Adam West put the 'batty' in 'Batman'

Some fans never forgave Adam West's Batman. But no one ever forgot him.

Michael Keaton? Val Kilmer? George Clooney? Christian Bale? The guys who donned the batsuit for a succession of big-budget "Batman" movies starting in 1989  — all excellent actors — were mostly interchangeable, and were duly interchanged.

Today, only a hardcore fan could tell you whether it was Clooney or Kilmer in, say, 1997's "Batman & Robin" (it was Clooney; we looked it up). It's the villains, not the hero, that everyone remembers from the "Batman" movies: Danny DeVito's Penguin, Tom Hardy's Bane, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze, Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning Joker.

But there was only one Adam West. And West, who died Friday at age 88, was the only actor who managed to turn Batman into a character as memorable as any of the bad guys he SLAMMED! BAMMED! and KA-POWED!! on the hit ABC-TV series.

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How did he do it? Well, that's what caused some hardcore "Batman" fans to have bat-conniptions.

What West did was to turn "Batman" into a super-square — a Boy Scout in a leotard whose every utterance sounded like a public-service announcement.  "Salt and corrosion," West would intone with a straight face. "The infamous old enemies of the crime fighter." Or, "Penguin, you pompous, waddling perpetrator of foul play."

The fact that kids could enjoy "Batman" as a comic-book adventure while adults understood it as a put-on, a sendup of action-movie heroics was one of the key things that turned the show into a brief  but unforgettable national craze in 1966. There were "Batman" toys, games, costumes, trading cards, a spinoff movie. There were endless recordings of the Neal Hefti "Batman" theme. There were mildly dirty playground songs ("Jingle bells, Batman smells … "). There were terrible bat-jokes (Q: Why did Bruce Wayne's date go badly? A: Because he has BAT breath!). And every celebrity from Vincent Price to Ethel Merman vied for a spot as a guest villain. 

Fans who took their "Batman" seriously hated the fact that Adam West didn't. But that was precisely West's genius. "It's part of my character not to take myself too seriously," West told The Record in 1995. "That's one of the reasons I've been able to survive." 

In fact, West was ahead of the curve. His career trajectory anticipated those of Leslie Nielsen and William Shatner, both of whom began as straitlaced action heroes in the 1950s and '60s and ended up, 30 years later, spoofing their old lantern-jawed personas.

Only in West's case, the timeline was hugely accelerated.

In five years, he went from playing it straight, as the stolid sidekick of Robert Taylor in "The Detectives" (1961), to being "Batman's" preposterous caped crusader. And pretty much everything he did after that, from his recurring role as the mayor on "Family Guy" to his appearances in movies like "The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood" and "Doin' Time on Planet Earth," was a burlesque. For West, it was all about being ahead of the curve. "I have no patience with dinosaurs," he told The Record.

What did West understand, in 1966, that put him ahead of his time?

In a word: "camp."

"The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration," Susan Sontag wrote in her essay "Notes on Camp," one of the big cocktail-party topics of 1964.

With the dawning of the '60s youth culture came a new sensibility: ironic, mocking, playful, self-conscious. "Camp" — originally an underground, largely gay, attitude — was very much in the air in the anti-establishment 1960s. 

Whether or not ABC's William Dozier, the man who was to become "Batman's"  executive producer, was aware of Sontag's essay, he was certainly aware of a strange phenomenon at Chicago's Playboy Theater, then an offshoot of the Playboy Club. In 1965, an old serial version of "Batman"  from 1943 had become an unexpected smash among students: the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" of its time.

What was new was the spirit in which audiences watched. 

They went there, specifically, to laugh. They tittered at the wooden acting, the over-the-top dialogue, the primitive special effects. Razzing the action, rather than merely viewing it, was the point. It was, in short, camp. And it also gave Dozier an idea.

He had already acquired the TV rights to "Batman," without knowing what he was going to do with them. Now he knew. "I got the idea of 'camping' it," he said.

West, with his earnest deadpan, was the perfect choice for the mission. And for a too-brief time, his stuffed-shirt superhero was America's bat-sweetheart.

 "We started very high, and there was nowhere to go but down," West said. "It was an extremely costly show to do. I think with falling ratings and the cost, the report I got was: `Let's get this into syndication as soon as we can and get our money back.' As soon as we got 120 segments, that was it." 

Everybody, back in 1966, loved TV's  "Batman." Well, almost everybody.

Some "Batman" fans took the character — the dark avenger whom Bob Kane and Bill Finger conceived in 1939 as the grimmest of all superheroes — very seriously indeed. And they were outraged by the jokey tone of the TV version.

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It was this grim "Batman" that Frank Miller re-introduced in  "The Dark Knight Returns," the "limited release" 1986 comic series that was above all a rebuke of the 1966 TV show. It set the tone for all the "Batman" movies that followed.

Inevitably, the backlash against the TV "Batman" carried over to the actor who played him. West was never asked to appear in any "Batman" movie — even in a cameo.

That does seem a bit unfair, considering how much the franchise owes him. He was the original Camp Crusader: the first, and possibly last, actor to make Batman an interesting character.  As late as the 1990s, he was still hoping for a bat-comeback in one of the Hollywood "Batman" sequels.

"I have a certain affection and proprietary interest," West said.

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com