Posted by Dan Greenfield on Jun 4, 2026
The Day the 1966 BATMOBILE Came to My House
True story. — UPDATED 6/4/26: I posted a feature today on those groovy old coin-operated Batmobile kiddie rides and it got me thinking about the time the 1966 Batmobile came to my house. So, this is a great time reprint that column from wayyyy back in April 2015. Thing is, much of it was way out of date, so I’ve rewritten the piece to a significant degree. Just being transparent. Dig it! — Dan — Back in 2014, I was involved in a one-year wonder comics convention in my hometown of White Plains, N.Y., called New York Comic Fest, led by 13th Dimension‘s co-founder Cliff Galbraith. (It later morphed into East Coast Comicon, before falling prey to the Covid lockdown.) Anyway, one of the attractions was a 1966 Batmobile owned by a cool New Jersey guy named Jeff Breden, who a couple months earlier had taken me for a ride in the world’s greatest car outside Cliff’s Asbury Park Comicon. Since the Batmobile was coming to my town and Jeff was such an affable dude, I decided on a lark — a total lark — to ask him if he’d pick me up in the Batmobile and take me to the show. I figured, “What the hell, why not ask?” I didn’t expect him to say yes. But he did. In the weeks leading up to the show, I asked him a couple of more times, “Are you sure this isn’t gonna be a problem?” He never hesitated once. “Oh, yeah, no problem.” But I still expected some kind of hiccup until I looked out the window of my house that bright June morning. There it was: the Batmobile. Like a kid at Christmas, I ran outside. Incredible. The Batmobile. In front of my house. These are the things of which dreams are made. It wasn’t long until the neighbors came out of their homes to gawk at this four-wheeled wonder on their street, phone cameras at the ready. I was worried we were going to cause an accident because every car slowed down to rubberneck, as well as joggers and cyclists out for a morning spin. I got in. Last time I was in Breden’s Batmobile, I took a video of the ride but this time, I didn’t want to. I just wanted to live in the moment....
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