from the Times of London (with apologies for the lack of formatting)
Jon Delfin
The Caped Crusader wasn’t always so serious, says Burt Ward, who played Robin in the classic TV series. He tells Jonathan Dean about the sex (kapow!), Adam West (zap!) and his pet food business (woof?)
The new Batman — called, yes, The Batman — is not a funny film. Fans and critics alike are calling it dark, moody and really long. At no point in its three hours does the word “Kapow!” blaze across the screen. There is not even a “Sock!”. For fans of the superhero’s jolly TV show in the 1960s, is this emotionally distraught Batman really Batman at all? Who better to ask than Burt Ward, the Robin to Adam West’s Batman in the series that ran for 120 episodes from 1966 to 1968?
The 76-year-old’s Zoom backdrop shows him and West filming Batman (he lives outside Los Angeles). He last played Robin on screen when he was 23, and, although it led to a typecast career of bit parts and occasionally voicing Robin in a cartoon, he does not seem fed up with the role that defined him. “I love it!” he says. In fairness, though, before Robin he was a junior estate agent. Everything he says is exuberant. He has done 8,000 personal appearances and signed 9.5 million autographs.
West died in 2017, aged 88. Ward misses him greatly. “I loved Adam. A lot of co-stars don’t get along, but we were best friends. We partied together and played tennis. In three years of Batman not one director told me or him how to say a line. We had a chemistry.”
They were funny. The show was funny. It premiered to about 15 million viewers. “Holy human pressure cookers!” “Holy Romeo and Juliet!” “Holy schizophrenia!” said Robin in the various versions of his catchphrase.
Yet the films, especially since the director Christopher Nolan brought endless pomposity in his films starring Christian Bale, have become as funny as a funeral. Robert Pattinson, the latest Batman, also opts for glowering over gags, and it all brings to mind the late Heath Ledger as the Joker hissing, “Why so serious?” Why indeed?
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“There’s a reason,” says Ward. “The studio knows how to sell the product, and they target a different audience now. Teenagers. Date nights. The new vision is tougher, darker, super-masculine and incredibly successful.” Has he found half a morning to take in the new film? “I haven’t, but I hear it’s fabulous.”
It should be pointed out that Ward has a contract with Warner, which owns the rights to Batman.
Still, even if Ward officially enjoys all the Batmen, there is a reason many think that Will Arnett’s take on Bruce Wayne’s alter ego in the animated The Lego Batman Movie is the best since West — Arnett, like West, treated the man with a bat fetish with exactly the seriousness he deserved. Also, the film had Robin, voiced by Michael Cera. It was the first big outing for the sidekick since Chris O’Donnell put on the mask in 1997 in the ghastly Batman & Robin, which rather killed poor Robin off.
“We had something for everyone,” says Ward of his show. “For adults, they had nostalgia for the comic books. But in 1966 you could not find a teenager who would sit down at a television set. They wanted to cruise around drive-in theatres. How did we get them to watch? We implied things that were totally taboo.”
Please go on.
“Batman and Robin bring Batgirl to the Batcave,” Ward explains. “But she can’t know where the Batcave is, so we spray her with Bat-Gas to knock her out.” (The #MeToo movement was a while off.) “In the Batmobile, I say, ‘Gosh, Batman, Batgirl is really pretty.’ Adam had the line, ‘That shows you are coming of age.’ But Adam messed it up for 14 takes. That’s expensive. Why mess it up? He knew the director was going to have to accept his last take — there was no more time. So I say my line and he says, ‘I’m glad you noticed, Robin — it shows the oncoming thrust of manhood!’ The censors descended on us when that show came out.”
Which brings us to Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights, Ward’s memoir. “Did you read it?” I did.
“And you’re still talking to me!?”
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Telling of the rampant sex lives of the clean-cut Batman and Robin, it is quite a ride. “It was a different world then, my friend!” says Ward. “Free love. I could drive on the Pacific Coast Highway and, every 50ft, girls lifted up their tops. It was love and peace and no disease. Maybe some had disease. But most of America was clean. I’ll tell you one thing that will open your eyes: the stuff I left out.” So stories of prostitutes and being seduced by women in Robin outfits were true? “I didn’t lie.”
These days Ward, who has been married four times and has two children by different women, runs the a national animal charity, Gentle Giants Rescue and Adoptions, with his wife, Tracy. They hosted the First Annual Burt Ward Batusi for World Peace event in 2020, in which actors and “Israeli soldiers at the Wailing Wall” did the Batusi, the dance from the Batman series.
Mostly, though, he is into animals. Gentle Giants has a pet food that, the blurb says, extends animal lives. “We get dogs living up to 27½ and cats up to 32½,” he says. What’s the secret? “We are not prematurely killing the animals. So let me explain ...” Basically, he says the pet food business relies on making animals think they’re still hungry to confuse them into wanting to have more. It boosts sales, but the pets are eating more than is good for them.
“Do you have pets?” he asks. I had a cat but she died. “I understand.”
How did he go from playing Robin to this? “I like to say that I was the caped crusader — now I’m the canine crusader.”
And with that we are done. His cheery sign-off? “To the Batmobile!”
