I am currently in the process of cataloging and consolidating my popcult archives, as they have long since gotten past the point where I can keep track of what I have and where things are by memory alone. It is a tedious business involving spreadsheets, labeling, and other forms of inventory tracking tedium, but one of the upsides has been finding items I had completely forgotten about. 

Items such as this…

…an early unaired pilot for the 1966 Batman TV series so adored and hated by comic fans. The pilot is fairly similar in style to the series as eventually aired, but there are a few notable differences.

The character of Jim (Neil Hamilton) Gordon was portrayed in the series as a bastion of just and fair law enforcement, but the pilot version of character is shown to be the solitary honest cop in a pop-art cesspit of civic corruption. The grandfatherly qualities audiences would later associate with Gordon are absent, replaced instead by, well…



Also, during his first tentative foray into urban vigilante work in the pilot, Bruce (Adam West) Wayne gets stabbed — represented with an “OUCHIE!” intertitle — by a teenage prostitute (Tuesday Weld in a kicky Mary Quant ensemble).

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