Review: 'Pop Sixties: Shindig!, Dick Clark, Beach Party, and Photographs from the Donna Loren Archives'

Donna Loren’s resume isn’t super substantial but it does swing. She was a regular on Shindig!, did guest appearances on the sixties’ too coolest series—Batman and The Monkees—, sang fun surf pop tunes, shimmied in goofy beach flicks, and shilled for delicious Dr. Pepper. Her new book Pop Sixties: Shindig!, Dick Clark, Beach Party, and Photographs from the Donna Loren Archives is similarly slight and groovy. She contributes some quotations and photo captions, but her biggest text load is a skimpy eight-page memoir. However, it is a juicy one as she explains how her parents essentially forced her into show business, forced her to get a nose job to look less “ethnic” (ugh), and wouldn’t allow her out of the house without makeup. Loren discusses such semi-dark material with the kind of cheerful you’d expect from a Pepper, though she clearly realizes her upbringing was messed up. She did make the most of it though, and the proof of that is in an abundance of fab B&W and color photos that find her rubbing elbows with The Supremes, Teri Garr, Davy Jones, Adam West, Burt Ward, The Dixie Cups, Brenda Holloway, La La Brooks, Dick Dale, Tina Turner, The Righteous Brothers, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and a bunch of other people cooler than anyone you or I will ever meet. Loren is groovy and photogenic enough on her own to carry the book when she isn’t flanked by her fellow pop stars. I can’t say this skinny 148-page volume exactly justifies its heavy $34.95 cover price, especially since both her Batman and Monkees stints are represented by mere two-page spreads, but it’s definitely fun to flip through. Bobby Sherman contributes the foreword and ace Sunset Strip historian Domenic Priore assists with the history and captions.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 298

The Date: July 24

The Movie: Batman (1966)

What Is It?: Forget your mumbly, grumbly, brooding, twenty-first century Dark Knights. The real Batman would prefer that you drink your milk, help old ladies cross the street, and pack plenty of shark repellent spray whenever you go swimming. The feature-length spin off of Bill Dozier’s pop-art spoof TV series is like a glorious four-part episode with four times the usual villainy. Joker! Penguin! Riddler! Catwoman! Too bad Julie Newmar couldn’t make the party, since she’s the most purrfect Catwoman and Bat-villain, but Lee Meriwether does do a smashing job in the cat suit.

Why Today?: D.C. Comics declared today Batman Day.

Review: 'Batman: The Complete Television Series Blu-ray'

As you may have been able to tell from the bevy of Batman-centric reviews I've been posting here on Psychobabble this month, the Caped Crusader's 75th Anniversary has infected DC, WB, and other holders of Batman properties with a serious case of Batman fever lately. The crown jewel of all these wonderful toys is the release of William Dozier's brilliant live-action series on home video for the very first time. Why Batman: The Complete Television Series is only zapping into shops now is a complicated conundrum worthy of The Riddler, and it's been detailed elsewhere. So let's just skip ahead to how Warner Brothers did with this landmark blu-ray box.

Full disclosure: I have not watched every single one of the 120 episodes it contains. Doing so would mean this review wouldn't get posted until sometime in mid-2015. Based on the ones I've watched so far, the series looks better than it ever did and certainly better than its makers ever intended. You can count the bristles of Cesar Romero's mustache under all that Joker make up. Actually, everyone looks pretty heavily done up here with fake tans that probably registered as a healthy skin tone on crappy 1966 TVs. But obvious facade is a big part of Batman's humor, so it all works toward the show's grand joke. The primary-color palette pops like a bat-punch to the bat-face. Batman and Robin's capes look so silkily tactile you'd swear you could reach through the screen and snatch them off the dynamic duo.

One down note is that there is the occasional missing element, the most glaring of which are the absence of the tag at the end of the "Marsha's Scheme of Diamonds" episode and a brief shot of John Astin in "A Riddling Controversy". Most of the lost bits are bumpers announcing next week's villains that will probably only be lamented by the most hardcore batfans. (*Information about WB's disc replacement program can be found here)

We do get a nice array of extras, including a half-hour doc on Adam West that plays like a mini-"E! True Hollywood Story" ("Hanging with Batman"), a piece about tie-in merchandise with lots of toys and costumes to drool over ("Holy Memorabilia Batman"), a doc on the show's comic-book look and attitude ("Batmania Born"), odd sporadic video commentaries by West cut into the first two episodes of the series, a collection of dopey soundbites from cast and crew members of current TV shows ("Na Na Na Batman"), and a semi-celebrity fan roundtable discussion mediated by Kevin Smith. Funny, relaxed, and informative, that roundtable was my favorite of the lot. "Batmania Born" is the smartest retrospective of the bunch.

