The TV Station That Clipped the Wings of Steel

He was a cartoon super hero fighting bad guys who was brought down in the real world by good guys. Or at least people with good intentions.

Who was he?

“A name to strike terror in the hearts of the cartoon world's evildoers everywhere. Batfink! Champion of justice and defender of the weak, who with his supersonic radar, wings of steel and faithful assistant Karate, responds to urgent calls from citizens in distress.” At least, that’s how the Ottawa Citizen newspaper described him in its 1967-68 TV listings. In reality, he was Hal Seeger Productions’ attempt to make some bucks from the Batman TV craze.

Batfink was a series of five-minute cartoons designed for the syndication market, though it was picked up by CTV in Canada. It was originally distributed by Mission Productions, the TV arm of toymaker WHAM-O. But another company looking for a cartoon series came sniffing around. Back Stage, a trade publication, reported on March 3, 1967:

Screen Gems has acquired world-wide distribution rights to the new color cartoon series “Batfink” from WHAM-O Manufacturing, San Gabriel-based toy manufacturer, it was announced by Dan Goodman, Screen Gems V.P. in Charge of Syndication Sales. The deal, which also gives Screen Gems merchandising rights on the show, is exclusive of the 40 key market stations previously sold by J.W. Packer, Pres. of Mission Prods, the tv subsidiary of WHAM-O.
The pre-sold markets for “Batfink” include: Metromedia stations WNEW-TV N.Y., KTTV L.A., WTTG, Wash., and KMBC-TV Kansas City; also WGN Chicago; KWGN Denver, KTVT Dallas, WEWS Cleveland, WXYZ-TV Detroit, WTCN Minneapolis and KPLR St. Louis; and the Triangle Broadcasting group.

Ah, but there was a time bomb in that sale and as Batfink’s mentor would say “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.” Batfink’s potential rise coincided with social activist groups carping and griping about “violence” in children’s programming, waving studies as “proof” that kiddie’s little brains were being warped. One of the stations carrying Batfink decreed the batty caped crusader was responsible—along with The Flying Nun!

Here are two stories from the Minneapolis Tribune of July 5, 1968.

Area TV Stations Blame Networks for Violent Shows
By RICK EDMONDS
Minneapolis Tribune Staff Writer
"Batfink" cartoons are no longer going to be shown on WTCN-TV kiddie shows, but that's the only change any local station has made in response to the growing outcry over "television violence."
The networks have cancelled at least a score of scheduled programs in the weeks since Sen. Robert Kennedy's assassination, and are busily editing film and rewriting scripts for next fall.
Episodes of "I Spy," "Tarzan," "Bonanza," "Wild Wild West," and "Gunsmoke" have been pulled and even installments of such generally innocuous situation comedies as "The Mothers-in-Law" and "The Flying Nun" have been canceled.
Fifty House members Tuesday introduced a measure that would direct the Federal Communications Commission to study the effects on viewers of violence, in television programs.
EXECUTIVES of the three networks have written memos to their writers and editors asking that violence be de-emphasized. The "Batfink" program is a series of about 100 five-and six-minute episodes that had run during WTCN-TV's Casey and Roundhouse shows, the most popular children's TV offering in the Twin Cities. A spokesman for the station said the program was canceled because it contained much "that was almost violence for violence's sake."
But the four Twin Cities commercial stations generally are standing firm with program policies that they say they have been using for years.

AS A RESULT, fans of explicit conflict could tune in this week for "Cry of Battle," "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers," "Battle of Apache Pass" of "Escape From San Quentin,"—all local late show offerings.
Spokesmen for the four stations defend their policies in similar terms.
They all point out that the local stations originate very few shows—only a few news broadcasts, a children's program or two, and maybe a travelogue—and so they claim that primary responsibility for policing violence rests with the networks.
Movies which might be objectionable are always shown late at night, the local stations say, and they do edit out offensive segments ("though mostly for sex reasons not violence," one spokesman said).
WCCO-TV substituted the soapy "Magnificent Obsession" for "The Fly," a science-fiction horror film, the night after Sen. Robert Kennedy was assassinated, but since then none of the local stations has juggled its movie lineup.
The stations buy their movies in packages. They don't have to show every one they buy, but usually they do.
"We haven't bought any pictures that can't be shown on TV," WTCN-TV Program Director Howard Reiser said.
Most of the spokesmen think the criticism being aimed at the TV industry is unjustified.
SHERM HEDLEY, WCCO-TV program director, said, "A few years ago ABC introduced some violent programs to get a competitive edge. CBS never has gone in for it much, but now the whole industry's being talked about as violent."
Don Swartz of the local ABC outlet, KMSP-TV, complained of "undue criticism of television as an industry. We have always had a policy of not running violent shows in an early time period."
Spokesman Bill Davy of KSTP-TV said, "I thing [sic] a lot of this talk about violence is phony concern I don't think there's any great problem there." Kiddie shows have taken much of the heat from critics of TV violence, but spokesmen for the local stations defended the Three Stooges and slam-bang cartoons as being so fanciful that they are innocuous.
EVEN IF the local stations continue to stand pat, Minneapolis viewers should be able to notice a change in their TV diet this summer and fall. NBS [sic] has canceled several Saturday morning shows and one spokesman said viewers should expect "a big change—from the bird-man-superman kind of thing to sweetness and light—in children's shows."
Though the networks' fall schedules are heavy with police shows, an unheard of number of captures probably will be accomplished by scuffles in which no one pulls a gun.
NBC has announced that it will eliminate all violence in its trailers and teasers, and a spokesman said his station was following the same policy in one-minute plugs for local movies "because it's good business."
"For the time being," he said, "that kind of thing discourages people from tuning in."

