Earlier this week, Burt Ward, famous player of Robin in the 1960s Batman TV show, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. During the ceremonies, he revealed some information that has us just bursting at the seams with curiosity.
It turns out, while there was nothing flaccid about Ward’s charismatic performance as the (clearly actually an adult) Boy Wonder, there was one part of Ward’s Robin that ABC wanted to have a little less on-screen presence.
“They thought Robin had a very large bulge for television,” Ward told Page Six. So large was Dick’s dick that, apparently, the Catholic League of Decency complainted, and apparently ABC was so concerned about the enormity of the problem that the company took matters into its own hands. According to Ward, he was put on medicine from a studio doctor that would, in his words, “shrink me up.”
“I took them for three days and then I decided that they can probably keep me from having children,” Ward said. “I stopped doing that and I just used my cape to cover it.”
I”¦ see. That was probably a wise move on Ward’s part: I don’t think there is any drug in the world where dick-shrinkage is an on-label prescription use, and any medicine that would have that effect would likely also have an impact on fertility.
Ward also made a point to say that, while his bulge was au naturale, Adam West’s wasn’t. “With Adam they put Turkish towels in his undershorts,” Ward said. Apparently, ABC had a rigid set of rules for super undershorts in the 1960s to which all Bat-bulges had to conform.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time Ward has gleefully recounted the difficulties the production of Batman had with his anatomy. In his own autobiography, he details a number of methods undertaken by the production other than direct medical intervention to get his super crotch under control, which include basically anything you can think of except for the obvious solution of letting Robin put some frickin’ pants on.
And while Ward seems to have narrowly dodged medical malpractice, he got something that he’s been able to enjoy his whole life since: an opportunity to brag about his genitalia.