I grew up as a latchkey kid with television on my brain. My parents worked and wouldn’t come home until after five at night. Most days after middle school, I would entertain myself with cartoons and sitcoms.

My favorite show was Batman from the sixties on what was called then The Family Channel. I don’t know if it’s around anymore, the channel that is. I’m sure the TV show, because of Batman’s popularity, is syndicated somewhere. I watched all three seasons since that was how long it had lasted. My favorite villain was The Riddler, played by Frank Gorshin. He wore green tights with black question marks and a pink mask over his eyes. He would send riddles to Batman and Robin to give clues about what crimes he was about to commit. For every episode, there was another villain, and the Riddler was featured in the first one.

Out of all three seasons, the Joker, played by Ceasar Romero, appeared the most. I remember the episode was in the third season when Batman and the Joker competed in a surfing contest. It was so long ago that I forgot why they would do such an asinine thing. They surfed in full clothing–Batman in his cheap costume and the Joker in his purplish-pink suit–and they rode surfboards in front of a green screen of an ocean that couldn’t look any more fake.

My favorite Joker episode was when the Joker managed a bank to steal money of course. While he was managing it, he disguised himself under the alias W.C. Whiteface. Even when Batman and Robin visited the bank, the Joker still wore his makeup and purplish-pink suit, and yet somehow the dynamic duo didn’t recognize him because the Joker referred to himself under the alias. In a chase scene, after they discovered it was really the Joker, Batman ran after him in an alley outside the bank, and the Joker hid inside a police car and put a policeman’s cap on his head. While he sat in the driver’s seat, Batman and Robin stopped to ask him where the Joker went, completely fooled by the Joker wearing the policeman’s hat in full makeup, and the Joker told them he went thataway and pointed in the direction behind the car. And so the dynamic duo continued running that way. Eventually the Joker would be caught and sent to the Gotham City penitentiary by the end of the episode, but it didn’t erase the fact that the caped crusaders still fell for the Joker’s ruse in the cop car.

I memorized all of the Batman villains on that TV show and even bought a book that summarized every episode. Some of the villains were just downright goofy, like Egghead played by Vincent Price. His head was shaped like an egg, and he would say things such as “Egg-celent” or “Egg-xactly.” That was all he really did–nothing special.

In another episode, King Tut, played by the actor Frank Bruno, hypnotized Batman and made him dance “The Bat-Usi,” which was a typical sixties dance move where Batman grooved to what I believed was surf rock, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed most of the episodes for as corny as they were.

Speaking of corny, pretty much all the shows I watched in my latchkey years were exactly that. Almost every afternoon, I would watch Saved By the Bell. It didn’t matter how many reruns came on. I would watch them again and know exactly what was going to happen. In case you’re not familiar, it was a sitcom that took place at a high school, and none of the jokes were funny. That is, I never laughed once. Maybe some people did, but not me. I think I watched those shows just because I had a crush on the cheerleader Kelly Kapowski, played by Tiffany Amber-Thiessen, whom some people might know from the show Melrose Place, which was a spinoff of another corny show that I watched back then: Beverly Hills, 90210.

I don’t watch TV anymore, but I’m still a latchkey kid in the body of an adult, it seems. Maybe someday, I’ll revisit those shows on YouTube or somewhere, but it’s doubtful.