Burt Ward (tv’s Robin) said he was offered the lead for The Graduate but those dicks at Batman wouldn’t let him do it.

His claim makes sense, in that he looked like Ben Braddock and was about the right age, whereas Dustin Hoffman did not and was not. In a rare fit of coherence, Renata Adler made the point that it’s a strange idea to cast Dustin Hoffman pushing 30 as a golden boy WASP athlete just out of college. She figured that, as a result, The Graduate was just about impossible to swallow. Yet the one time she made sense, she turned out to be wrong.

From Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights by Burt Ward, Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic by Renata Adler