BATMAN ’66 WEEK: A Big Little Book with a big impact… — Welcome to BATMAN ’66 WEEK, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the beloved TV show starring Adam West! All week, we’ll be presenting daily tributes and features, leading up to Jan. 12 — the premiere date itself — when we’ll roll out a brand-new TOP 13 BATMAN ’66 EPISODE COUNTDOWN, voted upon by a panel of the most knowledgeable Bat-experts around. Click here for the COMPLETE INDEX. — Dan — I don’t know how old I was, I just know I was young. Very young. I do know I was at a Howard Johnson’s and I saw it through the glass of the restaurant’s gift counter, on the bottom shelf: Batman: The Cheetah Caper, a Whitman Big Little Book with an enticing cover showing the Dynamic Duo wrangling a cobra, in front of a stylized, mid-century Gotham City backdrop. I begged for it from my Mom and Dad but I don’t think I had to work too hard because as we pulled out of the parking lot onto the Route 35 circle in Neptune, N.J., heading back to our house in Ocean Township, I had it in my hands, sitting in the dark in the back seat. That I can’t place the timing (1971, when I was 4, maybe?) in all likelihood means The Cheetah Caper was my first Batman book, predating any comic that came into my possession — my gateway into a storytelling world beyond the Batman TV show. I was obsessed with the show, which was already a syndication hit: It ran on Channel 11 (WPIX) in New York and I never missed an episode. I don’t remember the first time I saw it; it was just always there. (If I have a pre-Batman memory, it’s sitting in my crib with a Woody Woodpecker ukelele, watching bits of dust dance in the sunlight shining through my bedroom window, wondering when someone was going to come get me.) First published in 1969 as a hardcover, The Cheetah Caper, as it turned out, was the perfect distillation of the show and comics themselves. The story is simple: Batman and Robin are in the hunt for a supervillain called the Cheetah, whose skin is covered in spots and wears a black-tan-and-blue, feline-themed outfit, whiskers and all. He’s the fastest man on Earth thanks to his secret addiction...
BATMAN ’66 WEEK: Crossing the Bat-pond to see how they did it in Londinium… — Welcome to BATMAN ’66 WEEK, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the beloved TV show starring Adam West! All week, we’ll be presenting daily tributes and features, leading up to Jan. 12 — the premiere date itself — when we’ll roll out a brand-new TOP 13 BATMAN ’66 EPISODE COUNTDOWN, voted upon by a panel of the most knowledgeable Bat-experts around. Click here for the COMPLETE INDEX. — Dan — By JIM BEARD When Batman ZLONKed, ZOKed, and ZOWIEd into living rooms across the nation back in ’66, it set off a then-unparalleled chain reaction of merchandising that remains legendary to this day—though curiously very little of it had much to do with the actual show. Oh, there were some bubblegum cards with Batman feature film images, and yeah, a few Barris Batmobiles to be had, but beyond that, when the Dynamic Duo ended up on merch in 1966-68 they sported comic book faces (and too many times off-model at that). No, it took Merry Olde England, of all places, to make Batman the television series (In Colour!) really swing like a pendulum through a series of unique, original prose publications, something the Caped Crusader never enjoyed in his home country. There were two paperback books in the U.S. that teased what could have been: the novelization of the ’66 feature film, Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome, by Winston Lyon, and, a few months earlier, an original prose novel by Lyon called Batman vs. 3 Villains of Doom, which aligns itself far more with the comic book characters than the television versions of same. Sadly, that was it in America. The covers of both books spotlighted West in costume, but they just didn’t offer anything new to expand upon the show’s unique continuity—if you can even call it that. In England, though, they went Bat-crazy with the Bat-prose. A company called World Distributors Limited out of Manchester put out a series of digest-size paperbacks of pop-culture subjects, most of them from America, known as World Adventure Library. British kids could pick up each issue of the series for only “one and a penny,” which was barely equivalent to a U.S. dime, a pretty cheap sum. Characters like the Phantom, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, Tarzan, and the Man From U.N.C.L.E. filled out the...
BATMAN ’66 WEEK: How it might have been — whether you were there or not…
A BATMAN ’66 WEEK BIRTHDAY SALUTE to the ultimate gentleman’s gentleman…
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