Batman Credit Cards

Batman Credit Cards must have seemed like a good idea to somebody at one point. After all, George Clooney’s S&M Batman even uses one in the movie! These, though, are different. On E-Bay right now, you’ll find one of these—signed by bat-producer William Dozier—listed as having been a prop on the 1966 series and apparently going for a somewhat Bat-tastic sum. It’s my recollection, however, that some enterprising guy licensed Batman for a credit card at the height of Batmania only to have the series off the air by the time he was able to get them successfully printed up. As I recall, the uncirculated cards languished by the thousands in a warehouse somewhere for a few years before being dumped on the collector’s market for a pittance. Ads for them ran in early TBGs in the seventies. My own, in fact, came from a dealer in Chicago in the late eighties who had a case of them and was giving one away free with every purchase that day. He said he had bought a ton from that warehouse sale and found that there was just no real market for them. If my version is true (and it seems to be corroborated by that dealer) then Dozier’s card, with name imprinted on the front and signature on the back, simply could NOT have been a prop in the series. He would almost have had to have picked it up after the fact as a novelty memento of his biggest success.