As serious comicbook fans we wince at the BAM and KAPOW jibes used whenever a bored mainstream journalist tries to write about comics, but their presence just underlines the cultural impact of the 1960s Batmania craze. Despite all its vainglorious hype the 1960s Batman TV has genuinely made an impression on popular culture. Even in the 1980s school kids would sing “dinner dinner dinner dinner Batman!” as they charged around the playground with their school coat tied around their neck in an approximation of Batman’s cape (not that I’d ever have done that you understand, cough, cough). The theme tune was a quintessential part of the unreformed Batman experience and its author has now passed on to the great bat-orchestra in the sky.
Neal Hefti was a big band musician during the middle of the twentieth century, but it was as an arranger of music for the legenadary Count Basie and Frank Sinatra that he recieved his widest recognition. Hefti also wrote music for television and that included the theme for the 1960s Adam West & Burt Ward Batman TV show. On writing the score he once commented that:
“I tore up a lot of paper. It did not come easy to me. I just sweated over that thing, more so than any other single piece of music I ever wrote. I was never satisfied with it. I was almost going to call them and say, I can’t do it. But I never walk out on projects, so I sort of forced myself to finish.”
Neal Hefti was 85 when he died and had been retired since the 1970s. [Via the LA Times]
The Tim Burton Batman movie and later sequels have done a lot to reform Batman in the public’s mind, but the shear glouriousness of the 1960s Batmania can never be erased. Hefti’s theme was front and centre in that and will never be forgotten by the legions of former children who once believed that they could have been the caped crusader.
And, just for old times sake:
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