: Lex's receptionist in LEGO Batman 2:Superman: We're here to see Lex Luthor. (Superman and Batman look at each other in disbelief) Receptionist: Are those last names? Superman: Just one name each. Justified, as it turned out that the receptionist was a robot.Adam West – if not the original Batman, surely one of the superhero’s most memorable incarnations – is now 86. But, just so you know, a fine 86. Calling from his home in Palm Springs, California, he is evidently in a good mood. “Let me go look at this full-length mirror for just a moment,” he jokes. In the four decades since he starred in the 1960s television series, West has seen the Batman baton passed on to Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, Christian Bale and now Ben Affleck – without ever quite leaving the shadows of Gotham city. He has reprised the role several times himself during his career, most recently providing his voice to the new Lego game Batman 3: Beyond Gotham. “I decided early on to embrace the character,” says West, who hasn’t suffered from typecasting, so much as owned it.
“I mean how many actors are lucky enough to play a character that becomes iconic?” Outside of Batman, his roles more often than not riffed on his own life: a fading star whose glory days were spent as a TV superhero. In fact, the actor has made a career from a part with just as much longevity as his first one: Adam West is now famous for playing Adam West. Recently – and when you’re close to 90 that means for the past two decades – West has appeared in a range of shows, from The Simpsons, Fairly Oddparents and 30 Rock to several Funny or Die videos, as himself. It’s come to the point where the screenwriters’ wiki site, TV Tropes, has even named a trope after him, Adam Westing, which it describes as a form of self-parody. “Some actors get reputations that just won’t go away,” the site elaborates. “Maybe they’re famous for being divas on the set. Maybe they’re famous for only playing certain roles — or even worse, only playing one role. Nobody will let them forget it.
They can struggle mightily to earn a new reputation ... or they can resign themselves to their fate and make a career out of it.” True to form, in the new Lego game West appears both as himself and as the original 1960s Batman, complete with campy sound effects and the cartoon exclamations “thwack!” and “pow!” In each level there are also hidden Adam Wests in peril, to be rescued. Of course, there will be those under 30 who will know West not from Batman but from Family Guy, in which he plays the maniacal and unhinged Mayor Adam West (whose name is always said in full). Show creator Seth McFarlane is a long-time fan of the actor, and can do a killer impression, imitating perfectly West’s deep, gravelly register. Is it surreal to have had so many different animators manipulate his persona on screen? “I love the way you describe that. Yes, it’s so fascinating to see what they do with me that I can’t take my eyes off myself or any screen on which I might be appearing!
Like I said, I’m the luckiest actor in the world.” When I tell West I’m a big Family Guy fan, he replies “you’re too young – you mustn’t watch it.” I’m 31, I say. “Too young,” he says, adamant. West’s publicist is on the line and tries to wrap things up. But West hasn’t had enough and suggests we continue. With no more questions lined up, I throw the floor open and ask what he’d like to talk about. “What are you wearing?” he growls. A little stunned, I laugh, incredulous. He quickly adds: “I gave you a little shot of the mayor!” With six more episodes of Family Guy wrapped and still to air, and hosting duties on a new travel show too, West has clearly not lost his appetite for work. “It’s better than the alternative,” he says. I say it’s possible to die, long before you start dying. “I know exactly what you mean,” he responds. “I see it around me and I resent that. I think those people need someone to talk to. You have no idea the people I meet when I do these Comic-Cons.
When I go sign autographs and say hello to people, I see everything!” • Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham is out now is a community wiki dedicated to documenting narrative tropes observed in their native fictional habitats. Except when they’re creating the fictional web series Echo Chamber that illustrates the tropes documented on the site, or as a spin-off alternate reality game where those fictional tropes are found escaping into the real world. By Michael Andersen, originally posted at ARGNet TV Tropes is an intimidating website. Over the past eight years, the community wiki has displayed frightening tenacity in indexing, codifying, and analyzing the tricks of the storytelling trade in an often irreverent manner. Remember the pilot episode of Community? The TV Tropes community flagged those 25 minutes of television for using over 46 different tropes ranging from Worthless Foreign Degree to The Dulcinea Effect. And the community doesn’t limit itself to documenting tropes that appear on television: everything from fan fiction and webcomics to alternate reality games are fair game.
Here’s where things start getting complicated. Starting in 2011, the TV Tropes homepage was taken over by Echo Chamber, an episodic web series dedicated to illustrating tropes through the lens of an increasingly eccentric cast of characters. For two seasons, Dana Shaw and her collaborators Tom Pike and Zack Wallnau played characters in a “Trope of the Week” Show Within a Show that paralleled events in their fictional lives, under the direction of Zack’s father Mark, Director of Transmedia for “The Other Wiki” (TV Tropes’ tongue-in-cheek nickname for Wikipedia) and the inscruitable Mr. Administrator. Season two ended with a Mind Screw, as Mr. Administrator explains that the entire show is part of a diabolical plot to understand the true nature of fiction and reality in order to inject tropes into the fabric of reality. And that’s where the alternate reality game, named The Wall Will Fall by its players, begins. Last week, I received an envelope in the mail from Mark Wallnau.
Inside was a typed letter explaining that Mark sent numerous packages out to people likely to understand the true meaning of its contents at the behest of his former employer, Mr. Administrator. A handwritten postscript added the ominous warning, “He’d know if I typed this so I had to write it out. Trust him at your own risk. He likes to use people for his own ends.” The envelope also contained an unlabeled CD containing a video message from Mr. Administrator warning that cracks between the real and fictional worlds may be beginning to form and that, if true, the consequences are dire. Mr. Administrator goes on to explain that only one person has noticed the warning signs. The final piece of the puzzle was a comic book featuring shattered images, with the shards emanating from a white cuboid bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Administrator’s visage. The inside pages were largely blank, with only slivers of images hinting at the original artwork. Assembling the shards revealed a secret message, identifying the one person to notice the signs of impending apocalypse: “USER: WTFAVERAGEJOE.”