Holy tonal shift, Batman! If you’ve ever wanted to know what the dark and gritty Arrow sounded like as an Adam West Batman episode, Arrow co-creator Marc Guggenheim has got you covered.On April 1, Guggenheim posted to his Twitter with the opening pages of an April Fool’s Day prank script from Arrow’s second season. The script, for an episode titled “Two-Face,†uses speech patterns and voiceover narrations reminiscent of the campy dialogue from the classic 1966 Batman TV show.
In the script, “another sunlit day in Starling City†is disrupted when a man named Mr. Bottomham, President of the Crime-Does-Not-Pay-Well Association, is arrested for counterfeit. His ironic crime is reported to Captain Lance by one of his officers, Lt. Pike, who realizes that only one side of these bills are counterfeit. The other side is a genuine bill.
Fearing the work of some dastardly villain who threatens to “taunt the sanity of our monetary system,†the two decide to call the Arrow. The script then cuts to Queen Mansion, where Oliver is tutoring Roy Harper in economics.
This script preview matches the prologue setup of most Adam West Batman episodes: a crime is committed in Gotham City and Commissioner Gordon and Chief O’Hara are perplexed by it, then decide to call up Batman to solve the problem. This is usually followed by Bruce Wayne being alerted to the crime while teaching his ward Dick Grayson some educational lesson. All that’s missing is a shot of Oliver and Roy sliding down secret poles hidden within Queen Mansion to the Arrow Cave.
While Arrow's early seasons were heavily inspired by the Nolan-era Batman movies, later CW shows like The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow would fully embrace the often campy and silly nature of superheroes. Burt Ward, who played Robin in the old series, eventually appeared in a brief cameo on Earth-66 during the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event.