) is involved with the "Halloween Haunted House" industry. He has always been interested in dark rides and carnival 'spookhouses' or funhouses since he was a child. He was telling me about a dark ride at Cincinnati's Coney Island during the decade of 1960. The dark ride (customers are taken through a dark building in little cars on rails past displays that light up and animate suddenly as they pass-kind of like Tito-sama's Japanese Cave Of Horrors in the 1943 Batman serial) had been rethemed many times but in 1965 was "The Spook". Here is a photo of that:
In 1966 with the sudden popularity of the Batman TV show, the park did a hasty retheming of the event, making it into the Batcave. They repainted the front, making it purple with a giant black bat-symbol that took up the entire front of the facade with "Bat Cave" in huge black stylized letters. I guess copyright infringement was not so strictly enforced in those days because I cannot imagine DC licensing the finished version. According to Randy, most all of the inside displays were the same but altered a little to fit in with the Batman theme. For example, there were two skeletons inside posed like the famous picture of Robin crouching a little and Batman posing (the one they smash out of in the Queen of Freedom's museum in the When The Rat's Away, The Mice Will Play episode) in Batman and Robin costumes. There were also Batman and Robin skeletons being menaced by an executioner with an axe (like in the Batman Is Riled episode). There was Penguin 'flying' on an umbrella that turned into a skeleton. Most of the displays were dressed up to look like bizarre criminals. Randy says when he got to visit the park as a child he would go through the Batcave at least five or six times every trip! It only lasted a couple of years, he thinks only two, maybe three, then they made the ride into a house filled with nothing but skeletons in very elaborate sets like Disney with an impressive green and black 3D haunted house facade outside.
We have looked for photos or postcards of the Bat Cave but haven't found any yet, although it is mentioned in several books about Cincinnati and Coney Island. It must have been fun but also very strange for Batman fans to visit and see skeletal versions of their heroes (and even before the Contaminated Cowl episode!).
