In the late 1960's, the highly campy and memorable Batman TV series managed to make a lasting impact on live-action television despite its relatively brief three-season run. Not too long after the series ended, studio Filmation created an animated version of the series titled Batman with Robin The Boy Wonder, which paired up with The New Adventures Of Superman to become The Batman/Superman Hour.

Almost 10 years after the original series, Filmation created a second animated Batman series in 1977. The end result is The New Adventures Of Batman, of which the entire series is now available on DVD.

Through the series' 16 episodes, Batman (voice of Adam West) and his sidekick, the Boy Wonder, Robin (voice of Burt Ward), battle many of Gotham City's typical staple of villains like The Joker, The Penguin, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, and Clayface, as well as some new criminals like the otherworldly Zarbor. However, always getting in their way is a clumsy, comical imp creature named Bat-Mite, who idolizes Batman.

While Adam West and Burt Ward's contribution to this animated series could have given this series a chance to hearken back to the late 1960's TV series, The New Adventures Of Batman is a surprisingly dull affair. As typical for late 1970's animated TV, the series is littered with much of the same sanitized, sugary, and overly comical Hanna-Barbera-styled formula that had begun to grow stale by this period.

The inclusion of Bat-Mite, who, believe it or not, was in the comics, is overly cartoonish and out-of-place with the rest of the series, while the original villains created for this series are flat-out dull and unmemorable. To top it all off, everything that is brought here from the original Batman universe had become stale as it's recycled from decades of previous comic adventures.

The DVD is presented in the 1:33:1 full-screen aspect ratio of the original TV broadcasts, with the sound presented in Dolby Digital Mono. The sole special feature included on this DVD is the retrospective featurette The Dark Knight Revisited.

Writer/producer Paul Lini, comic book writer/editor Dennis O'Neil, and actor/director/comic book fan Mark Hamill, Warner Bros. Animation president Sander Schwartz, Filmation co-founder Lou Schemer and Filmation artist/historian Michael Swanigan are all interviewed here. The featurette runs the gamut in discussion from the evolution of the character in the comic books from its original dark roots to the campy atmosphere that bled from the live-action TV series in the late 1960's to the New Adventures animation.

While the featurette is undoubtedly interesting, the interviewees seem oddly ambivalent about their feelings on the series' lasting impact on the franchise in retrospect. Particularly unsettling is Schemer's rather sour remark in response to how other studios were outsourcing their animation overseas, while Filmation's was one of the only at the time to keep it domestically produced.

While The New Adventures Of Batman is certainly