On January 12, 1966, a Wednesday night, a fist punched through a television screen, a theme song exploded, and America changed. The show was Batman, and it did not merely arrive. It consumed. The program aired twice a week, Wednesday and Thursday, the only show on television that demanded audiences show up two nights in a row.

Within a week, the nation had a new obsession. They called it Batmania. It was not a trend. It was an epidemic.

By the end of its first season, Batman sat in the top five of the Nielsen ratings, alongside the family dramas and sitcoms that defined American television. But everyone watched it. Teachers watched. Principals watched.

Mailmen watched. The president’s children watched. Batman even appeared at the halftime show of the first Super Bowl in 1967. The words Bam, Pow, and Zap flashed on screen whenever punches landed, and they entered the American vocabulary overnight.

Kids shouted them on playgrounds. Adults used them in conversation. The merchandise followed: lunchboxes, costumes, trading cards, pajamas, posters, board games, and toys. Between 1966 and 1968, Batman generated $3.

5 billion in merchandise sales. The two men who starred in it, Adam West and Burt Ward, never saw a penny of that money. At the center of the mania was the car. In late 1965, the producers of the new Batman series needed a vehicle.

Not a prop, not a painted cutout, but a real, functioning, drivable car that looked like it belonged to a superhero. They had hired a custom car builder named Dean Jeffries, but he could not meet the deadline. They called George Barris instead. Barris was the most famous custom car builder in Hollywood.

He had been reshaping vehicles for movies and television for years, and would later build KITT for Knight Rider. But in late 1965, he was simply a man with a ringing telephone. The producers gave him a deadline that would have made most people hang up. Fifteen days.

Not fifteen weeks. Fifteen days to build the most recognizable vehicle in television history. The budget was $15,000, enough for a nice sedan, nowhere near enough to build a superhero’s car from scratch. But Barris did not need to start from scratch.

Sitting in his shop, covered in dust, forgotten for years, was a car he had bought from Ford Motor Company for one dollar. It was a 1955 Lincoln Futura, a concept car handbuilt in Turin, Italy, by the artisans at Ghia. They had shaped steel panels over logs and tree stumps carved as forms, creating curves no machine could replicate. Ford had spent $250,000 creating it.

It was nineteen feet long, seven feet wide, and only four and a half feet high. It had a twin-dome Plexiglas cockpit that made it look like a fighter jet on wheels, twenty-seven dashboard indicator lamps, eighteen control switches, a foot-pedal horn, and half a mile of internal wiring. The Futura had toured auto shows across America, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and starred in a 1959 film called It Started with a Kiss. Then Ford had no further use for it.

George Barris, who never passed up a deal on a beautiful car, bought it for one dollar. He did not know what he would do with it. He just knew it was too beautiful to scrap. It sat in his shop for years, collecting dust, waiting.

Now he knew. Barris and his team, including metal artist Bill Cushenbery, worked around the clock. They cut and reshaped the front end into a menacing bat nose. They extended the fins and added scalloped edges.

They mounted the body on a 1966 Ford Galaxie frame with a 390 cubic inch V8 engine and a C6 automatic transmission, because the original Futura drivetrain was too unreliable for the stunt driving the show would require. They added rocket launchers behind the cockpit, three tubes on each side that fired actual pyrotechnic charges during filming. Pulsating red plastic flames lit up the jet exhaust when the car ran. There was a chain-cutting blade in the nose, later removed because producers considered it too dangerous.

A parachute system in the rear allowed the famous Bat Turn, where Batman would deploy the chute, spin the car one hundred and eighty degrees, and accelerate in the opposite direction. A red telephone sat on the center console, the Bat Phone, a direct line to Commissioner Gordon. A mobile Bat computer and a Batscope radar display filled the dashboard. They painted it gloss black with red-orange pin striping and fluorescent orange trim that read perfectly on color television, still a novelty in 1966.

