The 1966 film Batman: The Movie was shot between the first and second seasons of the television show. It used the same sets as the TV show, the same characters, costumes, the same story formula, and — most importantly — adopted the same tonal jiu-jitsu: high silliness executed with grave seriousness.
The film differed from the TV show in small ways, however: Julie Newmar had a scheduling conflict, so Lee Meriweather stepped into the sparkly catsuit. The bigger budget allowed Batman to trick himself out with a Batcyle, Batcopter and Batboat.
The film premiered at Austin’s Paramount Theatre on July 30, 1966. (Why Austin? The Batboat was reportedly built by an Austin-based company who got the studio to agree to hold its red-carpet premiere there.)
The film was a moderate success, making a little over over $2 million, not quite twice its budget. But the studio had expected more, because the country had spent the spring of 1966 in the grip of a fervid Batmania.
The launch of the show back in January had arrived at exactly the right cultural moment. The Pop-Art movement prized anything that was slick, colorful, and mass-produced; Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” essay, published two years before, had had enough time to filter down from academia into the mainstream. The nation was also in the habit of looking to television for frothy, high-concept diversions like My Favorite Martian, Bewitched, and The Munsters.