LIFE With Batman: Rare Photos From the Set of the Classic TV Show

Despite the mega-success of the bleak and brutal Dark Knight Batman movies, it’s worth recalling that the Batman franchise wasn’t always so unrelievedly brooding and intense. Sure, Frank Miller’s graphic novels in the late 1980s—re-inventing Gotham’s troubled crime fighter as a humorless, vengeful sociopath—certainly sparked renewed fanboy interest in Bob Kane’s and Bill Finger’s amazing creation, and the early comic books themselves had their macabre moments.

But for many years in the middle part of the 20th century, the Batman of the popular collective imagination was not the hyper-violent vigilante of Miller’s riveting novels, or of Christoper Nolan’s often-overwrought movies. Instead, he was a wry, approachable, comically self-aware Good Guy.

In fact, in the minds of millions of men, women and kids who spent any time watching TV between, say, 1966 and 1989—when Tim Burton’s caped-crusader movies came on the scene—Batman was Adam West, and Adam West was Batman.

Along with Burt Ward as Robin and a slew of showbiz notables (Frank Gorshin, Eartha Kitt, Burgess Meredith, et al.), West starred in more than 100 episodes of Batman on ABC, and very few TV shows in the history of the medium can touch the series for sheer, unapologetic goofiness.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of photos from the set of the classic old show, in fond celebration of a lighter side of Gotham’s masked avenger.

We’ll end here by reprinting LIFE’s priceless observations about Batman when he and his cohorts were entertaining TV audiences for the very first time:

Does it ever.