Adam West later complained that the U-shaped steering wheel, carried over from the original Futura, was nearly impossible to drive with. He crashed the car into the side of the Batcave set several times. The custom Mickey Thompson tires kept blowing out. The engine overheated.

The battery died. Five fiberglass replicas had to be built for stunt work and appearances because the original could not survive the punishment. None of that mattered. When the car rolled out of the Batcave for the first time, every boy in America wanted one.

Within months, they could own it in miniature. A company in Wales called Corgi released the first diecast Batmobile in October 1966. It was four inches long. It had working rocket launchers, a chain-cutting blade, Batman and Robin figures in the seats, and one feature that sold more toy cars than any other in the history of diecast manufacturing: a working ejector seat.

Press a button on the side, the roof popped open, and the bad guy in the passenger seat flew into the air. Five million Corgi Batmobiles were sold. Stores reported being cleared within minutes of stocking them. It became one of the bestselling diecast toys of all time.

The Corgi was just the beginning. Ideal made the Batman utility belt, with the Batrope, Batcuffs, a Bat-signal flashlight, and a Batrocket grenade launcher. An unopened Ideal Batman utility belt sells today for $5,000, but none remain unopened, because no child in 1966 left one in the box. Marx made a complete Batcave playset.

Transogram made a nineteen-inch plastic Batmobile. Trading cards, coloring books, Halloween costumes, board games, View-Master reels, puzzles, pajamas. $3. 5 billion in merchandise from a show that ran for three seasons.

Burt Ward, who played Robin, earned $450 a week. He and Adam West were supposed to receive five percent of the merchandising income. They never saw a penny. The producers made $3 million.

The hairdresser on the show was paid more than Robin. The man whose face was on every lunchbox in America made less than the woman who combed his hair. Then it ended. ABC cancelled Batman in the spring of 1968.

The ratings had dipped in the third season. The show had been moved to Thursday nights only, losing the twice-a-week format that had created its essential cliffhanger culture. Production costs were rising. The camp factor that had charmed adults in 1966 had worn thin by 1968.

The world was changing. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. Robert Kennedy had been killed.

Vietnam was on the nightly news. A man in tights fighting a villain called King Tut felt like it belonged to a different country. NBC considered picking up the show. There were negotiations.

But by the time a decision was made, the sets had already been dismantled. The Batcave was torn apart. The props were scattered. The costumes were packed in boxes.

And the show that had dominated American popular culture for three years was gone. Not renewed. Not rebooted. Gone.

The merchandise disappeared with it, over months, as store shelves emptied and were never restocked. The toys ended up in attics, basements, closets, and garages, where they stayed for decades. On January 19, 2013, the original Batmobile went up for auction at Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was the first time the car had ever been offered for sale.

George Barris had owned it for forty-nine years. He had stored it, maintained it, shown it at events, leased it for appearances. Now, at eighty-eight years old, he was letting it go. The tent was packed.

The auctioneer said the room was brimming with excitement. Bidders had flown in from across the country. Car collectors. Memorabilia dealers.

And men in their fifties and sixties who had been six years old on that Wednesday night in 1966 and had never forgotten the sight of those fins. A businessman from Arizona named Rick Champagne bought the car for $4,620,000, including the buyer’s premium. The tent erupted. “I really liked Batman growing up,” Champagne told Reuters afterward.

“I came here with the intention of buying the car. Sure enough, I was able to buy it. That was a dream come true. ”

George Barris died on November 5, 2015.

He was eighty-nine years old. He had built hundreds of cars for film and television over a career spanning six decades. But when people talked about George Barris, they talked about one car. The one that cost a dollar.

The one he built in fifteen days. The one that every boy in America wanted to ride in. And somewhere in a box, in an attic, in a house someone moved out of forty years ago, there is a small gold and black car with a missing figure and a roof that no longer closes right. It is worth more than anyone knows.

Not in dollars. In everything else.