McFarlane is putting Adam West on the 7-inch shelf as the DC license walks. The Shakespeare bust is the whole argument.

Noon Eastern. That is when McFarlane Toys opens pre-orders on a 7-inch Adam West and a 7-inch Burt Ward in the same window box.

The product name is Batman and Robin, Batman Classic TV Series, McFarlane Collector Edition 2-pack. The clock is 12:00 PM EST, which the fan sites have been repeating since last Wednesday like a civil defense siren. Amazon. BigBadToyStore. Entertainment Earth. GameStop. Walmart. The McFarlane Toys Store. Select retailers, not a midnight Target dump. If you want the Dynamic Duo in the scale the rest of the DC Multiverse already occupies, today is the morning you decide whether camp still belongs on the shelf.

I am not going to invent a price. None of the listings I trust have posted a number I am willing to type. The accessories are the news. Two 7-inch figures. Six extra hands. An alternate Batman head portrait. Two batarangs. A Batradio. Two collectible art cards with biographies on the back. And the piece that made me sit up: a Shakespeare bust with a hidden switch, the Wayne Manor gag that tilts back and opens the cave.

That bust is the whole set. The cowls are expected. The radio is cute. The unmasked Bruce, if the window insert is what Toy Habits says it is, is a nice extra. The bust is the architecture of the show compressed into a prop you can put next to a lamp. Secret identity as a parlor trick. A millionaire who hides a cave behind a poet. I have spent twenty years watching this franchise sell me grit. Today they are selling me a switch.

McFarlane already did this universe in 6-inch. The DC Retro Batman 66 line launched out of a 2021 Summer Showcase with Adam West, Burt Ward, Cesar Romero's Joker, a Batmobile, and a Batcave playset, then kept going through swim trunks, boxing gloves, black-and-white TV variants, Eartha Kitt, Burgess Meredith, and enough word-bubble accessories to paper a rec room. Those were simpler figures on retro cards. Five points of articulation in the copy, more joints in the photos, Target exclusives in the United States. They were the correct toy for a show that was already a toy. They were also a different religion from the 7-inch Collector Edition line, which is where McFarlane parks the figures that have to stand next to a modern Batman without looking like a souvenir from a different decade.

Scale is the quiet argument. You can own a 6-inch West and still feel like he lives in a side cabinet. Seven inches is the admission that the camp Batman is not a novelty SKU. He is a resident. DCCollectors made that point in plainer language than I will: collectors can finally stand the 1966 designs next to the rest of the Multiverse without the height gap doing a joke the show already told better. I care less about height than about the fact that McFarlane waited until the license was walking out the door to put West where the serious figures go.

Because the license is walking. McFarlane's DC arrangement runs through the end of 2026. Mattel's adult collector line is dated January 1, 2027, on Mattel Creations. The sneak peek is New York Comic Con, October 8 through 11. Mephitsu's SDCC recap is the sentence I keep coming back to: Mattel confirmed the dates and did not have the collector figures on the table. They will show the future in October. They will sell it on New Year's Day. Between now and December, McFarlane still has the keys, and the keys are being used the way a band uses the last three songs of a residency. Hits. Deep cuts. One more Doomsday. One more Boy Wonder. Aliens with rings. And, this morning, the first Batman a lot of us ever met.

They did not save the last months for another grim cowl. They saved them for a POW.

Monday was the emptying. Bleeding Cool logged a Gold Label Silver Age Robin at the McFarlane Toy Store, Dick Grayson in the pixie-boot suit, fabric cape, eight extra hands, a batarang, a base, $26.99. Store exclusive. It had sold out in minutes the first time. It vanished again. Same day, a Gold Label Doomsday MegaFig, about 9.5 inches, comic armor, spikes, a rock base, an art card, McFarlane Toy Store only. Bleeding Cool reports it as the first solo DC Comics Doomsday in the line and says it appears to be the Death of Superman two-pack sculpt issued on its own. That one sold out too. If you are keeping a crisis on your shelf, you already know the pose. If you missed the two-pack, the exclusive is a second chance that lasted as long as a lunch break.

