The 1966 Stan Lee. A smash success from the moment it aired, Batman propelled the Dark Knight to the big time, creating a full-blown cultural movement when it hit the airwaves in the late sixties.

rare glimpse at Lee during his most productive time in comics.

Lee makes a number of salient points during the interview, but perhaps the most interesting of all is what he had to say about the contemporaneous Batman show:

That television show is so much the style of our comic magazines that, if we did our comic magazines live, we would almost look as if we were imitating Batman.

Batman Pushed the Dark Knight Into the Big Time

The Camp Classic Was a Huge Hit in the Sixties

Lee was impressed with the look of Batman, as he well should have been. The West-starring show had one of the largest budgets of any television series at the time, and the brightly colored sets and costumes surely helped to sell a lot of color TVs at a time when they weren’t already in every household. Later in the interview, Lee opines how he would be thrilled to see the Marvel characters get the same treatment, stating, “I would love for some of our characters to be done with the kind of budget Batman has.”

While the campy humor of Batman made it a hit with adults and kids alike, not everyone was happy. Some comics fans saw the show as making fun of their childhood hero, and once the initial success of the show wore off, the comics industry struggled to be taken seriously after the “Biff! Bam! Pow!” style of the show. White brings this up in the interview, which leads Lee to agree. “You get the feeling that they’re ridiculing or laughing at their own characters,” Lee says, pointing out the issues that many comic book had with the show’s humor.

Batman ’66 Lives On in DC's '66 Comics

DC Keeps the Camp Humor Alive in New Stories

official continuations from DC Comics. It’s interesting to learn that Stan Lee saw the potential of the Adam West Batman series all those years ago.

Source: The Comics Journal