Quote:
Originally Posted by Duster76
The series was a midseason replacement, and as you noted exploded out of the box, but the first season like all other things came to an end. Between the first and second seasons there were clear signs that the phenomenon was little more than a quick fading fad. The Batman movie released in July made a profit but underperformed at the box office based on expectations. There was a live show put together for the summer of 66 but ticket sales were abysmal, at Shea Stadium in New York only 3,000 tickets were sold.
By season two ratings were crashing and ABC was ready to pull the plug, the producers pitched the series with the addition of a Bat Girl character, and the network renewed it as one single half hour a week with a steep budget reduction. Season three fared even worse than season 2, exit Batman.
So now to the question, what happened and to answer that question we have to go back a few years to the offices of DC Comics. What was under discussion was what to do with one of their flagship publications, Detective Comics (That's where the name DC comes from). The monthly comic which featured Batman was one of the worse performing publications in their portfolio, there was even a discussion about cancelling the comic altogether. The eventual solution was to reimagine the Batman character not only in this comic but in the Batman comic as well. The idea was to update the look of Batman, get rid of the original Bat Girl, Bat Woman, Bat Mite, and give the Batmobile a more contemporary look. Batman would take on darker stories moving away from the softer storylines that were so much a part of the 1950 titles that featured Batman. The May 1964 edition of Detective Comics featured the new version of Batman, so this was the Batman fans were now familiar with when the Batman series premiered in early 1966. The fans of the character took him and the world he resided in seriously and the show made a joke out of the entire thing. Rather than bringing the world of Batman as imagined in DC comics to life, the producers created a parody that would have been more at home in Mad Magazine. The fans turned away quickly (in half a season to be exact), leaving the network, the producers, and a lot of TV columnists trying to figure out what happened.
|
1964 was the first Batman revamp. While the show was on the air, the comic book suffered a relapse back into camp and after the fad quickly faded, DC had to revamped the character yet again in the late 60's / early 70's. They even had Dick Grayson (Robin) leave for college to split them up. For a while, they were even experimenting with a new costume for Robin in a 70's issue of the Justice League.
The 2nd revamp was also when they brought back Two-Face and introduced some of Batman's darker villains, such as Ra's Al Ghoul, Killer Croc and ManBat.