Batman, Season Two

The second season of Batman is almost twice as long as Season One, and frankly, I don’t think that was a good thing.  By this point, the show was a monster success and everyone was riding high.  It was nominated for three Emmys—Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Comedy (for Frank Gorshin), and Individual Achievements in Sound Editing—and was even being referenced by other shows (The Monkees, Gilligan’s Island) and movies (The Fortune Cookie).  The Bat-climb celebrity cameos were in full swing, featuring everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. to… Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes?  How is that supposed to work?*

The point is, the show was at the peak of its popularity, and I guess that made the writers too lazy to get up off their laurels and make sure the show continued to be a success.

To my mind, the show tended to live or die on the merits of its villains, and that’s where a good portion of this season’s mediocrity comes from.  Aside from perennial favorites Catwoman, Joker, Penguin, and King Tut, we have a much larger, weaker Rogues Gallery this time around.  The season gets off to a VERY poor start with the Archer, played by Art Carney.  Now I love him on The Honeymooners, but as a Batman villain, Carney is just painful to watch.  The Archer, a less upstanding version of Robin Hood who robs from the rich and gives to himself, is easily the worst villain of the season.  He’s not uninteresting so much as he is… not funny.  I can’t even specify why, but this guy is just not entertaining.  On the upside, we get the worst episodes out of the way first.

The Minstrel… I don’t even know.  He’s certainly not Penguin-level awesome or anything, but I can’t help liking him anyway, probably because my weakness for old school musicals makes the concept of Van Johnson as a singing supervillain too good to resist.  And the idea of a musically-inclined miscreant is certainly not a bad one in and of itself, as fellows like the Pied Piper and the Music Meister prove, so I’m more inclined to blame the meh-ness of this episode on the relatively unimaginative plot.  Seriously—you have a guy who dresses up like a troubadour and sings threatening songs at Batman, and the most interesting plot you can come up with is to have him blackmail the Stock Exchange? 

Come on, dude, you couldn’t have gone after Gotham City Concert Hall or something?  Or, I don’t know, Garnegie Hall or whatever expy of a real-life place you’d use?

Ma Parker is another one-shot villain I enjoyed.  Based on the (apparently fabricated) stories of Ma Barker, she plots to take over the penitentiary with the help of her three grown sons… oh yeah, and that useless daughter of hers. (Ma Parker actually calls her useless… and, well, she is.)  I just like the way Ma shoots at the policemen surrounding her house while simultaneously threatening the kids with no dessert if they don’t eat their carrots. 

As for Clock King, I don’t have too many negative things to say about him either.  Even if I did, I would keep a lid on it purely because these were the only episodes co-written by Bill Finger.  He’s the guy who co-created Batman and many of the more popular rogues, only to end up overshadowed by Bob Kane.** So yeah, these episodes get a free pass.

Egghead would probably be my favorite “series original” villain if it wasn’t for King Tut.  I don’t know if Vincent Price had a good time playing this guy or not, but if he didn’t, he did a world-class job of pretending he did.  (He apparently started a food fight on set one day, so I’m guessing he had some fun.) Egghead, a raging egotist who bills himself as the world’s smartest man, is just so ridiculously happy to be evil that it’s impossible not to love him.  And yes, predictably, he makes a whole slew of egg-related puns.  But again, he’s just so darn gleeful, and they’re all eminently more intelligent than Schwarzenegger’s ice puns, so it’s very easy to egg-scuse him for making them.

Then there’s Chandell, a gifted pianist-turned-thief.  Normally, I shouldn’t have to tell you anything other than the guy was played by Liberace. 

Yeah, that one.  But the thing is, Chandell isn’t much of a crook.  His evil twin Harry (yes, really), also played by Liberace, has been blackmailing a reluctant Chandell into a life of crime.  If that sounds like Zelda the Great from Season One, that’s because it pretty much is.  And here’s where the series’ inherent sexism comes into play—with Zelda, Batman went out of his way to help her and make sure she’d get a job after she left prison; with Chandell, he just teases the guy and mercilessly throws him in prison, like he does with every other crook.  It’s like I said in the Season One review: men can’t make mistakes, and women can’t make decisions.  Honestly, the best thing about these episodes is Liberace’s acting, so-called.  It’s SO bad that I look forward to seeing these episodes just to laugh at it.  It’s entertaining in all the wrong ways… or maybe all the right ways, knowing this show.

