Burt Ward
Burt Ward portrayed and voiced Dick Grayson/Robin in Batman, Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders and Batman vs. Two-Face.
Significant roles[]
- Dick Grayson/Robin in Batman (1966-1968)
- Dick Grayson/Robin in Batman (1966)
- Dick Grayson/Robin in Batgirl (1967)
- Dick Grayson/Robin in The New Adventures of Batman (1977-1978)
- Dick Grayson/Robin in Tarzan and the Super 7 (1978)
- Dick Grayson/Robin in Legends of the Superheroes (1979)
- Dick Grayson/Robin in The Simpsons (2002)
Quotes[]
- "When I entered Batman as a naive 20-year-old who had only dated a couple of girls, I met Adam West, who immediately introduced me to the wildest sexual debauchery that you can imagine. Within a few months we were like two hungry sharks in a world of unlimited halibut. (laughter). Maybe I'm a little too harsh on Adam. Actually, to be more descriptive, he was more like a killer whale in a world of plankton. Together we had this wild time. Of course, remember, then was the 60s. You know, it's a different world now, but to skip ahead and really answer your question, only in the last five years did I find what I call holy maturity, finding the balance, finding the right person in my life so that I could live a normal life."
- "Oh gosh no, no regrets. How can you? I mean, we're talking about some of the wildest things you can imagine. Things that were absolutely kept from the public. In my book, Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights, everything I have in there is only the material and the things that people would most likely never have found out about. Everything that was regular and average I left out because people already know about it."
- "The people on the show. I mean when you come into the set at 7:30 in the morning and you come out of make-up and the first thing you know, the ladies start coming into our dressing rooms at 7:45. We're talking about wild times in the dressing rooms, on the set, between the shots, in the lunch wagon. When we got home at night after fourteen hours on the set, I think we redefined the meaning of the word pleasure pad. And then of course, doing the personal appearances on the weekend, that's where it really got wild. And I have to be honest with you, we became like sexual vampires. On our show, I must tell you, it was...the 60s was a period of time when everything was free love. People made love to each other. It was a very open life, you know? So it wasn't as though we were out soliciting or anything. We were the ones being chased. But I must tell you, in today's world, which is really a sad reflection of our time, with the horrors and the scourge of Aids and God only knows what else is lurking out there, that in this time it seems like about the only safe sex is to read a book!"
- "Our characters were antiseptic but we weren't. And if you remember what we did on Batman, as the scripts were written very funny, we played them very straight. So for children, they had the hero worship of super heroes and we never, ever in any way tarnished that image. For the adults, they remembered the nostalgia of the comic books and for teenagers and college kids, it was that put on style. Now, we used to say we put on our tights to put on the world. So I don't think it tarnishes the image at all. On the contrary, what it does say is that, "hey everybody, while you thought that this was going on, in addition to that we were human beings and not just comic book characters and this was one of the wildest times that you could possibly imagine." We found that just by the way we stood, affected women dramatically, and if you look at our show, you'll see that we always stood with our legs open our fists on hips and our bat bulges forward, which had a profound effect on women!"
- "I've done appearances for twenty years. And this is where Adam and I would often do appearances together. And you know, I must tell you the life of being a super hero, so to speak, and our show in particular, just drew people to us. They flocked to us and they went crazy! Even in Los Angeles, where we lived, when we would date somebody or go out with them, if we went out with somebody else the next night, we often found that women were banging on our windows while we were bedded down with other women! It was a real nightmare. But my book talks about more then just the wild and crazy sex that happened on Batman and after Batman. It talks about all the explosions, I mean the really dangerous things that happened where I was hospitalized with second and third degree burns from explosions, from the Batmobile cracking up, from the fist fights, the feuds, the vendettas, as well as the super hero sex with young fans. It's a total uninhibited romp. The book is not in Canada yet. I'm hoping that we can get a distributor for it up in Canada. Here in America, it's in every major book store in America...."
- "I had the greatest time of my life! Even working with Adam, who I really adore, okay, but who absolutely drove me crazy upstaging me, constantly blocking me from the camera, that I was always having to be on my toes. And even when he said his lines, I must tell you, he spoke his lines so slowly that snails could make love while he's doing it, (laughter). And he did it on purpose, because his theory was, "if I speak twice as slowly as I'm supposed to, the camera will be forced to stay on me twice as long."
