The Pop Culture Obsessions Of Batman ‘66

(Over the years, I’ve written a variety of articles that have not always seen the light of day. Editors leave sites, things fall through the cracks, etc. They just end up sitting on my desktop without a home. I decided to use Medium to give them a home, so they can at least see the light of day. Fair warning: These were initial drafts sent into editors in many instances, so they may not be meticulously pored over. They are good enough for me to want to publish them, but maybe aren’t perfect.)

Batman, or Batman ’66 as it is known for the sake of clarity, is mostly viewed as that silly, goofy take on Batman that people remember as a kitschy joke. Of course, Batman wanted to be a kitschy joke, but this sells the show short. In actuality, Batman is a very smart, and very clever, show with a lot of interesting preoccupations. Particularly, Batman is obsessed with pop culture. Not just comic books and superheroes, either. Way back in 1966, Batman was infatuated with pop culture and the medium of television in a way that still feels fresh to this day. Before Dan Harmon was even born, Batman was a show that was, in many ways, about pop culture.

Of course, Batman’s pop culture riffing does begin with the nature of the show itself. As has become lore, when William Dozier and his production company took over the rights to Batman, he hadn’t read a single Batman comic book. When he did, he decided it had to be done as a pop-art comedy. Batman is a joke on Batman, a joke grander than anything The Joker could concoct. There was something inherently absurd about the idea of a man dressing like a bat and fighting a cadre of garishly-dressed villains to Dozier, and so that’s what he decided to build the show on. Fortunately he found the writers for it, and fortunately Adam West and Burt Ward, and all the various other players, tapped into it right away.

As such, Batman is a show that is, to some degree, commenting on itself all along the way. Every over-convoluted villain’s plan, every meticulously labeled bit of Bat Equipment, the elaborate death machines that are always vanquished: It’s all got a wink attached to it. That wink is even more pronounced in the dialogue, particularly Batman’s. It’s there in his offbeat delivery, in his preoccupation with the “warped minds” of criminals, and in his constant reminders to Robin, and others, to do things like look both ways before you cross the street and to wear your seatbelt. Some of these are delivered directly to the camera, and Commissioner Gordon talks directly to the camera quite a bit as well. They aren’t “breaking the fourth wall,” per se, in defining that as admitting you are on a TV show, but they certainly are pushing up against that fourth wall at least a little bit.

Let’s go beyond all this, though, because Batman is just as interested in other pop culture entities, and in fact the delivery services for culture as well. In particular, characters spend so much time watching TV, or appearing on TV, on Batman. This is, in part, because bad guys overtake the television waves all the time. It’s often framed so that it appears like you are watching the same TV the people on the show are. Occasionally, Batman and Robin are on some sort of talk show, or news broadcast, and sometimes they are on the radio as well. Onetime Batman talked to his enemy King Tut through a radio shock jock’s program. The Joker appeared in an opera that was being aired on TV. And, once, we watched Bruce Wayne just watch TV. It was a western.

Television is not the only medium that Batman is interested in. There were a handful of musical villains on the show, be it Minstrel or Siren or Chandell. Then, of course, there was the time Lesley Gore appeared as Catwoman’s henchgirl Pussycat. She sings a couple songs, one a love song for Robin. Catwoman also once stole the voices of the hit British singing duo Chad and Jeremy, who have a clear Beatles thing going on based on their press conferences. The Joker once operated out of a comic book printing shop, and another time remade himself as a pop artist/criminal. You want movies? The Riddler one time decided to make a silent movie about his crime spree, a spree inspired by silent movies as well, replete with pies being thrown into people’s faces and Frank Gorshin doing a Charlie Chaplin impression. Then, of course, there was the time The Penguin started a movie production company, and got Batman and Robin to act in his movie, alongside Penguin’s fellow villain Marsha, Queen of Diamonds. We watch Batman reading through his script, and we watch parts of the movie being filmed, although Marsha’s big nude scene is nixed thanks to Gotham City’s League of Decency. Sure, in the end, Penguin’s big plan was to build a solid gold tank, but the movie stuff is still very funny, and very clever.

On top of that, there are apparently multiple abandoned movie lots in Gotham City, and also a place called Westernland, where a villain named Shame hangs out. Shame is a direct parody of the titular cowboy from the movie Shane. This includes a child wandering around saying “Come back, Shame,” a whole bunch, in reference to an iconic moment in the movie Shane that probably is not as resonant as it was back in 1966. Here, we have a character who is a genuine parody of an existing pop culture entity, and his henchman throughout his four episodes are in line with that as well. In particular, in his second two-parter, he has a henchman called Fred, who is a Mexican guy with a posh British accent, and Chief Standing Pat. Both of them are played by white guys painted up, which would seem racially insensitive, except that Shame refers to them as something along the lines of “characters from an old time Western.” The show comments on how they are old archetypes, and their very existence is a meta joke.

We would also be remiss to not mentioned “Surf’s Up, Joker’s Under!” This is not because it is the best Batman episode, although it is. No, it warrants mentioning because it is basically a parody of beach movies/surf movies. Back in the ’60s, this was a contemporary reference. Beach movies, such as Beach Party and Beach Blanket Bingo, were very popular. There was also Ski Party, which was the same premise in a different climate, but it is getting mentioned because one of the love interests was played by Yvonne Craig, aka Batgirl. It’s very much like those old beach movies. Joker’s plan is to become king of the surf. He and Batman have a surfing contest. Surfer lingo is bandied about liberally. There is a band playing on the beach. It’s amazing, and it’s not like any other Batman episode in many ways, because it is so dedicated to the trappings of beach movies.

Additionally, let us not forget the wall climbing cameos. You are probably familiar with Batman and Robin climbing walls, and with the fact it was clear they were just walking along the floor and the picture was then tilted. However, they would frequently run into people popping out of the window. It was always a celebrity, if you include Santa Claus as a celebrity. Sometimes it would be Sammy Davis Jr. or Don Ho, which is to say a real person. On the other hand, TV characters would show up as well. Colonel Klink, a Nazi from the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, popped up. So did Lurch from The Addams Family. This is always bizarre, but in a delightful way. A couple more things must be noted. One, once Penguin got angry at his poll analysts when he was running for mayor against Batman (a fantastic couple episodes), he put them all up on coat hooks, at which point one of them says at least they can become TV writers. Two, one time Batman and Robin got out of Catwoman’s clutches, and Robin gets meta talking about how it seems almost like all these close calls are being crafted by some sort of storyteller. Batman dismisses him, of course, but we at home can appreciate the meta humor.

Batman wasn’t the only show doing meta stuff, and pop culture stuff, although it was certainly ahead of the curve. The Monkees debuted the same year, and had some similar sensibilities. All the movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun and everything in that vein is essentially a combination of Batman and The Monkees. Green Acres was doing some bonkers stuff at the same time as well. However, Batman, by dint of being about Batman, has a longer reach than those two, or similar shows. Its pop culture preoccupations still resonate. It was doing parody and meta comedy and spoofing pop culture decades ago. This includes spoofing itself. Watching it now, it’s fascinating to see just how obsessed with pop culture it was. Everything is just a little tweak on something we are all familiar with. It was as interested in TV as its viewers. This is largely what makes such a good, and engaging, show to this day. It works on multiple levels. They could have just made a straightforward show about Batman fighting criminals, and it may have been fine. Instead, they decided to put the entire world in quotation marks, and it was all the better for it.