Family Guy pays tribute to Adam West with nine-minute highlight reel

As famous as he was for playing Batman — and he was very famous for that — Adam West was also known to another generation of fans for his wacky work on Family Guy. The late actor, who popped up and scored in more than 100 episodes as Mayor Adam West, left a colorful, indelible imprint on the animated Fox comedy — as well as on its producers and fans.

“Family Guy has lost its mayor,” said creator Seth MacFarlane following West’s death on June 9, “and I have lost a friend.”

 How best to sum up all those scene-stealing appearances, which date back to 2000? That’s no easy feat. As executive producer Steve Callaghan told EW last month, “there are not enough positive adjectives in the language to use to describe Adam West.” But the show’s producers are hoping to show you what he brought to the series with a jaunt down memory lane. The Family Guy producers have cherry-picked some choice West moments and assembled a nine-minute highlight reel that basks in his joyful, delusional comedy. Here, you can get a first look at a Mayor West supercut in which he wonders if his name is actually Adam We, stabs the ocean, gets in a shouting match with the city, doesn’t quite understand what it means when blood pours out of your nose (“My god! I’m a tomato!”), coughs up a life raft, exacts revenge on a pizza delivery guy with a cat launcher, makes an amazing Bo Bice joke (as well as a Batman one), impersonates a clearance-sale area rug, is terrible at ding-dong ditch, and pardons a frozen turkey.

“What struck me most while looking through all this material was how much of a unique, memorable, and hilarious character Adam had created in Mayor West,” Callaghan tells EW. “The vocal performance and the specific comedic angle that he brought to the role were truly unlike anything he’d done before, and such an enormous gift to the series and us as writers. I also found myself laughing all over again at bits so old I’d forgotten them, while simultaneously realizing just how much I was going to miss Adam, both as a vital component of the show and as a friend.”

There are more moments to be added to this reel over the next season, as West had recorded material for five upcoming episodes before he passed away. “He’s gone,” Callaghan told EW, “but we can still enjoy his tremendous work for a while longer.” (An Adam West tribute panel, “Adam West Celebration,” will be held at Comic-Con on Thursday, with participation from Family Guy voice actor Ralph Garman, and the Family Guy producers will pay tribute to West at their Comic-Con panel on Saturday.)

Summed up Callaghan: “Adam West’s legacy in the Family Guy universe is that of an incredibly kind, upbeat, and hysterical man who played an incredibly kind, upbeat, and hysterical — but also totally insane — version of himself. We will miss him greatly and truly think of him as utterly irreplaceable.”