Mr. Freeze is played by two different actors this season.  The first, Otto Preminger, is BEYOND ANNOYING, and if you’ve seen him, you’ll know that the caps lock was more than necessary.  All of the sympathy George Sanders brought to the role has been put on ice (ha) in favor of straight-up supervillainy.  Plus he’s got this awful catchphrase—“Wild!”—that starts to make Schwarzenegger and his ice puns seem like Jack Benny by comparison.  Maybe this awful performance is the reason he was replaced later in the season by Eli Wallach (that, and apparently Preminger was as insufferable off screen as he was on).  Wallach, while a marked improvement over Preminger, still plays Freeze as a one-note villain with nothing particularly special about him.

Marsha, Queen of Diamonds is surprisingly entertaining.  Her main schtick is, well, diamond stealing, and she will happily brainwash any man into worshipping her to get what she wants.  Like with many of the best villains, Carolyn Jones happily hams it up and gives what, in my eyes, is a sparkling performance.  That, and her potion-brewing Aunt Hilda is a flipping riot.

Above: best part of episode

Moving right along, Shame is a cowboy-themed villain whom I suspect was invented for the sole purpose of being able to make Alan Ladd-related puns with his name.  He’s pretty fun, although Cliff Robertson’s performance feels a bit forced at times, like he knew what show he was on and thought it was silly.  Though if that was the case, it wasn’t enough to stop him from playing the character again in Season Three… more’s the pity.

Puzzler is pretty bland.  I always got a sort of “we’re in a hurry so we picked some random villain traits out of a hat” vibe from this guy.  As his name suggests, he leaves puzzle-clues for the Dynamic Duo to solve.  We already have a villain who’s into riddles, and another who’s into jokes, so I don’t know, maybe they thought a dude who digs puzzles would be a hit?  Oh, and airplanes.  He likes puzzles and planes.  And Shakespeare.  That must have been such a stretch for Maurice “the original Laurence Olivier” Evans.

The next villain to menace our heroes is the Sandman, played by Michael Rennie.  It’s a bit difficult to judge him on his own merits, since his only appearance was in a team-up with Catwoman, but he seems a lot like the Puzzler in some respects.  He has a very similar villain plot—dupe a rich person into trusting him so he can swipe their fortune—and he, too, is a suave, older European man.  I think at this point the writers were just trying to come up with enough new villains to keep up with the influx of celebrities who wanted in.  At the very least, Sandman picks one motif—sleeping—and sticks with it. 

The Mad Hatter makes his second and final appearance this season.  I already discussed him in the Season One review, and I only bring him up again because I forgot to mention something there.  The Mad Hatter of the sixties series is not the same Mad Hatter that most people today would recognize.  In 1956, DC Comics introduced a Mad Hatter imposter who did not employ mind control or recite Lewis Carroll; rather, he was obsessed with collecting all of the hats that he could.  The character was eventually phased out with the return of the real Mad Hatter (though he’s recently resurfaced), but that wasn’t until after this show ended.  Long story short, Batman’s Mad Hatter was based off the imposter, not the original.  I’m kind of glad they went with this Mad Hatter though, because now I get to continue that time-honored tradition of casting Republicans as Bat-villains.  Observe:

As for the Riddler, let’s just say it’s very appropriate that the second half of his sole Season Two appearance was titled “A Riddling Controversy”, because that’s exactly what happened.  After Frank Gorshin became the only actor to ever be nominated for an Emmy for this program, what did they do?  Replace him with John “Gomez Addams” Astin.  Brilliant!  I’ve heard competing stories on why Gorshin did not appear—illness, contractual disputes, prior obligations…—but the end result is the same: a dismal performance.  Even if you somehow manage to do the impossible and forget that Gorshin’s version exists, Astin is just bad.  As in, “I’m tempted to scroll back up the page and say that Archer was the second-worst villain of the season behind Astin” bad.  His performance see-saws between bland and very obviously forced and none of it is even remotely enjoyable to watch and gah.  If they couldn’t get Gorshin, they should have just retired the character. 

Colonel Gumm is pretty much Generic Hammy Villain.  It’s just a shame that the creators had to go and pick such an uninspired bad guy for the Green Hornet crossover.  How much would I have paid to see them go up against Penguin or Joker?  I don’t know, but it’d be a lot.  At least by 1967 standards.