Most of these extras are notable for the participation of Adam West and the absence of his co-stars aside from appearances by Burt Ward and Julie Newmar in "Batmania Born" and very briefly in "Na Na Na Batman". "Hanging with Batman" and "Holy Memorabilia Batman" are marred by a tone too earnest for tributes to a ridiculously fun series. You might want to hit the stop button before a collector starts singing a sappy piano ballad about his toys at the end of "Holy Memorabilia Batman". Unaffected by such matters are a sampling of vintage tidbits that include screen tests and a seven-minute pilot for a "Batgirl" series that didn't happen. Inclusion of the 1974 PSA about the federal equal pay law starring Yvonne Craig and Burt Ward (and an imposter Batman) would have been a really cool addition too. It's not here, but you can always just watch the bad quality version on YouTube.

Finally, we must make mention of the boffo limited edition packaging, which is more notable for a very cool, magnetically sealed box complete with Neal Hefti-theme-song playing button than any of the trinkets inside. The grooviest of these is probably the Hot Wheels Batmobile, but we also get a neat repro set of Topps' 1966 Batman trading cards. A wafer-thin hardcover book of color photos is less impressive, but when all is said and done, Batman: The Complete Television Series blu-ray is not one of the best home video releases of 2014 for the extras and swag. It's the gorgeously restored presentation of one of the best series of the sixties that makes this a must own. You might want to wait for the inevitably cheaper (though currently way overpriced, for some reason), standard packaging release to arrive before spending your bat dollars though.

Review: Nelson Riddle's 'Batman: Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album'

Can't wait until November 11 for the landmark home video release of the classic "Batman" TV series? Well, Bat Fan, you can whet your Bat-ppetite further with Mercury/UMe's reissue of the show's Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album. Originally released by 20th Century Fox records in 1966, the year the series debuted, this record was both of its time and seemingly ahead of it, much like the series it advertised. Nelson Riddle's mix of lounge jazz, light Rock & Roll, and surf was very sixties soundtracky, while the presentation was much more forward thinking. The way the record folds dialogue from the series in with the music sounds like sampling twenty years ahead of schedule, especially the litany of Burt Ward's "Holy-This!" and "Holy-That!" littered through "Holy-Hole-in-the-Doughnut -or- (Robin, You've Done It Again)". There's also guest gabbing from Special Guest Villains Anne Baxter (as Zelda), Frank Gorshin (as The Riddler), Burgess Meredith (as The Penguin), and George Sanders (as Mr. Freeze).

That major baddies like The Joker and Cat Woman are absent is probably down to the fact that the Batman: Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album was released so early in the show's run, before viewers had a chance to really identify their favorite villains (Julie Newmar wouldn't regularly appear as Cat Woman until season two). This also means that a couple of favorite themes are absent, such as the Batgirl theme and the awesomely fuzzed-out variation on the main theme that played during fight scene's in the series' final season. Also, one should be warned that the "Batman Theme" on this album is not composer Neal Hefti's recording that kicked off the show but a remake by Riddle that works in a surprise lounge-jazz interlude. But, hey, that's how the album came out five decades ago. The re-release is available on both CD and vinyl, which is what I received to review. If you really want to recreate that Bat feeling of '66, the vinyl is the only way to go.

Review: 'Batman: The Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1966-1967'

Batman has existed in a swarm of guises. He’s been a comic book and a campy live-action TV series and a Saturday morning cartoon and a Mego action figure and more than one movie franchise. One of the guy’s lesser-discussed incarnations is his turn as a newspaper comic strip. Batman first popped up in your local paper in 1943, only lasting there a few years before flapping back to the funny books. He had more success during his return run from 1966 to 1970 thanks to Adam West and Burt Ward.

Cult Club: "Batman" (1966 - 1968)

In this new feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

When The Dark Knight Rises opens next week, you can bet your cowl that the punches won't be punctuated with cartoon Pows, there will be a distinct lack of villainous canted angles, and at Christian Bale's personal request, Robin won't be invited to the grand finale. Not a "Holy this!" or a "Holy that!" to be heard. Even more so than Tim Burton's Batman movies of yore, Chris Nolan and friends have distanced themselves from William Dozier's campy sixties super sitcom as assuredly as possible. With several decades of dark, dark Dark Knights by way of graphic novels such as Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, in which The Joker severs Batgirl’s spine, and hate-fueled Frank Miller's Year One, in which Catwoman is given a fun new back story as a prostitute, Batman had basically cleansed himself of his goofy past with a Brillo pad dipped in lye. The Bat fans who groaned every time Neal Hefti's theme tune started pumping welcomed this return to the superhero’s supposed grizzly, gritty essence.

