On Tuesday, I was interviewed on camera for one of those little "special feature" interviews that comes on a DVD — in this case, it's an upcoming release of the 1966 Batman movie starring Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin but not (sigh) Julie Newmar, who was replaced in the Catwoman role by Lee Meriwether. The film's been available on DVD for some time but this is a more deluxe packaging with extra bells and whistles. I don't know when it's coming out…and to head off the obvious question, I don't think this means anything in terms of the Batman TV show being released on DVD. As far as I know, Warner Home Video and Fox Home Video are still quarrelling over which of them has the right to issue that one. Perhaps if this new DVD of the movie does exceptionally well or even exceptionally poorly, it will shake up the dynamics of that dispute.
Anyhow, I explained to the camera how it wasn't the same with Ms. Meriwether — lovely though she was and is — in the cat suit; how I kept waiting for Batman to rip off her mask and shout, "You! You're not the woman who played Stupefyin' Jones! What have you done with the real Catwoman?"
Mostly, I talked about…
- How creepy it was that Cesar Romero hadn't shaved off his mustache to play The Joker so they put the clown white makeup right over it. On my 17" Zenith at home, it was no big deal but on the big screen at the Picwood Theater, it looked awful.
- How the funniest thing in the movie was, as you can see in the above photo, The Joker and The Penguin wearing masks. Yeah, you'd never recognize them with those masks on.
- How I liked the Batman TV show until about the time I saw the movie. I thought it crossed the line of silliness, instead of teetering on self-parody. It was also a different experience for me to hear an audience laughing out loud at (not with) the Caped Crusaders. It was partly that and partly that the show was turning into a parody of a parody that caused me — and most of America — to lose interest in it. My friends lost interest when Ms. Newmar stopped being Catwoman…though the consensus was that Yvonne Craig in a Batgirl suit was a pretty good consolation prize. Still, when the series was cancelled, none of us cared one bit.
And I forgot to mention that three of the four actors who played the villains appeared two years later in Skidoo. Can't imagine how that escaped my mind.