Two decades after the demise of television's "Batman," the character and the actor are resurfacing - together, then separately.
Adam West, who played the Caped Crusader on the twice-weekly prime-time TV series from 1966 to '68 and in the 1966 feature film, said:"I've done maybe five or six fantasy/sci-fi conventions and I'll probably do more because they pay me so well, and they're so easy, and I can see a lot of people."
He's talking from his home in south-central Idaho en route to a stopover visit in Tampa, Fla.
He'll do it as Adam West - not as Batman. That's a no-no now and perhaps permanently.
West, an unusually affable fellow, did all his Batwork when rights to the character were held by 20th Century Fox in the mid-'60s.
"Fox didn't retain the rights to do new or original material," West says. When the rights lapsed, Warner Bros. scooped them up and began several years of planning on the new "Batman" film, tentatively scheduled to be released June 23. It stars Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker.
West had hoped to do the film. In 1983 he told Vernon Scott of United Press International: "There's talk of a nationwide talent hunt for a new guy. But the fans want to see me as Batman again. . . . I'm too young to hang up my cape."
He submitted a script outline to Warner Bros. The studio developed its own and opted for Keaton, using Nicholson for villainous support just as Warner Bros. backed up Christopher Reeve in "Superman" with heavyweight Gene Hackman.
"The Batman I created," West says, "was a lighter, loonier character than what is being done today. My conversation about that is usually limited, though, because I have nothing to do with (the new one). I haven't seen it. It's not my candy store. They have a right to do theirs.
"I will do a Batman special for Fox, hosting it as myself, and we'll use excerpts from the old shows."
There may be no series in TV history that burned so torridly and so briefly.
"It was in the red and a case of deficit financing (normal when a show is new). Fox said, `Let's just do enough episodes to put it in reruns and get our money back.' And that's when I started to get uncomfortable with the show - or maybe more uncomfortable because the tights were not comfortable to begin with. (Fox) started cutting costs, with less money budgeted for special effects and guest stars, and they were just making it more of a kids' show. When it was canceled (by ABC), NBC wanted to pick it up, but the expensive sets had been destroyed, including the enormous bat cave."
For years afterward, West struggled - tied to a show that would yield no new episodes yet limited by the perception of him held by casting agents and producers. He turned up sporadically on TV ("I Take These Men," "Laverne and Shirley," "What Have You Got to Lose?"), films ("One Dark Night") and in dinner theaters.
But - and he's careful not to sound wounded when he describes this - when brief opportunities arose to reprise Batman in billboards or commercials, he was socked - Pow! in the pocketbook by the new corporate Batman proprietors, Warner Bros.
It was The Lone Ranger Syndrome, recalling Clayton Moore's fight to be allowed to wear the Lone Ranger costume in public appearances during the past few years and being reduced to wearing sunglasses instead of the trademark mask.
"Dishonorably dismasked," as West puts it empathetically.
"You'd think they'd see that all these things cross-pollinate, wouldn't you?" he asks. "But the statement I kept getting from Warner Bros. through my people was that Warners felt it would be confusing in the minds of the public. Now how the . . . ? I mean, people aren't dumb. They know the difference between the one in the hard plastic costume and the body doubles and the one they saw in the TV series and the (1966) movie.
"But I won't criticize Warners and be embittered by it. Michael Keaton is an artist, and so am I, and we do our own thing.
"I've got three movies in the can awaiting release - "Doin' Time on Planet Earth," "Solar Survivors" and "Night Raider" - and a possibility of a fourth starting toward the end of the month. So you see, things are finally beginning to cook a little."