'Children's Hour' TV Found Violence-Rich
BUFFALO, N.Y.—Violence is common in early-evening television programming, according to a recent survey conducted by a western university research team and cited in the current issue of The Humanist magazine, a publication of the American Humanist Association.
The researchers found that in a single five-day period (Monday through Friday), early-evening television featured over 100 separate acts of violence, including:
One stabbing in the back, three suicides, four people falling over cliffs, two attempts to run cars over persons on sidewalk, 12 murders, 16 major gun fights, 37 hand-to-hand fights, two stranglings and 42 incidents with guns.
According to a 1963 Federal Communications Commission study, also cited by The Humanist, a youngster growing up before the set would witness, between ages 5 and 14, representations of 13,000 violent human deaths.

Whether other stations copied WTCN-TV’s example, I don’t know, but Batfink aired here and there into the early ‘70s (it was sold in Australia as well), and the U.S. networks reacted just as the story said: Space Ghost was out, Wacky Races, The Archie Show and The Banana Splits Adventure Hour were in.

However, nostalgia digs its claws into the memory, and Batfink still had his fans. Here’s a neat story from the Edmonton Journal of January 19, 2002. It was accompanied by a drawing of Batfink covering a good deal of a full page. (A fan reproduction accompanies the article).

Batfink flown but not forgotten
Satirical '60s super-rodent deserves TV resurrection
By Sandra Sperounes
"Your bullets can't harm me. My wings are a shield of steel!"
As a kid, I ran around yelling these magical phrases. They were the words of Batfink, a cartoon superhero with a kung-fu fighting sidekick, Karate, and an evil, bald nemesis, Hugo A-Go-Go.
Nowadays, none of my friends have any idea who Batfink is. Most think he's a product of my own imagination. For a time, I thought so too, until I spotted a rerun in Cambridge, England, of all places. Dubbed into German.
Eric Strong feels my pain.

"In my 31 years here on Mother Earth, I've met exactly one other person who remembers Batfink. As an aside, that person's name is Matt, so I've taken to calling him Mattfink," says Strong.
Batfink first appeared on TV in 1966 as a satirical antidote to the Batman TV series. Created by Hal Seeger, the cartoon crusader didn't have a long life -- he was cancelled in '67 after 100 episodes.
But in the '70s, Batfink reappeared on CFRN's Popcorn Playhouse, which is where Strong fell in love with the pointy-eared superhero, who looks more like a grey cat than a flying mammal.
Strong is a rabid fan of Batfink. He would even be willing to take time off work to attend a Batfink Film Festival, if there ever was one. He hasn't seen the show in 10 years, but he remembers the tiniest details, from Batfink's red boots to the "BEEP" of his supersonic sonar-radar tracking abilities. "The cartoon was like a James Bond movie made for five-year-olds," says Strong.
Glenn Arnold is also haunted by memories of Batfink and his car, the Batillac.
"A Volkswagen with bat-wings is not the product of a sane mind," says Arnold.
"To this day, I have an obsession with Volkswagen Beetles which I believe was precipitated by my sponge-like brain spending hours in front of the television absorbing stray supersonic-sonar-radar waves. There is no cure for my condition and I believe that I am doomed for the rest of my life."
So are the rest of us Batfink fans. In the mid-'90s, he aired on Nickelodeon in the U.S., but he's been missing from Canada's airwaves since the '80s.
The reason? Some speculate Batfink's sidekick, Karate, may now be considered an offensive Asian stereotype. But I disagree -- otherwise Jackie Chan wouldn't be allowed to make movies.
No, I think Batfink is overlooked because he's simply faded from the minds of most TV viewers and executives. They might have a vague recollection but, like erectile dysfunction, they're too embarrassed to talk about an animated bat with their friends.
So, hopefully, this will jog some memories and inspire a nationwide campaign to resurrect Batfink! Or maybe not.

Batfink did get a resurrection. His cartoons were released on video—in the U.K.—in 2004, a year before creator Hal Seeger died. And a couple of fansites and two Facebook pages. The pages are still there and the fansites are preserved on that magnificent site, archive.org. A UK site is here (you need Flash to see it), while a Hal Seeger tribute site is here.