Adam West - The Bright Knight or a Sad Clown?

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https://www.ign.com/articles/quest-p...ight-sad-clown

By Jesse Schedeen

Updated: 3 Mar 2022 3:26 pm
Posted: 28 Feb 2022 3:56 pm

There had been live-action incarnations of Batman before Adam West donned the cape and cowl for the 1966 series on ABC. Lewis Wilson and Robert Lowery both played the Caped Crusader in separate movie serials during the '40s. But for many Bat-fans of a certain age, West's Bruce Wayne is their first exposure to seeing the Dark Knight in live-action.

Nowadays, West’s Batman is viewed as sort of the odd man out of the franchise - the campy, goofy alternative to the brooding heroes of modern DC movies. Even West himself famously described his Batman as “The Bright Knight.” But for all that the TV series and its feature film tie-in capture Batman and his rogues at their silliest, there's a lot more to West's Batman than just '60s pop art camp.

We're kicking off a weeklong retrospective on all the actors to play Batman in a live-action film. None have emerged as the truly definitive Batman actor, but each has brought something unique and vital to this iconic role.

A Serious Batman in Unserious Times
Tonally, visually and stylistically, there's a vast gulf between the 1966 Batman series and every live-action adaptation to come along since. Nowadays, Batman '66 is often dismissed as the weird outlier for the franchise, despite the fact that it simply echoed the goofier and more kid-friendly approach of the Batman comics of the '50s and early '60s. Never let it be said producer William Dozier didn't do his research when pitching the show.

For many younger DC fans who grew up watching West’s Batman punch criminals into an onomatopoeia-filled stupor, he didn’t come across as a joke. He was just Batman, the guy who wages a one-man (well, two-man) war on crime every day. Adults watching the series weekly may not have been taken in by the constant cliffhanger endings threatening death and destruction for the Dynamic Duo, but those cliffhangers helped keep kids enthralled and always coming back for more.

West’s genius was always playing his character completely straight, giving kids a role model to aspire to even as adults laughed at the show’s campy excess. It wasn't so much the Leslie Nielsen effect, where Nielsen achieved comedy gold in films like 1978's Airplane! for treating patently absurd situations with an unflappable deadpan delivery. Rather, West brought a true earnestness to his Batman and Bruce Wayne roles. He took the job seriously, even when decked out in yellow swim trunks and a surfboard, which ensured that younger viewers did, too.

Adam West: The Most Accurate Batman?
West's Batman and Burt Ward's Robin don't necessarily embody what most contemporary fans think of when they picture a cinematic Batman and Robin. West's bright, form-fitting costume stands in stark contrast to the colorless, sculpted, even militaristic approach of all subsequent Batsuits. West's Batman also predates the era when actors were expected to undergo Olympic-level training regimens and shed every last ounce of water weight to get into superhero shape.

But in terms of pure comic book accuracy, West's Batman has most of his successors beat. He's still the only actor to don the classic blue and gray spandex. No sculpted muscles or armored plating here. Even when modern comics like Batman: Hush have brought the blue cape and cowl back in vogue, the movies always pose the same question - "Does it come in black?"

There's also the fact that West's Batman is a scientist and detective as much as he is a physical crimefighter, a balance many Batman movies have struggled to achieve. Even Batman's seemingly endless lineup of single-purpose gadgets (Shark-Repellant Bat-Spray, Anti-Penguin Gas Pills) and meticulously labeled laboratory are weirdly faithful to the source material. Nowadays, Batman is depicted in the comics as the man of a thousand plans - the guy who has a contingency for literally everything.

And unlike most of his successors, West’s Batman never resorted to using lethal force while fighting crime. That alone arguably makes this live-action Batman the most faithful to the comics.

The Unbearable Sadness of Being Batman
Not only is West's Batman/Bruce Wayne a deeply serious hero responding to over-the-top supervillain antics, but there’s also a subtle undercurrent of sadness lurking beneath this Batman’s happy-go-lucky exterior. Even with the 1966 series largely shying away from touching on the murders of the Waynes and the trauma that transformed Bruce into Batman, some of the darker aspects of the character do shine through.

In this candy-colored vision of Gotham City, no one is ever seriously injured or killed, and villains like Joker, Catwoman, and Riddler always return to threaten the city another day. Being Batman is less a crusade and more like a game of dress-up that never ends. It’s almost depressing in a way.

The 1966 movie illustrates this as well as anything, as we see West’s Bruce tempted by his infatuation with Miss Kitka, only for that romance to be revealed as another supervillain trick. The end of that movie suggests even this fun-loving Batman just wants the ride to end.

In that sense, the movie is weirdly reminiscent of 1991's Miracleman #21, a Neil Gaiman-penned comic about how society deals with an excess of spies rendered useless by the end of the Cold War. In this tale, these spies are transplanted into a sort of bubble city where they're free to scheme and conspire and wallow in paranoia, all because they can no longer hack it in normal society.

That may as well be the Gotham West's Batman inhabits. It's a place trapped out of time and where the antics of villains like Joker, Riddler, and Penguin never end. Some part of Bruce may yearn for a normal life, but by now this dance with costumed buffoons is the only life he knows. Joker may slather his face in white makeup, but Batman is the real sad clown in this universe.