Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Evidently a noirish non-camp screen test with shadows and a pre-New Look Batman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOVoxnlfxHw&NR=1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOVoxnlfxHw&NR=1)

This footage has been making the rounds the last few years.   There's also versions of the same scenes with alternate actors (Lyle Waggoner as Batman and I forget who was Robin).  There are some very clean, good-looking versions on the recent "Holy Batmania" DVD.

I'm not so sure they were going for "noirish" and "non-camp" here.  The dialog is still campy depending on how you read the lines (and many of them ended up in the pilot episode, "Hey Diddle Riddle" exactly as they're heard here).  What makes it "noirish", I guess, is how dark everything is, but I don't see that so much as a matter of establishing mood as it is a reflection of where they were in terms of development and budget when this thing was shot.  The "Batcave" is heavily shadowed not, I think , to make it "creepy" but rather to hide just how small the set is (especially compared to the huge version we'd get in the final product).  Basically they just rolled in a bunch of computers from the Lost in Space set and probabaly used a "cave" left over from same.

I do dig the pre-"New Look" chest insignia, though.  But I'm not so sure about the cowl.  Fun to see how it goes on, however, and you'll note that in the actual series we never got this kind of shot of Bruce and Dick in the cave sans masks.

Cool stuff.  You can find the alternate screen tests and lots of other goodies over at Scott Sebring's "Batfriend" site: www.batfriend.com (http://www.batfriend.com)

 

Kind of a mixed bag for me.  Even in this test, West and Ward have voices that tend to take things over the top. I loved the Riddler's riddles, seems even in this test that the answers are pretty arcane though.

The dialog and riddles are pretty much verbatim from the story "The Remarkable Ruse of the Riddler".

It's all in the line delivery.

Its been awhile since I've seen the episodes.  I'm assuming Bruce's line about his dead father was never used. Still, the readings of the lines are still very dramatic and tending to camp, despite the look of the sets.

I kind of like the looser fitting costume.

Bruce's line was a bit different in "Hey Diddle Riddle."  We first meet him at the manor, chairing some citizen's committee or other devoted to the eradication of crime in Gotham.  He says a line that begins, "Perhaps if my own parent's hadn't been killed by dastardly criminals..."  and I forget how it ended.

Anyway, it's the closest to an "origin" the Adam West Batman gets and the only reference to Bruce's parents in any context (aside from a moment in a Penguin episode when Bruce pulls out an umbrella that "belonged to my father").  This episode is also the only one to feature an on-screen death, when Molly (Jill St John) falls into the Batcave's atomic reactor ("What a way to go-go!").

It's funny how everything seems a lot more serious.

In that last scene, Batman in his cowl with the lopsided ears looks almost identical to the Batman from those old movie serials.

Great stuff!  I hope this and other similar material makes it to the series DVD set when it finally comes out.

Was the camp thing always intended for the show at the outset?  Seeing this, I can almost see how the intention was serious - but just the way Adam and Burt delivered their lines, I felt like laughing.

Adam always has this slightly psychotic thing going on though, works for Batman but his delivery is just soooo perfect for camp when he tries to be serious.

Neat.