Holy sitcoms, Batman!

A lot of bad things happen in history. I decided to write about something good instead. So what happened on Jan. 12, 1966?

Just one of the greatest shows ever to hit the TV screen! Blam! Wham! Plop! Zap!

ABC-TV was really hurting in 1965 and needed something to draw an audience. They hired William Dozier, then president of Screen Gems and the person largely responsible for such shows as "Dennis the Menace" and "Bewitched."

What he came up with was "Batman," starring Adam West and Burt Ward. It was the first time a comic book hero became a TV super hero ("Superman" - as far as I can tell with very little time to research this story idea because only one person wrote a letter to the editor and we have to fill this space - came about the other way around).

The people at ABC loved the idea of Batman so much they ram-rodded production from the fall of 1966 to January 1966. They even had a plane fly over the Rose Bowl game and spell out "Batman is coming" in smoke while the first episode was still in production.

They were on such a fast track that the first two episodes were completed in two weeks and the show began airing on Wednesday nights while the stars were still on the third episode.

The ABC execs loved the show so much they told no one let alone the cast members working on the second episode that a test audience booed the first episode.

They ran so fast with "Batman" that they scheduled two episodes to air each week, and because of this they often came up short when it came for the plot of each episode to fill the required time slot.

Their solution to the problem was to include at least once in every episode a scene where Batman and Robin would have to climb a building, with one hugging the other. By tilting the camera on its side the dynamic duo was able to fake their way up each building, killing precious TV seconds. The more time that was needed to kill, the longer the walk.

On especially long walks the execs came up with another time-killer: they began inviting whoever was handy to open a window and talk to the caped crusaders as they hunched over and grimaced their way across what was nothing more than an elevated floor.

That's how stars such as Jerry Lewis, Dick Clark and Sammy Davis Jr. got cameo appearances. Jerry Mathers (the Beaver) and Alan Hale (Skipper), to name a few others, also got conned into making last minute appearances on the show.

And fanfare grew for three seasons. It became a Top 10 show, but it wasn't the lack of viewers that ended "Batman," it was money. The Batcave alone cost over $800,000 to build, and production costs were so high that ABC was forced to sell off "Batman" into syndication to pay the show's bills.

The execs at ABC loved "Batman" the TV series so much that they shelved the original "Batman" product at the request of Dozier. "Batman," it turns out, was a movie filmed in 1965 that finally aired in August 1966, giving cast members a short but much-needed break in production.