Burt Ward Didn’t Get a Dime From ‘Batman’ Merch
What did Burt Ward, the actor who played Robin the Boy Wonder on the hit ‘60s TV series, do with all of his Batman money?
Not much, considering there wasn’t a lot of cash to begin with. In his first year, he only made about $450 a week, he told The Napa Valley Register in 1978, per MeTV. By the end, he’d gotten a raise to $600 a week. That’s not exactly retirement money.
“Even the hairdresser got paid more than I did,” Ward complained after the show was through. “The producers made $3 million, but even that wasn’t the tip of the iceberg. The big money on that show was in the merchandising, selling of items with the Batman and Robin names on them.”
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Ward says he heard that merchandise from Batman was worth around $3.5 billion. “Adam (West, who played Batman) and I were supposed to get five percent of the merchandising income, but we never saw a penny,” he griped.
Ward surely deserved more than $600 a week based on the show’s popularity, but he needs to get in line for those merch dollars. While artist Bob Kane received sole credit for creating Batman in 1940 and had a handsome contract with publisher DC, Bill Finger — the man who wrote all those early Batman comics and co-created the Robin character — died penniless. Maybe Finger should have received a check before the kid actor who played Robin for three years on TV.
But there’s no question that Ward struggled. After rocketing to stardom as Robin, Hollywood refused to cast the recognizable actor in other parts. Things got so tight that, according to Ward’s borderline-pornographic memoir, Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights, he agreed to pocket 10 grand for directing a “fantasy photo shoot” for Hustler magazine. The shoot was tame, Ward said — “no lesbianism.”
The real money, however, came when Ward discovered what many others associated with comic books would find in the years to come: It paid big to make appearances at fan conventions, auto shows and department store openings.
Ward traveled the country with West, picking up women, playing practical jokes, and picking up more women. Lots and lots of women, if Ward’s memoir is to be believed. It turned out that signing autographs wasn’t a bad way to make a living.
Beyond the adulation and hardware-store hanky-panky, the business proved to be such a money-maker for Ward that he started Entertainment Management Corp., a company that managed other stars’ personal appearance tours. One of his early clients was Henry “The Fonz” Winkler. “And I’m doing very well for him, I think,” Ward said in 1978. “I’ve gotten him deals in sweatshirts, T-shirts, posters. He’s going to make a lot of money.”
Ward even signed the guy who played Luke Skywalker, hot off the success of the previous summer’s Star Wars. “I just got Mark Hamill two very lucrative dates doing auto shows,” Ward bragged.
