10 Surprising Things Sixties Batman Shares With The Dark Knight
3. Bruce Wayne As A Real Playboy
The duality of Batman and his secret identity, Bruce Wayne, is something that many incarnations of the character struggles to get right. Either one suffers in favour of the other, or the out-of-costume character is just totally ignored. Which goes along with the people who think that Batman is the real persona, and Bruce Wayne a mask (they're wrong, FYI). Like The Joker in make up, the sixties Batman and Nolan's Dark Knight are probably the only two places where Bruce Wayne has been equally as fleshed out as Batman. Both Christian Bale and Adam West spend as much time on screen as a billionaire playboy as they do a masked vigilante in a silly costume. It's not hard to imagine that Nolan's depiction of Bruce Wayne was heavily inspired by those early years watching the sixties Batman, with his character spending most of the first half of The Dark Knight Rises swanning around in fancy bathrobes that Adam West would probably kill for. If anybody ever died in that Batman TV series, anyway. Which nobody ever really did.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
