Batman/Superman Hour (TV Series)

Summary
The Batman/Superman Hour was a Filmation animated series that was broadcast on CBS from 1968 to 1969. Premiering on September 14, 1968, this 60-minute program featured new adventures of the DC Comics superheroes Batman, Robin and Batgirl alongside shorts from The New Adventures of Superman and The Adventures of Superboy.

This series marked the first Saturday Morning vehicle of Batman, his supporting cast and some of their classic enemies. At the time the show was ordered by CBS, the live-action Batman TV show was at its ratings peak on ABC. Due to a licensing oversight on the part of the live-action show's producers, Filmation was able to secure the cartoon rights to Batman and produce the series for CBS.

The Batman/Superman Hour went into production close to the start of the 1968 TV season, requiring Filmation to pull as many additional animators from other projects as they could spare to ramp up production. According to Norm Prescott, six episodes of another series already sold to CBS — starring another DC Comics character, Metamorpho, the Element Man — had been completed and were ready to air, but the entire series had been shelved when CBS chose to rush The Batman/Superman Hour on its schedule.

This series was the first time Olan Soule and Casey Kasem performed as the voices of Batman and Robin. When The New Adventures of Batman was produced in 1977, Adam West and Burt Ward reprised the roles they had originally played in the live action TV series. Soule and Kasem would return several times to reprise their roles in The New Scooby-Doo Movies, Super Friends, The All-New Super Friends Hour, Challenge of the SuperFriends and The World's Greatest Super Friends. Kasem would go on to voice Robin with Adam West as Batman in The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians.

In 1969, the series was repackaged into 30-minute episodes without the Superman segments and renamed Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder. Batman would next appear in The New Adventures of Batman in 1977. In 1985, Warner Home Video released five selected episodes of the series on VHS as part of the "Super Powers" video collection. These videos were re-released in 1996 and are out of print. In 1996, episodes were included in The Superman/Batman Adventures on the USA Network. They later aired on the Boomerang Network.