustom and George Barris announced the sale of the Batmobile at the Barrett-Jackson car show and auction held in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The vehicle fetched $4.2 million on January 19, 2013.
The Futura Concept Car
The Futura's styling was original by the standards of the 1950s, with a double, clear-plastic canopy top, exaggerated hooded headlight pods, and very large, outward-canted tailfins at both ends of the vehicle.
Nevertheless, the Futura had a complete powertrain and was fully operable in contrast to many show cars then and now.
Its original color was white, and was one of the first pearlescent color treatments, using ground pearl to achieve the paint effect.
The Futura was powered by a 368 cubic inch Lincoln engine and powertrain; the chassis was that of a Lincoln Mark II.
The Futura was a success as a show car, garnering a great deal of favorable publicity for Ford.
It was released as a model kit and a toy, and in a much more subdued form its headlight and tailfin motifs would appear on production Lincolns for 1956 and 1957, such as the Lincoln Premiere and Lincoln Capri.
Media appearances
The Futura played a prominent part in the 1959 movie It Started with a Kiss, starring Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford. For the movie, it was painted red, as the pearlescent finish did not photograph well.
After that, though, the car would have been forgotten and perhaps destroyed, as most show cars of that time were.
However, it was sold into the hands of George Barris, an auto customizer.
Despite the car's original cost of $250,000, the Lincoln Futura was sold to Barris for $1.00 and "other valuable consideration" by Ford Motor Company.
As the car was never titled and was therefore uninsurable, it was parked behind Barris' shop where it sat idle for several years and was allowed to deteriorate.