This may sound a little weird to a lot of fans but this very much true, Battman actually wrestled for WWE. This was back in 1966 when the craze DC comic book hero Batman was reaching the sky with the release of the Hollywood movie Batman and a TV Series that featured Batman as the main protagonist of the show in the same year. Using this craze, a professional wrestler named Tony Marino created a gimmick that blatantly copied the look of Batman from the movie and the TV series mentioned above. The look was exactly like Batman played by famous American actor Adam West.
But there were a lot of copyright issues that forced Tony Marino to add one extra “T” in Batman making it “Battman”. But the copyright problems were not as strict as nowadays. So Tony Marino kept copying the original look of Adam West as Batman in the Batman featured film and the TV series.
Using the fame of Batman, Tony Marino’s Battman gimmick became really famous among the wrestling fans back then. He featured in the main event posters several times and fans were loving him. The craze of Battman was so high that he even appeared on title pictures. Back then, appearing in a title picture was a huge deal, no matter the challenger wins or loses.
As we all know, WWE got the name in the year 2002. The time we are talking about WWE was known as WWWF or World Wide Wrestling Federation which was run by Vince McMahon sr. Later, World Wide Wrestling Federation got rid of ‘Wide’ from it and became World Wrestling Federation or simply WWF. But they had to lose out on their ‘F’ as it had the same short form of World Wildlife Fund. But that is a completely different topic, we can talk about that in a different story.
Today nobody might know about Batman but back then, the gimmick created by Tony became so popular, he was given a title run. He won the World Wide Wrestling Federation Intercontinental Tag Team Championships along with the biggest name in professional wrestling back then; Bruno Sammartino. The gimmick was so famous that it continued for over three years. Later, Marino had to discontinue this famous gimmick.
Unfortunately, there is no video footage available of Tony Marino’s Batman gimmick. But there are some pictures available. We have some of them, the rest can be seen on Google.