The story of Batmobile
Jim Maxwell reveals the story of the Batmobile, one of the most famous cars of TV – you might think it all started and ended with George Barris, but as Jim discovers, there’s a lot more to this iconic car…
Built as a one-of-a-kind concept car for the 1955 new car shows, including the Chicago, Detroit and New York Auto Shows, the Lincoln Futura was wildly styled and had a dramatic visual impact on all that saw it. It represented the future on four wheels. Credit for the appearance of the unique vehicle goes to Bill Schmidt, who was Lincoln-Mercury’s chief stylist. Aspects of the design were said to partly have come to fruition after a 1952 fishing trip to the Bahamas that Schmidt had taken with GM’s styling boss Bill Mitchell, where both of them viewed and enjoyed the tropical beauty of the sea life there. As it turned out, that scubadiving vacation had an impact on the American automotive world, as both Schmidt and Mitchell used their underwater experiences and took their studies of sharks and applied it to designs on special projects (for Schmidt the Futura and for Mitchell a few years later with the Stingray racer, Mako Shark I & II and the Manta Ray Corvettes). The Futura was a real, functional and operating vehicle, unlike many of the show cars of the era. The chassis was one of six built by the speciality firm Hess and Eisenhardt (more commonly known for ambulance and hearse conversions) which were prototype Continental Mark II units, built on a 126-inch wheelbase. Power came from a standard Lincoln V8 and fitted with an offset air cleaner assembly to allow for the lowered hood. The body of the car is all steel, and it was built by craftsmen at Ghia in Italy; however, it was all designed in the Ford styling studios and the Italians followed the Bill Schmidt design parameters exactly to every detail, as a full-sized plaster model was sent, along with blueprints and a rolling chassis. Besides the futuristic shape of the body, one styling ingredient that really stood out from anything else was the clear plastic double-bubble canopy top, which certainly had the general flavour of coming off a military jet fighter. This concept car project was a major expense for Ford, as the total cost of the Futura was some $250,000, which in today’s dollars translates to about $2.2 million. It was a real car, and was looked at as something that could possibly be studied for inspiration for future vehicles – the Futura was even wind-tunnel tested and tested on Ford’s Dearborn Proving Grounds.
Theh car ran iits course andd remainedid iin the h limelight for as long as it could; however, after four years the Futura was ‘retired from duty’ by Ford Motor Company. Unlike many previous concept cars, it was not immediately crushed and destroyed when no longer useful to the company. With the publicity work done, it was still found to be something interesting to look at and that’s how the car made its way on to movie screens, appearing (with a fresh coat of red paint) in the 1959 movie It Started With a Kiss, which starred Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford.
The car’s the star
It was in late 1965 when TV producer William Dozier created a newly proposed TV show, called Batman. Part of the formula included a cool car with a lot of gimmicks and gadgets, a distinctive andd ddefinitivefiii vehicle:hil theh Batmobile. Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote the pilot and the Batmobile was a key component; it was mandatory to have the vehicle incorporated into the storyline. Originally, car customiser Dean Jeffries was contacted by the studio to create the Batmobile; that initial car was to be based on a 1959 Cadillac and the show was to be released in September of 1966. However, the need to get a car completed much sooner came about when ABC changed their planning and Batman was rescheduled as a mid-season replacement.
Because of this revision, a Batmobile needed to be created in weeks, instead of the original target date of months. Jeffries wouldn’t take on the project with such a tight time frame, so he was paid for his time and effort, and the job had to go to someone who could do it in such a short period.
Car customiser George Barris was well-known in and around Hollywood as the ‘go-to’ guy for theme vehicles for TV and movies. One of the first movie cars he did was for the classic 1950s film High School Confidential and also his handiwork was used in the teen movies Hot Rod Gang and Running Wild. His cars appeared on the TV show The Munsters (and later on
The Monkees) so he was certainly qualified for the job of creating a suitable car to become the Batmobile.
And, as luck would have it, Barris had a car that would be a fantastic starting base for what the network was after: it was the Lincoln Futura. In an interview in the mid-1990s Barris said that, during this time frame, he had obtained “half a dozen concept cars from different Ford divisions” and had requested the vehicles from Ford Motor Company to be saved, rather than have them chopped up and destroyed (a typical fate for concept cars in the day). George was able to get them sent to California and, in the case of the Futura, he was involved in the deal that got it featured in the movie It Started With a Kiss.