Those of us who don't feel that ample doses of nihilism and streetwalking are necessary to justify our comic reading may be amenable to the existence of several Batmans. The black armor-clad Dark Knight has his intriguing place as a noir-ish tortured hero/anti-hero willing to cause zillions of dollars in urban damage to bring the baddies to justice and give us our daily dose of existential angst. But so does that milk-drinking square in the grey leotard who always cautions Robin about driving safety and pows us into guffaws whenever he batclimbs up a skyscraper or breaks into an impromptu Batusi.

Even in the sixties, there were Batfans who squirmed at the series that debuted on ABC in January of 1966. Longtime fan and former D.C. Comics editorial director Mike Gold dismissed TV’s Batman as “regrettable” in his introduction to The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. In his afterward to the Batman: Year One graphic novel, Miller grumbled about “Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars like Vincent Price and Cesar Romero… For me, Batman was never funny.” He goes on to recall picking up his first Batman comic at the age of eight and marveling over Gotham City’s “cold shafts of concrete lit by cold moonlight, windswept and bottomless.” Now there was a fun kid.

Of course, in the sixties, comic books were for kids, and a vocal adult fanbase of the medium would not emerge for a decade or two. The Batman series, however, was embraced by all ages because it was comic booky and TV’s first direct link to the burgeoning pop art movement. A single episode of Dozier’s series was worth its weight in an endcap of Warhol soup cans. There was much for kids to enjoy at face value, with its colorful villains and action-packed punch ups. For adults, Batman was an unprecedented exercise in irony. No weekly series was so self-aware and so funny. Standards for humor change, which is why it isn’t likely many modern viewers will find much to giggle about when Dick Van Dyke flops over his ottoman for the zillionth time. Batman holds up because its humor was so far ahead of its time, seemingly responding to viewer criticisms in the same way current shows often do in the wake of Internet outcry. Batman acknowledged the ridiculousness of Commissioner Gordon not recognizing that the voice of Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred was the same one he heard at the end of the Batphone, the fact that Wayne and Batman never appear in the same place at the same time, and how Batman and Robin managed to escape seemingly inescapable death week after week. Though the series’ formulaic structure would cause it to wear out its welcome before finishing its three-season run of 120 episodes (for its first two seasons, the show ran twice a week),  it largely excused its clichés by acknowledging and poking fun at them.

Batman could be knowing, but its humor was equally dependent on the brilliantly broad comic performances of its cast. West’s humor was almost solely derived from his nearly comatose even-temper in the most ludicrous situations, while his friends and foils contrasted his hurricane eye with whirling lunacy. Stand up comic Frank Gorshin transformed the minor comic book villain The Riddler into one of Batman’s arch and most manic nemeses. As the best of three Catwoman portrayers, Julie Newmar was a master of drawing out the double-meanings in her sexually suggestive, often sadistic (to a captive dynamic duo: “Your eardrums will shatter and your brains will turn into yeccchh”) dialogue. Victor Buono channeled W.C. Fields for his King Tut. On the side of justice, Burt Ward bordered brilliance when lapsing into randy delinquent mode after Catwoman’s assistant slipped him a Mickey in the “That Darn Catwoman”/”Scat Darn Catwoman”, the series’ funniest arc. A great deal of the fun of Batman is watching its great cast have fun.

Batman’s humor—both clownish and ironic—and vivid imagery (the characters and blatantly artificial sets were painted in a primary palette pulled right from the comics) made it a sensation among the psychedelic crowd. The year it debuted, both The Kinks and pop-art champions The Who aligned themselves with the series by covering Hefti’s theme in concert and on disc. The producers did their best to cash in on the Rock-and-Batman connection by enlisting a few agreeable pop stars like Leslie Gore, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and Chad and Jeremy to guest star. The older generation got in on the hipness when Sammy Davis, Jr., Edward G. Robinson, and Art Linkletter appeared in the iconic Batclimb gag (while Batman and Robin were taking their sexually suggestive scale up the building of the week, a celebrity would open a window, whom the Dynamic Duo would engage in an awkward, action-halting interview). Some respected sources, such as Variety (which noted the “action, clever sight gags, interesting complications and … all out … batmania” of 1966’s feature-length Batman), got the joke.