Thursday, noon Eastern again, the Corps gets weird. DCCollectors has pre-orders for Ghr'll, Medphyll, and Naut Ke Loi at the usual fan-channel list: Amazon, BigBadToyStore, Entertainment Earth, GameStop, Walmart, plus the McFarlane store. Insectoid. Plant. Aquatic helmet. These are not the Lanterns that sell movie tickets. These are the Lanterns that make a shelf look like a workplace instead of a poster. I have argued for years that the test of a DC line is whether it will sculpt a character whose name you have to look up. McFarlane is spending the leftover calendar on that test. I respect it more than another Earth-1 cowl with a new paint app.

I am supposed to treat all of this as panic shopping. License ending, Gold Label vanishing, 2-pack windows, Mattel in the wings. The hobby has a script for that. Refresh at 11:58. Blame bots at 12:07. Post a photo of an empty cart. I have done that script. I am trying not to do it for a Shakespeare bust.

The bust is funny because it is accurate. In the 1966 series, Bruce Wayne does not brood in a cave he excavated out of trauma. He owns a house with a library gag. You tilt the head. Poles. Costume change. Cut to the car. The show understands Batman as a device, and the device is delight. Adult collecting spent the last decade pretending delight was a failure of taste. We bought tactical cowls and weathered capes and statues that looked like they had been left in a rainstorm on purpose. Some of those objects are great. A lot of them are the same frown in different plastic. West's Batman is the reminder that this character was a prime-time comedy about gadgets, and that the gadgets included a poet.

Toy Habits got an early look at the packaging, and the insert is doing the correct amount of noise. Onomatopoeia on the backdrop. RAKKK. CRASH. GUSH. The window shows the two figures and the extra bits between them, including what looks like the unmasked head, the radio, and the small bust. That is not subtle branding. It is the show's grammar printed on cardboard. I like that more than a black box with silver foil. If you are going to sell 1966, sell 1966. Do not sand it into a prestige object so a collector in 2026 can pretend he is above the word balloons.

The 6-inch Retro line already proved there is a market for this tone. It also proved McFarlane could live in two Batmans at once: the articulated grim one on the 7-inch peg, the simpler colorful one at Target. Moving West and Ward into Collector Edition collapses that split. The camp designs get the joints, the extra hands, the art cards, the scale of the line that was supposed to be the adult one. That is either a victory lap or a confession that the adult line was always big enough to hold a smile. I think it is the confession. I think it is late. I still want the box.

I should say what I am not claiming. I have not handled these sculpts. I have not seen a joint budget published. I do not know if the capes are cloth or plastic. I do not know when the two-pack ships. Fan sites say Collector Edition 2-packs have a habit of disappearing in the first window. That is a pattern, not a guarantee, and it is also how you talk people into hitting refresh for a product that might still be sitting there on Friday. I will not narrate a sellout that has not happened. Noon has not happened yet either. I am writing this in the morning on purpose. The news is the window, not the aftermath.

What I will claim is taste. If your shelf is already a row of cinematic Batmen, this 2-pack is the one that will look like it wandered in from a different network and then made the row more honest. West next to a Snyder cowl is a better sentence than West hidden in a 6-inch ghetto. Ward next to a modern Nightwing is a genealogy, not a gag. The Boy Wonder in this show is not a grim intern. He is the reason the hero has someone to talk to. McFarlane putting them in one box is the correct grouping. Batman without Robin is a mood. Batman with Robin is a series.

The Gold Label Robin yesterday is a different Dick. Silver Age comics, not Burt Ward. Fabric cape. Same name, different job. I mention him because the store is clearly running a Robin week while it still can, and because sold-out exclusives are how McFarlane has trained the audience to experience the end of the license as a series of closed tabs. I do not love that training. I also do not pretend a $26.99 store exclusive is a moral event. If you wanted the pixie boots, the number was on the site. If you missed it, the 1966 Ward in the 2-pack is the other door. They are not interchangeable. They are both the argument that this character is allowed to be bright.

