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Fridge / Batman (1966)

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Fridge examples for Batman (1966).


Fridge Brilliance

  • The show's Insistent Terminology always refers to Robin's real identity as Bruce's "youthful ward, Dick Grayson". It's an odd choice of words in a stiff formal phrase that seems out of place in the lunacy of the show, until it hits you that Robin's actor is Burt Ward. It's not just a phrase over-dramatized for comedy. It's an intentional pun on the actor's name...which has taken us over 50 years to get.
  • The Joker is a narcissist with a sick sense of humor, so it's fitting that his once-an-episode Villainous Breakdown moments are epic tantrums, like the one when he thought he and his henchwoman found the entrance to the Bat-Cave when all he found was a miniature insteadnote 
  • Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019) establishes that the show is canon on Earth-66, but it also provides a neat explanation for the conflictions caused by the comics, animated films and the Legends of the Superheroes specials. Much like how the main universe of that crossover was altered, it's likely that the animated films and the specials were canon pre-Crisis while the comics, which crossed over with Wonder Woman (1975) which in turn was established to be canon on Earth-76 by Crisis, are canon post-Crisis.
  • Every King Tut episode makes it appear at first that the writers have barely skimmed even a pamphlet on Egyptology, which at first seems odd considering Tut is the alter ego of a renowned Egyptologist... but then, of course, Professor McElroy is the Egyptologist, and he's also a mild-mannered kindly law-abiding citizen. King Tut is a separate identity, so of course it makes sense that in addition to being a megalomaniacal arch-criminal, he knows fuck all about the real Tutankhamun, let alone Ancient Egyptian history and culture as a whole. And some of the malapropisms and misuses of Egyptian mythology are clearly intended as in-jokes only fans of the myths would catch. (Batman's belief that Ancient Egyptian arch-criminals invariably struck at the Hour of the Jackal, on the other hand, is presumably the same kind of divergence from reality that gives us Gotham City, the United World Organisation, and Londinium.)
  • Some people wonder why Professor McElroy taught at Yale instead of a divergent reality university. However, it is established in the first episode by Aunt Harriet that Yale exists in the Batman 1966 reality when someone looks at a painting of Bruce Wayne's grandfather and asks if he was a member of Yale's Skull and Bones club, to which Aunt Harriet responds, "Member? Heavens no — he was its founder!" The connection between the Wayne family and Yale makes Professor McElroy's periodic transformation into King Tut that much more personal.

Fridge Horror

  • In "The Joker Goes to School/He Meets His Match, The Grisly Ghoul" Joker hooks up the Dynamic Duo to a pair of Electric Chairs, and if not for a handy power failure, we would've seen them fried.
    • By the same token, a lot of the villains' death traps, though whimsical and silly in concept, would have left a pretty horrific mess of our heroes' corpses if they had actually been successful.
  • In one episode, Catwoman's deathtrap-du-jour is designed to more or less lobotomize Batman, with the implication that she plans to keep him as a sex slave afterwards.
  • Even though this is a light-hearted Batman, he is still Batman and watched his parents get killed. The pilot episode has Bruce Wayne outright confirm that he's motivated by his parents being killed by criminals, which in itself suggests that Joe Chill had some help in this continuity.

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