Barris and his crew reworked certain aspects of the then 11-year-old concept car, and while it was ‘futuristic’ back when it was designed, there were elements of it that George felt needed updating and revising to better fit the theme of the show. Here’s how Barris remembered it in a documentary: “In 1965 I was contacted by Dozier. ‘We're doing Batman. We got to have a Batmobile. What can you do for us?’
“I said: ‘Great, let me give you some ideas, and some sketches.’”
He was given a deadline of October 11, 1965, and the work got started right away.
As a spokesman for the Ford Motor Company (through their Custom Car Caravan programme) George had developed a very positive business relationship with Gene Bordinat and because of that great alliance, the Futura, it was basically given to Barris for whatever he could do with it. And the price? Just one dollar, a legal formality. The paperwork for the transaction was dated December 21, 1965, and ownership changed to Barris Kustom Industries.
George Barris hired Bill Cushenbery to handle the metalwork to convert the car to the Batmobile. They knew each other from the work they did together during the Ford Custom Car Caravan days, and Cushenbery’s shop was located right around the corner from Barris’s shop.
The non-stop work to convert the factory concept car into a TV theme car started immediately and revolved around reworking the hood and grille, opening up the wheelwells and adding flares, and enlarging the rear tail fins. The centre section of the transparent roof was removed and a centre-mounted hoop type single roll bar was incorporated into the interior as a platform for a revolving light assembly. In studying the differences between what Bill Schmidt did originally with the Futura in 1955 and what was done to it in 1965 for the Batman show, it would be accurate to describe the transformation as more of a ‘facelift’ or ‘restyling’ than to say the Batmobile was created from scratch. Clearly the vast majority of what the Batmobile was based on had been created 10 years earlier.
Besides already having a unique and futuristic outside appearance, even for 1966, the Batmobile was further modified and fitted with numerous gadgets that were tied into story lines, including an on-board telephone, a radar system, lasers, rockets, on-board computer with dash monitor, front-mounted chain slicer, smoke emitter, nail spreader and twin 10ft parachutes (to facilitate quick 180-degree turnarounds).
In addition, other gadgets were added for specific episodes.
Making its debut
The show debuted on ABC TV on January 12, 1966, starring Adam West as the Batman, aka The Caped Crusader, and his crime-fighting sidekick Robin, played by Burt Ward. Together they became known as the Dynamic Duo.
The show ran for three seasons in prime time, but has lived on for younger generations in syndication worldwide. While the Batmobile certainly did help add excitement to the TV programme, nobody could have ever guessed just how much the vehicle would be recognised around the globe.
Except for maybe George Barris, who clearly had a good feeling early on about the potential of the car. In March 1966 he had applied for, and received, a US Patent for the Batmobile.
After the Batman TV show ran its course (1966-68) and wound down on network re-runs, the Batmobile did continue to do the custom car show circuit all over the world, thanks to the persistence and PR abilities of George Barris. However, by the time 1973 rolled around, the hype of the car and the show had well worn off and an auction took place at Barris’s shop to clean out some old movie cars, including the original Batmobile. At that time there was no interest from bidders for the Batmobile and it went unsold without any offers or bids of any kind (imagine!). After the auction, an individual offered George a 1957 Ford Thunderbird, valued at around $1700 at that time, which George turned down.
Fast forward to January 19, 2013, Scottsdale, Arizona, at the West World facility where the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction was taking place. George Barris rode on to the auction block standing in the passenger seat of the #1 original Batmobile, with the Batman theme playing over the speakers and the entire place went wild! George went over to the auction microphone, gave the crowd some background information and soon the bidding began, starting at $100,000. Within 14 seconds someone in the crowd bid $1 million, then 36 seconds later it was $2 million.
There was unbelievable electricity on the auction block and soon the bidding frenzy continued up to $3 million – then George announced that he was throwing in all his personal Batmobile memorabilia and even the Batman jacket he was wearing, to go to the winning top bidder. With a continued amount of jubilation on the stage, and with three more minutes of the bidding wars, the auctioneer’s hammer came down with the proclamation of ‘Sold!’ The sale price – $4,200,000!
The Batman TV show was an unexpected phenomenon and the Batmobile was an essential part of its success. Time served the Batmobile well, as it was only 40 years before this event that nobody even wanted it!
The TV show ran 120 episodes, and the car remains in the minds of the millions of viewers that either saw the series the first time around and/or the countless amounts of re-runs. Everybody knows about the Batmobile, and largely because of George Barris, it’s more popular now than the original Futura would have ever been. Now that’s truly an American automotive icon. ★