( Reprinted from the Saturday Evening Post - May 2, 1966)
HAS TV GASP! GONE BATTY??
By John Skow
( Note- The Saturday Evening Post is too large to fit in a scanner so I have recreated the article as close to the original layout as possible- David )
W hy you may well ask, is a nice young man like Billy
West Anderson out there n Los Angeles hanging from a hook?
Why does Roger Arm so bitterly disdain spaceships?
Has E William Henry lost his mind? Why, furthermore, is Jimmy
Juliano, a junior majoring in sociology, leaping about the Quad 
at
the University of Connecticut at 11:30 at night (causing hundreds of
scholars to set aside Samuelson's Econonomics and Nugget
magazine and rush to their windows), dressed in a borrowed black
cape, a knitted ski mask with ears attached, and black dyed underwear
shorts pulled on over his blue jeans?
Finally, why in the name of sanity is Gina Valentina, a sensible young lady. risking bronchial disorder by wibble-wobbling around Big Al's Bar in San Francisco wearing a mask and cape but (HOLY COW!) no shirt?
These are good questions. The answer is that, although last year's mass alarum (skateboards, elephant jokes, William Buckley's campaign. to be mayor of New York) have disappeared beneath the fish heads and empty tin cans of non-history, and next year's frenzies have not happened yet, this season's dementia is already hard upon us. It is (POW! AAARGH! IMBECILITY!!!) Batman!!
The Batman TV program was loosed upon the world on January 12. It immediately lodged itself in that subcellar of the national cerebellum that controls involuntary movements political deliriums, the moods of teen teenagers, flying-saucer sightings, female nudity, the bayings of college presidents and, naturally, all distempers of the entertainment business. Batman abniptly became (SNICKER!! REVULSION !) an obligatory topic in every conversation, a factor in the convings of every department-store executive, a dull-day column lightener for every editorialist, the theme of every junior-high-school dance, and a pass word for every adult who for reasons praiseworthy or contemptible wished to slip past the sentries of the young.
Now Batmania spreads throughout the nation. The climate of foolishness produces winds of idiocy. Federal Cornmunications Commission Chairman E. William Henry, who knows better, appeared at a Washington benefit recently wearing a Batman suit. At the University of Conneticut, Jimmy Juliano rigged himself out as Batman, persuaded his roommate to approximate Robin, and capered about the campus. University officials revealed themselves as Batfinks when they proclaimed that the capering must not recur.
Unable to stop herself, Gina Valentina confronted all of those red faces at Big Al's in half a Batman outfit. A topless Batwoman was inevitable. In San Francisco, bare-topped frugistes are as common as Chinese waiters, and a girl without a gimmick is just a thorax in the crowd.
Nationwide rage (KILL!! DESTROY!!) followed when ABC Tele vision broke into Batman to give news of the emergency landing of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Maj. David Scott in Gemini 8. Said 20-year-old Roger Arm of Queens: "I was plenty mad be cause I missed out on Batman finding the clues and I missed out on the fighting." Naturally Arm was angry. Gemini was last year's fad.
That leaves Billy West Anderson. Why is he hanging from that hook? Well, someone has to be Batman. Anderson, whose stage name is Adam West, is it. Just now, as we look on, he wishes he were not. His archenemy The Riddler has tied him back to back with Robin (played by a slight young man named Burt Ward, who is not very happy either). The Riddler, who for some reason seems to be the owner of a candle factory (and who gets his name because of his fiendish delight in taunting the moronic Gotham City cops with riddles), is about to dip Bat- man and Robin into a pot of boiling wax.
This is very painful for West and Ward, who are now hung about 15 feet from the floor of a sound stage at the Desilu studios in Culver City. To hang an. actor without the governor's permission you strap him into a leather- and-steel corset that passes around the waist and between the legs in a way that is uncomfortable even to look at. Then you attach the hook of a cable hoist to a hook on the back of the corset and push the hoist's "on" button.
West, who is working for the first time since a flu attack put him into the hospital four days ago, has been going since 6 A.M., when he left his Malibu Beach house, and he has been on the hook with Burt Ward since 7:30. This week's script calls for some 40