The Batman/Superman Hour

Did You Know?

• The Superman portion of the program consisted of new 6½-minute shorts from Filmation's The New Adventures of Superman and The Adventures of Superboy.
• Thirty-four stories were produced for the Batman half of the series.

Series overview

The Batman/Superman Hour introduced Batman, his allies, and several classic foes to animation for the very first time. Among the villains appearing were the Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, Scarecrow, and Mad Hatter, along with a few antagonists created specifically for this cartoon. Filmation had originally planned to expand on the success of their 1967 series The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure by developing a Metamorpho pilot and other similar projects.

Those plans fell through when CBS obtained the animation rights to Batman, following the popularity of ABC’s live-action Batman show. Because production had to begin just before the 1968 television season, Filmation pulled as many animators as they could from other assignments to speed things up. Olan Soule and Casey Kasem provided the voices of Batman and Robin for the first time in this series. Later, in 1977’s The New Adventures of Batman, Adam West and Burt Ward returned to the roles they had played in the live-action series.

Soule and Kasem would come back to voice the characters in several later shows: 1972’s The New Scooby-Doo Movies, 1973’s Super Friends, 1977’s The All-New Super Friends Hour, 1978’s Challenge of the Superfriends, and 1979’s The World’s Greatest SuperFriends. Starting in 1980, Soule continued as Batman in shorter seven-minute episodes produced through 1983, which aired under the generic Super Friends title. Kasem later voiced Robin alongside Adam West’s Batman in 1984’s Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show and 1985’s The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians.

In 1969, the series was re-edited into half-hour episodes for Sunday mornings, dropping the Superman segments and being renamed Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder. Batman’s next animated appearance came in 1977 with The New Adventures of Batman. In 1985, Warner Home Video released five selected episodes on VHS as part of the Super Powers video collection. Those tapes were re-released in 1996 and are now out of print.

That same year, episodes were included in The Superman/Batman Adventures on the USA Network, and later aired on Cartoon Network and Boomerang.