Director: Leslie H. Martinson
Cast: Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero
Have I Seen it Before: Oh, man... Many, many times. Before it was released on DVD, I made do with a WGN broadcast of the film I had recorded in the summer of 1989. That screening truncated the beginning and cut entirely the scene where Batman (West) calls the Pentagon.
I had no idea what I was missing.
Did I Like It: At various times, it has been more than a little bit fashionable for Batman fans to look down their noses on the Adam West iteration of the character. There are few elements of Batman fandom—with the possible exception that every film Ben Affleck has appeared in is a criminally under-appreciated gem—that annoy me more. Adam West’s hero isn’t tortured, and he always plays fair. He is a hipster adventurer, and anyone who says the mythos of the Caped Crusader doesn’t have room for that particular hue doesn’t understand the sheer adaptability of the character which has made him a mainstay of the superhero genre for 80-plus years.
He’s also deeply, unalterably, perhaps even insanely funny. There’s room for that, too, and tragically, that is the part that Clooney’s effort in Batman & Robin (1997) never utilized. If Clooney forced himself to read every translation on an elevator button before pressing “up,” he might be the version of the hero we all were clamoring for in the forthcoming Flashpoint, but alas.
I don’t even mean to only say that West is funny relative to the rest of the Batman canon. He is supremely funny in the context of screen comedians at large. I would put the “somedays you just can’t get rid of a bomb” up there with the greatest of all time.
The film’s sense of adventure is—and someone is going to shake their head when I type this, I just know it—far greater than any other live-action feature-length version of the character. Keaton and his successors restricted themselves to a very limited stretch of Gotham (those parts which could easily fit into a backlot), Bale upgraded to a city which felt like a real place (largely, because it was), and Affleck was mostly fixated on his mother (which is saying a lot for the character), West’s Batman reckons with a world writ large, that is still somehow brought to life on nothing more than a TV budget. The film reached for a wider canvas, and therefore could underwrite expenses for the associated TV show, amplifying its scope in the process. We’d have been stuck with just a Batmobile on the show if this film hadn’t seen fit to place their characters in a larger world.
If you’re a Batman fan and not an unapologetic fan of this film, then you’re lying about one of those things. I don’t make the rules; I just enforce them.