Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Holy Women's Lib, Batman! (1974)

A mini-Batman reunion highlights this long forgotten public service announcement (PSA), produced in 1974. Burt Ward (Robin), Yvonne Craig (Batgirl), and narrator William Dozier are all back, but instead of Adam West, we have Dick Gautier (ex-Get Smart) as Batman. At that time, West was looking to avoid being typecast, but as we all know, he'd later re-embrace the mantle of the Bat.

As it is, Gautier has only one line, trying his hardest to mimic West (serviceable, but not perfect), but that leaves room for Batgirl to make her case for equal pay (as if there was ever a salary scale for superheroes). This would be the last time we'd hear from Dozier, but Ward would reunite with West 3 years later for The New Adventures of Batman.

Uploaded by Tommy Brookshire:


2 comments:

magicdog said...

Boy how out of date! Not ot mention a horrible depiction of our heroes!

What if the situation were reversed and Batman & Robin chose not to rescue Batgirl for some reason? Oh there'd be hell to pay!

The Batgirl I lovingly remembered would NEVER have leveraged B&R like that! As you note, superheroes don't get paid (unless you count, "Heroes for Hire") so it's rather pointless. Robin, as Bruce Wayne's ward would most likely be getting an allowance of some sort anyway, not a salary.

Being a woman myself, I've never known of any lower payscale for women compared to men for the same job - unless the other person had seniority, but that goes for either gender.

hobbyfan said...

Blame it on whomever wrote the ad. As the title implies, Women's Lib was pretty big in the early 70's, and the idea was to riff on Season 3 of Batman, with Batgirl taking an aggressive stand on equality in pay for women. A lot, of course, has changed 41 years later. I'm not sure if DC actually ever signed off on this piece, though at the time, they had Wonder Woman wearing a Emma Peel-style white jumper in her book, and......