Doomsday is the counterweight, and I am glad he is ugly. A 9.5-inch murder machine on a rock, issued solo so you do not have to hunt a two-pack, is the other last-mile instinct: print the monster while the contract still covers the monster. Bleeding Cool framed Monday's Gold Label drop as McFarlane getting its money's worth before the license leaves. That is a blunt way to put it. It is also obviously true. Companies do this. They run the catalog through the machine until the machine is someone else's. The question is which SKUs they choose for the last pass. A plant Lantern and a 1966 two-pack are better last-pass objects than another Batman with a different belt.

Mattel will get a turn. Kid-focused DC play is already in the mid-2026 pipeline. The collector flagship is the New Year's product. NYCC will be a tent. January 1 will be a website. I have no sculpts to judge and I am not going to review a line that has not been shown. What I will say is that the gap between McFarlane's 7-inch comic grimness and Mattel's unrevealed adult line is exactly the kind of vacuum in which a camp 2-pack starts to look like a period at the end of a sentence. If you wait for Mattel, you are waiting for a company that did not bring the toys to San Diego. If you wait for a restock of West, you are betting a license sunset against a warehouse. I am not a financial advisor for plastic. I am a person who still thinks the 1966 show is the most American Batman, and that American Batman includes a bust that is also a button.

McFarlane is not going to vanish in January. Monday they also put a Fallout Elite Edition T-45B in Nuka-Cola paint on pre-order, 7 inches, 22 points of articulation, $59.99, due in September, with a pile of guns and a mini nuke and an Elite Points card. Bleeding Cool noted the obvious nerd correction: the Nuka-World park suit fans remember is a T-51 with the soda livery, not a T-45B. McFarlane made a different chassis and put the brand on it anyway. That is a different desk argument. I bring it up for one reason. The company already has other rooms to work in. The DC exit is real. It is not a funeral. It is a calendar. The people who will miss the Multiverse the most are the people who used it as a weekly habit. Habits end. Objects stay.

I keep returning to the switch. A figure line at the end of a license usually tries to look important. Important means dark. Important means a character who could be a statue. The Shakespeare bust refuses that. It is a play feature that is also a joke that is also the plot of every episode's first five minutes. You cannot put it on a resin plinth and call it tone. You have to click it. If McFarlane actually engineered a tilt, I want that click more than I want another interchangeable angry mouth. If the switch is sculpted and does not move, I will still keep the bust, because the idea is the accessory. The idea is that Batman begins as interior design.

The grim Batman is a product. The camp Batman is a toy. Those are different jobs, and only one of them still knows how to open a door.

Buy it if you still like the show. That is the only rule I have. Do not buy it because a forum said the window will slam. Do not buy it as a hedge against Mattel. Do not buy it because you think 1966 will become scarce the minute the contract hits December. Scarcity is a feeling manufacturers are very good at manufacturing. The 6-inch Retro figures did not become unobtainium just because they were simpler. Some of them sat. Some of them got expensive. Taste is not a ticker.

If you already have the Retro West and Ward, this 2-pack is still a different object. Different scale. Different joint promise. Different company of neighbors on the shelf. If you do not have them, skip the nostalgia tax of hunting old Target cards and take the Collector Edition as the grown-up version of the first Batman you can remember. If you never liked the show, this box will not convert you. It will stand there in bright color and make your other Batmen look like they forgot how to talk to a partner. That might be useful. It might just be noisy. You know your shelf.

I am going to try at noon. I want the bust more than I want the cowls, which is a strange sentence to write about Batman and also the most accurate one I have. I want the radio. I want the extra hands so Ward can point at a clue. I want the art cards because this line still pretends a biography on the back of a slip of paper is part of the toy, and I like that pretense. I do not want to treat a pre-order as a personality. If it is gone at 12:04 I will not write a tragedy. If it is still there on Thursday I will not call the market stupid. The box either belongs next to the grim ones or it does not. That decision is older than McFarlane's contract and it will outlast Mattel's launch event.

The license ends. The show does not. Sixty years on, the most durable Batman merch is still the one that looks like it might say POW when you pose it. Today they finally scaled that idea to the shelf that was supposed to be serious. I think that is the right last trick. Tilt the bust. Open the cave. Put the bright ones with the dark ones. Let the row argue. That is what a collection is for.