I was sorry to hear of Adam West's passing yesterday. I have to admit that his Batman series was a major disappointment to me.
As I mentioned yesterday on my writing about Wonder Woman, I was a major DC Comics fan back then. I was into the serious "action" of the stories. So when I heard that there would be a TV series of the Batman, I practically salivated at the thought. This was my moment!
I vividly remembered sitting down on the couch in front of the television eagerly awaiting the first episode of Batman to start. I can't tell you how disappointed I was when I saw this inane, campy episode. Biff? Pow? Holy major disappointment!
I ended up watching a lot of the episodes because members of my family liked it, but I never really appreciated the campiness of it all. I silently steamed at the thought of what could have been.
What really chapped my ass was that it became a cultural hit. Why did it chap my ass? Because I was also into the secret agent genre, and one of my favorite shows on at the time was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. The first season of U.N.C.L.E. was a pretty straightforward TV version of the initial James Bond movies. However, once the campiness of Batman became vogue, the U.N.C.L.E. series drifted toward the same campiness. Boy, was I pissed!
Ah, well. Eventually over the decades there were serious takes on the superhero genre, and I've really appreciated them. I'm still not that much into "Camp."
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