Today there's a whole lot of Batman entertainment to watch, but in the days of my childhood there wasn't much live-action Batman to choose from. The 1940s serials Batman and Batman and Robin weren't readily available, so you either watched reruns of the 1966 Batman TV series, airings of the Batman '66 movie, or - starting from the time that I was five on - waited for Warner Bros. to release the brand new Batman features. So that's how I came to watch the 1966 Batman movie repeatedly. Not content to just catch it on TV, I even ended up buying it on VHS - the only official copy of a Batman movie that I ever owned, until the DVD era. (I did have the Burton movies recorded off of cable.) As time has gone on, I've returned to Batman '66 more often than the others... so it's probably safe to say that this is the Batman adaptation I have seen the most.
Released to theatres soon after the Batman season 1 finale aired on television, Batman: The Movie came together very quickly. Lorenzo Semple Jr., a writer on the show, was given a week to assemble a treatment, then he fleshed that treatment out into a screenplay over the course of ten days. After a few days of rewrites, the script was fast tracked into production with Leslie H. Martinson, who had directed a couple episodes of the show, at the helm. The public was experiencing Batmania, $50 million in Batman merchandise was on store shelves in early 1966, and the powers-that-be wanted to cash in on the Batman craze before it started to fade. Filming began at the end of April and the movie was in theatres at the end of July.
So how do you entice viewers who had just had the opportunity to watch two episodes of Batman a week, and would have that opportunity again in the fall, to go spend their money to see a Batman movie? This couldn't just be the equivalent of a few episodes being smashed together. They had to go bigger with it. 20th Century Fox pumped so much money into the budget of the movie, producer William Dozier said it cost twenty times the average episode. Viewers had just seen a lot of The Joker, The Penguin, The Riddler, and Catwoman on the small screen, so the movie couldn't just be about Batman (Adam West) and his sidekick Robin (Burt Ward) trying to thwart one of them again. No, the movie would be about Batman and Robin trying to thwart all four of them at once.
This is a super-villain team-up movie. The Joker, The Penguin, The Riddler, and Catwoman have come together to form a group called the United Underworld, and with their powers combined they're planning to spread their villainy beyond the borders of Gotham City. They have plans to disrupt the world. Now that's a plot worthy of a movie. Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, and Frank Gorshin reprise the roles of The Joker, The Penguin, and The Riddler from the TV series, but small screen Catwoman Julie Newmar had a scheduling conflict and had to opt out. She was replaced by Lee Meriwether - who was then replaced by Newmar when the next season of the TV show went into production. This was the only time Meriwether played Catwoman; Newmar played the character on thirteen episodes of the show, and Earth Kitt played Catwoman on three episodes. They had more time as the character than Meriwether did, but since I have seen the movie many more times than I have any given episode, she is the actress I primarily associate with Batman '66 Catwoman.
The villains have gotten their hands on a device that can dehydrate the human body until it's nothing but a pile of colorful dust. They use the device to dehydrate the United World Organization's Security Council. This is serious business! The fate of representatives from nine different countries around the world are in their hands. In the midst of trying to pull off this "get rich quick" scheme (they're holding the dehydrated people ransom for $1 million a piece), the costumed villains are also actively trying to murder our costumed heroes to get them out of their way. Just like on the TV show, Batman and Robin regularly find themselves trapped in situations that nearly kill them. Torpedoes are fired at them from The Penguin's penguin-styled submarine on multiple occasions. At one point there's a plan to catapult Batman into the arms of an exploding octopus. A missile knocks the Batcopter out of the sky.
Yes, the Batcopter. You don't just get to see the Batmobile in the movie, you also get to see the Dynamic Duo in the Batcopter, on the Batboat, and riding the Batcycle (Robin sits in the side car).
There's so much action packed into the movie's 105 minutes, Batman and Robin are in costume for almost the entire movie - in fact, we only see Robin in his Dick Grayson street clothes for a matter of seconds. Batman does spend some time as Bruce Wayne in the middle of the movie, as there's a stretch where he's being romanced by Soviet journalist Kitayna Ireyna Tatanya Kerenska Alisoff. Kitka for short. This romance gets Bruce knocked out and captured by the villains, because Kitka is actually Catwoman and the United Underworld - not realizing that Bruce Wayne is Batman - has decided that the millionaire is the perfect bait to lure Batman into one of their traps. Even when Bruce is hanging out with Kitka, Dick remains in his Robin costume, monitoring them with Bruce's butler Alfred Pennyworth (Alan Napier).
Batman: The Movie is a blast to watch. When a movie has Batman being attacked by a shark within the first ten minutes, you know you're in for a good time. It moves at a rapid pace, there's never a dull moment, and there are great scenes of Batman and Robin putting together clues and solving riddles in their wonderfully ridiculous way. The actors playing the villains seem to be having the time of their lives chewing the scenery, as usual, and it's always entertaining to watch Adam West play the Caped Crusader.
This movie also contains one of the most memorably silly sequences of all time, in which Batman runs around on a dock trying to dispose of a bomb before the fuse burns out. Everywhere he turns, there's something or someone that keeps him from being able to toss the thing away. As he says, "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"
Batman: The Movie's box office success was surprisingly moderate; it needed $3.2 million to break even, and ended up making $3.9 million. But nearly sixty years later, it's still being watched and enjoyed by a lot of people on a regular basis. In that way, it has been amazingly successful.
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