THE UNIQUENESS OF '66 BATMAN

Just a forum-post to clarify some of the unique factors of the TV show, responding in part to a claim that the program went downhill because of the number of episodes required in the second season.

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I guess we are at loggerheads on the episode thing. In terms of sheer quantity, going from a half-season for a show with about thirty half-hour episodes to a full season of 60 should not have been any bigger deal than an hour-long show with a half-season of, say, 15 episodes suddenly getting a full season order of, say, 30 episodes. 

HOWEVER, I do concede that with BATMAN, even the producers were to an extent making things up as they went along. Doing two episodes of BATMAN a week was in my outsider's opinion far more difficult than doing a weekly hour of even a good western like, say, RAWHIDE. The rules on how to do westerns had been well established long before RAWHIDE. Everyone involved in making the series would have grown with westerns, both juvenile and adult, and everyone would have known what a good western needed.

BATMAN was almost sui generis for television. ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN followed various tropes of comic book stories, but I don't think that show consistently represented the comic book of the early fifties. Some episodes roughly captured the feel of some comic stories, but the low budget meant that overall SUPERMAN couldn't really be that much like SUPERMAN the comic. Similar factors also limited other low budget adaptations like SHEENA and cheap original cartoons like COURAGEOUS CAT.

But BATMAN actually had a high budget (though some accounts claim that the showrunners acted like they had to pinch every penny). The makers could actually make the Caped Crusader as way out as the source material. But most adults had at best a friendly contempt for comic books of all genres. Hence Dozier came up with his two-pronged approach: render the comics tropes as accurately as possible to please the kids but seek to please the adults with ironic humor. Yet that balance was hard to sustain, and as we've discussed, in the end a lot of raconteurs defaulted to zaniness rather than distanced camp.