New York Times, Wednesday, November 16, 2016

I had a plan when I built this puzzle in March 2015. The 50th anniversary of the old TV show would be in January 2016, on a Tuesday, which I thought perfect for this theme. Hoping to avoid a multi-year wait to get published, I suggested it run on the anniversary.

But Will Shortz saw through my plan and … didn't run it. Oh well. It was worth a shot.

I am extremely proud of this grid. I think I had to work harder on this than any other I've made. No corner is safe from constraints so it took quite a while to get everything just so. Further, I made sure there were no NAs in the Down direction, adding to my difficulties.

My original grid only had 13 NAs (if you listen to the actual theme song, you'll only hear 13 of them at the end…and they sound more like DAs, not NAs). But Will rejected it since people are more familiar with the main part of the theme song and the Internet meme usually has 16. I had my doubts that I could pull off 16, but I had a go and am pleased with the result.

I had trouble cluing the revealer. I was trying to cross reference the starts of the long theme answers as well as the NAs, and the clue was so unwieldy. Will's solution is much cleaner: refer only to the NAs in the revealer and simply highlight the action sounds in the theme answer. Very nice.

For better or worse, I can't take credit for the NAE clue. It's cool that it's the first time it's being clued that way in the NYT, but crossing foreign word TABLAS, I wish the typical "Scottish no" clue was kept.

Until next (bat) time!

I have a feeling some solvers will miss the trick here, so I highlighted the 16 critical letter pairs below. Think about it …

Okay, if you've never seen the old BATMAN TV show, it might not make sense. But as a lover of all things Batman (maybe the campy Adam West stuff a tiny bit less), that opening song from West's old TV show brings me back. Singing NA-NA-NA-NA / NA-NA-NA-NA / NA-NA-NA-NA / NA-NA-NA-NA / BATMAN! is awfully fun.

Along with the bonus BANG, BAM, POW, WHAM — visuals often popping up in the old show — there is so much entertainment packed into the grid.

With such high theme density, Jim does a great job with his grid. It says something that I didn't even notice all the NAs until I got to the revealer. Well, it did seem suspicious that NITA Naldi made an appearance in what looked to be an unconstrained section, and IONA / ANEG seemed indicative of something — Jim wouldn't normally let these kinds by in flexible sections, given his strong gridding skills. And A BEAR near I MIND … okay, maybe I did know something was going on by that point. But packing in 16 NAs along with the four long themers with pretty darn good smoothness = excellent work.

There was so much about this that I really wanted to give it the POW! (how appropriate, given POWerNAp!) But 1.) there was something jarring about the random rhythm of the NAs spread through the grid — even though I know it would be near impossible from a construction standpoint, l would have loved a more regular spacing — and 2.) there's another puzzle I just adored coming up this week.