The very perks that endeared Batman to its generation of viewers were those that made it a thing of derision among later-day Dark Knight fans. But if we look back on the comics, they were ripe with what we now call camp from the days when Bill Finger and Bob Kane first hatched the Caped Crusader. 1946’s “1001 Umbrellas of the Penguin” finds our fine-feathered fink feigning partnership with the Dynamic Duo to convince his auntie she’d raised him right. In 1952’s “The Joker’s Utility Belt”, the clown prince of crime harrumphs at not being inducted into Gotham Museum’s Comedian Hall of Fame. That latter story was way-out enough to pull the rare feat of directly inspiring an episode of the series (Cesar Romero’s coming out “The Joker Is Wild”). In the years immediately preceding the series, Batman and Robin had taken to time traveling and battling space dinosaurs in the comic, leaving the series looking positively sober in comparison.

Much like The Monkees (which I gave a more thorough once over here on Psychobabble last year), Batman is a series that skews hopelessly dated and corny in hindsight. Also like The Monkees, its wit and innovation is unmissable when actually reviewing the series. Something to be remembered, not swept under the Batcape.

June 30, 2009: Pop meets Batman!

As a kid I spent many, many afternoons vegetating in front of the gloriously campy “Batman” series that aired on ABC from 1966 to 1968. Recently rediscovering it on the Internet (the series is unavailable on DVD for an abundance of reasons), I’m blown away by how consistently funny the show remains, especially when compared to the great majority of sitcoms from its era. As a ‘60s pop geek, I’m also thrilled by the number of pop star cameos and guest-star spots during the series’ second season (which was chided for taking the camp too far by critics who didn’t quite get the show).


In the episode “Dizzoner the Penguin”, the Penguin runs against Batman for mayor of Gotham City, and we have an unabashedly cartoonish Paul Revere and the Raiders performing silly dance steps and blasting some instrumental nonsense at Pengy’s rally.

The Raiders were no strangers to television at that time as they were already regularly featured performers on Dick Clark’s Rock & Roll variety show “Where the Action Is”

A few weeks later, Catwoman schemed to steal the mellow singing voices of British folk/pop duo Chad and Jeremy (best known in the States for their 1964 hit “A Summer Song”). The two-episode arch in which they appear (“The Cat’s Meow”/”The Bat’s Kow Tow”) is notable for the absurd claims that Chad and Jeremy were currently the most popular singing duo in the world (Simon and Garfunkel? Peter and Gordon maybe?) and that they had a reputation somewhere along the lines of the Who:


Fortunately, Chad and Jeremy take a break from their chaos and mayhem-making long enough to sing the pleasantly catchy “Teenage Failure”.

The most substantial pop star appearance on “Batman” was that of Leslie Gore, who played Catwoman’s protégé, Pussy Cat, in the “That Darn Catwoman”/”Scat! Darn Catwoman” arch. Gore sings “Maybe Now” for Catwoman’s flyer hat-wearing henchmen…but it’s the scenes that find a drugged and randy Batman and Robin speaking in faux hipster lingo that really make these episodes twin works of genius:

If any group was born to appear on “Batman”, it was The Who, a band that shared the show’s Pop Art panache, irreverently self-mocking humor, and mindless violence. Unfortunately, the pre-Tommy Who received little love in America, so the boys would have to settle for covering Neil Hefti’s indelible theme song on their Ready, Steady, Who E.P. (1966), a throwaway release fueled by Keith Moon’s surf-rock and comic book obsessions.

Eleven years later, The Jam did the same on their debut record, In the City, although this may be more of a tribute to their heroes, the Who, than the program itself.

Sub-Brian Wilson surf popsters Jan and Dean (to whom the Who paid tribute with their cover of “Bucket T” on Ready, Steady, Who), actually recorded an entire tribute album titled Jan and Dean Meet Batman (1966). The song called “Batman” is not a cover of the Hefti piece (although it does quote it), but a new song composed by Jan and Dean full of their trademark castrati harmonies and shameless cheese:


The rest of the album is filled out with ludicrous (and occasionally racially insensitive) spoken-word comedy routines and songs with titles such as “The Joker is Wild”, “Robin the Boy Wonder”, and “A Stench in Time”, which are either detestable or delectable depending on your tolerance for camp cutesiness. An instrumental titled “Mr. Freeze” is pretty slick, though:



Of greater musical value is Batman and Robin: The Sensational Guitars of Dan & Dale, a children’s record recorded to cash in on the show’s success that rather bizarrely features jazz legend Sun Ra  and rock legend Al Kooper. Along with some funky jams with titles like “Penguin’s Umbrella”, “The Riddler’s Retreat”, and (once again) “Joker is Wild”, there’s the familiar theme song, although the keening chorus of the original has been replaced with a soulful chant:

For my money, “Robin’s Theme” is the killer cut on this record.