- "And so, even with that I still had a great time and I played some terrible practical jokes on Adam. Things that he's embarrassed to death about. And of course, now that my book is out, which exposes both of us for what we were doing....I've been calling around to local hospitals to see if he's checked in with a heart attack."
- "You know honestly, I enjoy working with everyone because remember, these were all real pros that had been around the business a long time. I enjoyed Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, Cesar Romero as the Joker, certainly Frank Gorshin, The Riddler and Julie Newmar, the Catwoman. In fact in my book I have an anecdote about Julie. It's called "A Felonious Feline Shows Her Fur Coat.""
- "I wasn't invited, nor did they want Adam or me. Let me tell you why exactly that is. We did a family show. Our show was oriented towards Mom and Dad and the kids, teenagers. Everybody could watch our show. The three Batman movies that have come out, the studio must feel that they need to present this in a much darker more ominous, more violent, more degrading way, because they didn't want any association with anything was uplifting or wholesome or all American apple pie. And that's the answer to it. I don't happen to agree with it. I honestly think that Adam and I could have done an incredible job doing the roles. Let me tell you something, this is not against the other actors like Val Kilmer or Michael Keaton. They're great too. But Adam West and I were Batman and Robin...."
- "And just like you have Star Trek that had William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy in the original series, which was followed by, I don't know, five, six, probably now going to be seven features, all of which were successful, there's no reason we couldn't have done it. It's just that there is some theory that you have to kill so many people per second and you have to have such death defying violence that we could not be believed. And to be honest with you, if we were going to do it, we wouldn't have wanted to do it that same way. We believe you can have all the kind of entertainment you want appeal to all ages. Because right now you have a movie that only should be seen by adults, these three films, and when I went to see the movie, I was very upset to see children two, three, four, five, six years old in that theater that should never have been in there."
- "Well you know in this last Batman movie, there was a line where Chris O'Donnell as Robin says "Holy rusted metal, Batman!", and you know everybody laughed, and I've been told by about a half a dozen people, that they said that that was the one thing that they like the most in the entire movie, which is a tie-in to our show. So apparently Warner Brothers really hasn't gotten the message yet, but maybe they will."
- "Yeah probably, but they don't want any association whatsoever, and you know, I must tell you, it's not that I'm putting Warner Brothers down, because it's not a whole studio. It's a producer, it's a director, maybe a writer. It's somebody who maybe has a slant on the situation, but no matter what, and they're fine...I mean, as far as I'm concerned everybody has an artistic choice and if they want to do it darker that's fine, but no matter what, there shouldn't have been any children in that audience. Period, end of story. No kids should see that kind of violence where Batman is killing as many people as the bad guys."
- "Well yeah, and I must tell you the difference between....we wore costumes. And those costumes were form fitting. They don't wear costumes. They were like suits of armor, which have nothing to do with what their bodies underneath are really like. So, this thing with the nipples is this director who directed this thing. This is his own, I think, personal spin on making Robin a little more bisexual, if you will, because you know, Dick Grayson's haircut was done in a butch haircut. He obviously directed Jim Carrey to swish when he walked. Jim Carrey is one hell of a man. He doesn't normally do that. So this was the director's spin which I find highly offensive and really only playing to a very small segment of our audience."
- "Well, not at all. Let me tell you something. I'll give you the whole story in a nutshell. In the 1950s, there was a psychiatrist that felt that the Batman- Robin relationship represented a wish dream of two homosexuals. And he based that on the fact that Batman was a muscular older man that took this young teenage boy under his wing who agreed to everything that Bruce Wayne asked him to do. I mean, kids don't normally agree to what parental suggestions are. And in this case, this was not an adoption. It was very clear that it was a different kind of relationship, but it didn't necessarily have to be homosexual. Now I've gotten a lot of questions when I was filming the show. They say, "well you know, it's kind of a strange and unnatural relationship." And I'd say, "hey wait a minute! What's so strange and unnatural about two guys who run around wearing tights and live together?" (laughter) You know, and I will say this though, when we did put on our costumes, and you look at the opulence of the Wayne Manor and the impenetrable dark cave and they spend so many long hours together. I mean, I can see where some people might start to think in certain directions. But in our own personal case, we were out fighting all these heinous girls off and sometimes even cheek to cheek as we did it."