“Good Night, Sweet Knight: Remembering Adam West” - Forever the Caped Crusader and the Domino Daredoll:
Batgirl’s civilian identity of librarian Barbara Gordon, daughter to Gotham City Police Department’s Commissioner James Gordon, debuted in Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino’s Detective Comics (Vol 1) 359 in January 1967. This heroine was introduced on the thirty-minute prime time live action television series Batman, featuring Adam West and Burt Ward to bring in a bigger audience. The figure to help this decline in ratings turned out to be Yvonne Craig. When the ABC producers approached Craig to be their Batgirl for the series, although she had never seen a previous episode, she said she would watch the re-runs all summer long to get a feel of how her character can fit into this action-adventure comedy. While she starred in other major roles in 1965’s “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and the 1968 Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Whom Gods Destroy”, Craig became the Barbara Gordon who rose to intense popularity in ‘Detective Comics’. She premiered in the first episode of the third season, “Enter Batgirl, Exit Penguin”, which originally aired on ABC September 14th, 1967. Craig’s Batgirl for the remainder of the series stood tall with the male dominant Dynamic Duo as the smart, beautiful, independent ally, becoming an overnight symbol of female empowerment to young girls and women watching that was a social and political struggle within the 1960s. Although both Yvonne Craig (1937-2015) and Adam West (1928-2017) have passed away, what both actors brought to the mythology will forever be cherished, for it shaped in many ways the Batman and Batgirl personas we celebrate today. #RIPBatman #RIPBatgirl [Sources: imdb.to/1vPTGta, bit.ly/1hNmB06 ; History of the Batman is releasing this content under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 3.0.] ✌🏼💙🦇🎬🙏🏼
