The First Live-Action Batman and Superman Team-Up in 1973 Was Wild

Airing on a Friday night way back in September 1973, The Saturday Morning Sneak Peek, hosted by the comedy team of Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, was designed to build excitement and help usher in a fresh batch of cartoons debuting on ABC the next morning. Most notably, the lineup featured a brand-new superhero cartoon from Hanna-Barbera called Super Friends. To help promote it, the network brought a couple of familiar DC comic book superheroes to life in live-action segments.

Long before Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill battled each other and then became friends on-screen, the first live-action crossover between Batman and Superman took place on a Saturday morning cartoons preview show mixed in with silly comedy skits, cartoon clips, and more than a couple of bad jokes.

Thanks to Schreiber’s son, Josh, who uploaded a portion of the broadcast to YouTube, viewers know that the fellow wearing the red cape and the red “S” on his chest was Chuck Woolery. Long before he was helping singles arrange dates on Love Connection, Woolery was standing tall as the Man of Steel.

However, when it comes to the actor in the gray and blue Batsuit, that is where things get really interesting. To this day, the identity of the actor under the cowl remains an absolute mystery.

Television historians definitely know who he was not. He was not Adam West, who played the Caped Crusader on the 1966 TV series. Nor was he Dick Gautier, who replaced West for a 1973 public service announcement with Burt Ward and Yvonne Craig. And he certainly was not Olan Soule, the veteran actor with a slender build who voiced Batman on Super Friends. Instead, it appears that an unknown performer donned the cape and cowl for a fleeting moment of television history and then simply walked away.

While Woolery gave his Superman lines plenty of energy and actually did a decent job of portraying the Man of Steel, the mystery Batman was not quite as successful. He appeared to be quite a bit older and seemed stiff and clumsy. Things get even more surreal when Batman engages in a bit of casual chit-chat with pop star Rick Springfield about locking up the Penguin. Yep, Rick Springfield.

End of the day, despite robust conversation all over the internet regarding who it might be, this mystery will probably never be solved. There is no IMDB listing for the broadcast, and no one has ever been able to locate a complete version to see if there is anything revelatory in the end credits. In all likelihood, the network simply booked a local Los Angeles stage actor or a stunt performer for a quick day rate, handed him a rented costume, and rolled the tape.

The only thing that is truly certain is that no one back in 1973 could have ever imagined that decades down the road, curious comic book fans would be freezing frames on their computer screens and studying jawlines, trying to solve this particular puzzle. And given that Batman, after all, is supposed to be a mysterious character, perhaps that’s how things are supposed to be.