Holy UK Joker! Man Dressed as Batman brings in his crook friend!

My dad used to tell me about the old Batman movie serials of the forties: silly stuff, and because they hadn't yet developed the kind of tights that emphasized the musculature, Batman looks fat in those serials! Seriously, take a look and you'll see that this serial makes Adam West look like the Terminator.

Well, apparently someone decided to pay homage to the old serial films, as this story tells it:


Who's this joker?

The British media is going batty over footage of a chubby crime-fighter bringing a wanted crook to justice while dressed in an old-school Batman costume.

The Caped Crusader stunned cops at the police station in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on Feb. 25 when he showed up with a track suit-wearing thug in tow.

 "I've caught this one for you," the masked vigalente told cops, The Telegraph newspaper reported.

The 27-year-old suspect was a two-bit thief wanted for burglary. He's due in court on Friday, according to reports.

Meanwhile, the vigilante -- whose baggy gray getup and yellow emblem recalled Adam West's TV Batman from the 1960’s -- "promptly vanished into the night," a police spokesman said.

The costume is the Adam West era, but it's worth noting that West's costume is similar to, if better fitting than, the serial Batman's costume.  

Interestingly, this caped crusader has taken off his cowl to reveal the truth! Seems that he went to a football match in the costume -- which actually makes perfect sense -- and while at the match he got a call from a friend who was wanted for burglary and wanted to turn himself in.  Our hero -- in real life a  39-year-old Chinese food delivery guy -- agreed to turn him in after he came home from the match, at about one in the morning. (His drive home from the stadium is a long one, about three and a half hours.)   Rather than change out of the costume -- or, quite sensibly, simply take the suit off and wear the tracksuit that he had on underneath it for warmth -- this guy, Stan Worby (a great alter ego for a costumed superhero, doncha think?), kept it on, and I guess he and his burglar friend thought it'd be funny if he brought him in as Batman. 

As it turns out, they were right.  It's very funny. 

Worby blames the "fatman" look on that tracksuit, which he wore to keep himself warm at the football match.   He's not very amused at all the jokes the video of his "heroics" has inspired.   I hope Adam West sends him a note.  I hafta check twitter, see if he's already said something about this!