The sixties West-and-Ward BATMAN TV show is finally (after years of wrangling and confusion over copyrights between 20th Century Fox and Warner Brothers/ DC Comics) about to be released on DVD and BR disc. Hurrah. And bad news for convention bootleggers who have been taking advantage of the official void for years.
To mark the occasion, here's a 1979 UK Corgi Toys advert for their line of vehicle spin-offs. Yep, more than a decade after the TV show debuted on ABC in the States, the toys were still big business in the UK. I certainly had the smaller version of the Batmobile and the Bat Boat (I believe they came in a car-boat-trailer combo set of some sort) and friends with better-resourced parents had the larger version with more action features (including the pop-out buzzsaw and rocket launcher).
The TV show (and, latterly, the movie) had been mainstays of the British TV schedules for decades. In the eighties, episodes turned-up on ITV (Anglia aired them on a Saturday lunchtime, although I don't know if that was regional or national scheduling), TV-am (ITV's national breakfast contractor) used them as part of their block of weekend early-morning kids programmes and - famously - as strike-breaking schedule-fillers during the prolonged and bitter technicians strike (unable to mount a full service, TV-am management loaded-up the VT machines and played whatever they had in the programme cupboard) and I'm sure the LWT-produced NIGHT NETWORK (a partially-networked, prerecorded overnight programme) also used reruns as part of its line-up.
More recently, the show resurfaced on BBC FOUR.
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