Vintage 1966 Alan-Whitney Batman Signal Bat Sticker - Decal ✨ Dark Knight, Cool!

Remember the Bat Signal Sticker? ✨ Vintage 1966 Alan-Whitney Batman Decal

Size: 3 1/2" ~ It is unknown if the adhesive still works, as that is usually the first thing to fail.

Cool! That's still the only word for these. This is one of Alan-Whitney's Glo-Colors Bat Stickers: a solid black bat silhouette, wings spread flat and scalloped along the bottom edge, stamped onto a disc of bright fluorescent paper. Peel the kraft backing off and it's ready for a book, a bicycle, an auto bumper, a window or a wagon — that's the maker's own list off its old store pack, not mine. I'm holding a real stack of these: pick Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Orange, Light Orange or White, or grab all 7 Colors and have the full run.

The bat itself is the good stuff: broad, straight-topped wings sweeping out to sharp points, two small pointed ears, and that scalloped lower edge, with no oval, no outline and no border around it, just black on color filling the disc almost edge to edge. That's a graphic decision that has aged extraordinarily well, and it's why these read bold today instead of dated. Pairing a flat black silhouette with fluorescent stock is textbook 1960s graphic thinking: maximum contrast, no gradients, no fine detail to lose at a distance, and a shape you can read from across a room. It's also why a set of seven laid out together beats any single disc on its own, with the white playing its own part in the group, quieter and warmer, right where the fluorescents shout.

The stickers themselves don't say a word: no name, no date, no price, nothing printed front or back, just the bat on its disc and plain kraft paper behind it. They come loose, without a card. The bat is what gives them away. The same bat, in the same day-glo colors, went out five to a cello pack under a printed header card, and that card says it best, so here it is close to word for word: "5 GLO-COLORS BAT STICKERS, (c) 1966 Alan-Whitney Co. Inc., New Haven, Conn., Made in U.S.A., 5 for 39c, Peel Off Backing Paper — Apply to Any Smooth Surface, for Books, Bicycles, Auto Bumpers, Windows, Wagons, etc." Thirty-nine cents for five bat stickers, and a company telling you flat out to stick one on your bike. That's a great pitch on its own, sixty years later. Alan-Whitney was a New Haven, Connecticut outfit, and bat stickers weren't their only novelty — they also made the 1964-65 Space-Bird fabric kite, a nice bit of color in its own right, and Hal Levine, a name tied to Alan-Whitney Company, is acknowledged in "The Complete Book of Kites and Kite Flying." So this wasn't a nameless factory stamp; it was a small company with a name behind it, making the kind of five-and-dime novelties a kid would actually beg for.

And these aren't simply colored stickers. The colored discs are fluorescent stock: under ordinary light they look impossibly bright next to conventional printing, because a daylight fluorescent pigment turns invisible ultraviolet into visible color instead of just reflecting what falls on it. "Glo-Colors" on that header card is the language of the stuff two Berkeley, California brothers, Bob and Joe Switzer, worked out in the 1930s. In 1946 they set up Switzer Brothers, Inc. in Cleveland, the company that became Day-Glo Color Corp. in 1969, and their daylight fluorescent pigments went on into advertising, packaging and safety work; in 2012 the American Chemical Society named them a National Historic Chemical Landmark. By the 1960s that glow was everywhere from poster art to safety signs to the toy aisle, which is exactly where a bat sticker like this one lived.

Small die-cut decals like these were the impulse-buy end of the 1960s novelty trade: sold off spinner racks, dime-store counters, vending machines and by mail, priced for pocket money, and bought to go straight onto a bicycle frame, a school binder, a bedroom door or a car window. Most of them were stuck on within days of purchase and went the way of whatever they were stuck to.

Holy collectibles, Batman! 1966 also happens to be the year the Batman TV series exploded onto ABC and turned the whole country bat-crazy — Adam West, Burt Ward, POW and ZAP right there in your living room, and every dime store and drugstore counter in America stocking up on anything bat-shaped to catch the wave. The show premiered on January 12, 1966, with Adam West as Bruce Wayne and Batman and Burt Ward as Dick Grayson and Robin, keeping Gotham City safe twice a week that first season in full camp color, and it ran 120 episodes through March 1968. In their 2016 book TV (The Book), critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz ranked it the 82nd greatest American TV show of all time, and wrote that West's performance took decades to be properly recognized. Alan-Whitney's header card doesn't carry a Batman name or a comics company's copyright line anywhere on it; it just sells "Bat Stickers." So I read it as a small novelty maker riding a national craze with its own bat design, not as an officially licensed tie-in — and either way, it's exactly the kind of thing that went home from a dime-store counter in 1966 and ended up on a bike fender by the weekend.

The show itself was built on the DC Comics character, and for three seasons the Dynamic Duo POW!-ed and ZAP!-ed their way through a rogues' gallery of dastardly villains, all at the call of the Bat-Signal blazing in the night sky. It aired twice a week for the first two seasons and weekly for the third. With its earworm of a theme song and tongue-in-cheek humor that winked at the grown-ups while thrilling the kids, it wasn't just popular - it was the biggest TV phenomenon of the mid-1960s! A companion feature film came out in 1966, between the first and second seasons, and those 120 episodes stood as the most of any superhero TV series until Smallville passed them in 2007. Not too shabby for a guy in tights, huh?

These are unused, still riding on their original backing paper — never peeled, never stuck to anything. The kraft-paper liner on the back carries a straight split line - that's where the peel-off backing opens, just as the maker's pack told you to peel it; that's how a sixty-year-old peel-off backing looks. I have no idea why the White and Green ones show that straight line through them on the front, but it lines up with the split in the kraft backing right behind it. These all have the backing still attached. Little to no wear. I've got dozens of these across seven colors, so think of the photo as the floor of the stack, not the ceiling — most of what I'm holding looks just as crisp or crisper than the one pictured. The fluorescent colors especially still glow the way day-glo paper is supposed to; the white runs a little softer and creamier by comparison, which is its own kind of nice. Up close the black has a slightly mottled texture; at arm's length it reads as a clean, flat black, and the die-cut edges are crisp and round. Please refer to the pictures.

It may require assistance, also known as glue, to affix. A dab of glue, and voila! Sixty-year-old peel-off adhesive can harden, so I'd treat one that's never been peeled as a display piece first and a sticker second - but if it's going on your bike, it can be there faster than you can say "To the Batcave!"

Whether you're a die-hard fan of the Caped Crusader or just someone who likes a slice of pop culture history, these suit superhero memorabilia collectors after real 1960s merchandise rather than modern reissues, day-glo and 1960s graphic-design people who want the fluorescent stock itself, sticker collectors who want unused old stock still on its backing, and anybody framing a seven-color grid for a game room, a studio or a kid's room.

Each disc is 3.5 inches across. A full set of seven framed together on a dark mount makes a handsome little grid, bat wings all pointing the same direction. So what are you waiting for? To the Bat-computer! Pick your color, or take the whole run. Cool, right?

There's only a finite supply of these, and nobody is making 1966 Alan-Whitney bat stickers again; once they're gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.