Where Would You Place Him? by Dave Goode

I think most people enjoy Top 10 Lists. It's fun to see where exactly your favorites fall. And they're usually the subject of spirited debates when your favorites don't make a list. Or aren't as high as you think they should be. For instance when it comes to the subject of television theme songs a dozen from the western genre pop into my head before I can think of any other genre. There are the themes to RAWHIDE and BONANZA at the top. And they're followed by themes from HAVE GUN , WILL TRAVEL and Warner Brothers westerns like CHEYENNE , MAVERICK , SUGARFOOT, BRONCO and LAWMAN. And let's not forget the songs Happy Trails and the William Tell Overture. In the end these lists are just the opinion of the people who compile them. If you agree with one cool. If you don't the sun will still come up tomorrow. As for myself there's only one list that bothers me.And largely because it omits Adam West as Bruce Wayne / Batman.

To me Adam West as Batman / Bruce Wayne was the epitome of cool. Sinatra use to say of Dean Martin that an H-Bomb could go off in back of Dino and the coolest member of the Rat Pack would just shrug and ask , " What was that? " . That was Adam West's Batman. Nothing phased him. Think back to the 1966 BATMAN movie starring West.Think of all the scenes with West in a tuxedo. He was Euro-Spy cool. Maybe he wouldn't have been a great James Bond. But I can imagine him as a Bond type. I'm surprised that he never turned up in a Bond movie as C.I.A agent Felix Leiter.

But I'm getting away from my original thought. My apologies. The list that Adam West never seems to appear on no matter who compiles it is for the Top 10 Television Fathers. My own favorites are Hugh Beaumont as Ward Cleaver and Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain. But I think there should be space on a list like that for Bruce Wayne / Batman. As I grew older one of my favorite parts of the old BATMAN television series was when Bruce Wayne and his young ward Dick Grayson played by actor Burt Ward were seen at stately Wayne Manor. Bruce was always giving teen-aged Dick some life lesson. Or he was teaching him some skill , mind expanding experiment or moral lesson before they were summoned by police Commissioner Gordon to solve some crime perpetrated by one of Gotham City's seemingly endless supply of super-criminals.

I'm just hoping that the reason that Batman is omitted from these lists is because Bruce Wayne was Dick Grayson's guardian and not his biological father. Sometimes a foster parent can be a better parent than a biological parent. Or maybe it was because of something we never gave much thought to as comic book reading or television watching kids. We all identified with Robin , the Boy Wonder. We wanted to be him fighting a war against crime alongside Batman. But the truth was Batman was committing a crime with the "reckless   endangerment of a minor"  every time they went into action.

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