Black Widow is another lame one.  She’s basically Marsha, except if Marsha was thirty years older, had a thing for banks instead of diamonds, and was really annoying.  Also worthy of note: this is the episode where Robin decides that he should make Batman sing Gilbert and Sullivan before freeing him from Black Widow’s mind control. 

I wish I could tell you the context makes it better, but there is none.

Boy, that was a long list.  On to the good guys!  Well, I already discussed all of them in the Season One review… but Aunt Harriet is given a bit more to do this season.  Whether or not that is a good thing is a matter of individual taste, but she’s more than an afterthought now and is getting some character development of some kind, so I guess that’s good?  Unfortunately, that character is mostly irritating, shrill, and unnecessary.  She has a bigger role, true, but she doesn’t do anything in that extra time that she wasn’t doing before—namely, getting in the way.

Whoa, Auntie’s packin’ heat!  I take it back!  I take it back!!

Another thing I didn’t mention in the Season One review that I should have is the whole “Irish cop” thing.  Yes, Chief O’Hara is a big ol’ ball of outdated stereotyping.  Heck, if the show was made today, he’d probably be clutching a beer bottle in every scene before the fans came down on them with the wrath of… well, fans.  I’m not saying stereotyping is right, but to be completely fair, the show does kind of acknowledge this at least once.  In “Marsha Queen of Diamonds,” we are introduced to a few other policemen.  Their names?  O’Leary, O’Rourke, O’Toole… and Goldberg. (Bonus points for the guy playing O’Leary—his real name is O’Hara!)  The writer of this episode, at least, is perfectly aware of the stereotypes and isn’t afraid to play around with them a bit.  No, that doesn’t make it right, and yes, the Bumbling Irish Cop needs to die now, buuuut it’s like I said in my Teen Titans #1 review—it’s the sixties, I’ve seen worse, and I really can’t hate on it too much.

Season Two also featured guest stars outside of the villains and Bat-climbs.  These were largely musical guests, most notably Chad & Jeremy and Lesley Gore, though Phyllis Diller and that guy from “The Trouble with Tribbles” also showed up.  Like I said, now that the show was so popular, everybody who was anybody in Hollywood wanted in on the joke.  Reportedly, such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and John Wayne expressed interest in appearing, but the writers couldn’t come up with enough ideas to accommodate everybody.

My favorite episode of the season is “Hizzoner the Penguin/Dizzoner the Penguin,” in which our beloved Bird of Prey decides to run for mayor.  (Yes, you read that right; Batman Returns—by all accounts the darkest of the Batman films—stole its plot from the sixties series.  Take that, purists!)  The only way to defeat him is for Batman to run against him, leading to a campaign filled with political rib-poking that is still frighteningly accurate and relevant today. 

"We'll give the voters of this city the kind of campaign they want: plenty of girls and bands and slogans and lots of HOOPLA!!  But remember: no politics!  Issues confuse people."

Just try and tell me you can’t hear a variant of that being said by some dunderheaded politician who didn’t realize he/she was being recorded.

I have to admit, though, that the scene where Batman goes all “I’m not worthyyyy!” when first asked to run for mayor makes me want to punch him in the face.  It’s just trying too hard to make Batman self-effacing and give the other characters an excuse to raise his pedestal a little.  But this is supposed to be a review of the entire season, not these two episodes, so I’ll just leave it there.  Honorable mention goes to “King Tut’s Coup/Batman’s Waterloo” because Victor Buono’s performance here makes me laugh harder than any other single thing in the entire series.

Oh, and just so you don’t spend years wondering what a “hizzoner” is and mispronouncing it the way I did, it’s a corruption of the words “his honor,” referring to a public official of some kind.  You’re welcome.

In all seriousness, I adore Season Two.  Not as much as the impeccably and indescribably incredible Season One, but there is still a lot to enjoy about this season.  The only dark cloud hovering over my amusement is the gradual, unsteady decline in quality.  One day we’re watching Archer scold his fried chicken-loving, Brooklyn-accented henchwench Maid Marilyn (bad), and the next there’s Ma Parker taking over the penitentiary and trying to blow up the Batmobile (good).  At least if the descent into mediocrity had been steady, I’d know when to stick a “jump the shark” tag on it, but noooo, they have to be difficult.  Heck, even the subtler signs of impending suckitude bounced around like Joker’s Jumping Beans.  The rhyming titles, for instance, no longer rhyme, except when they do.  The only constants are a) the fact that the onomatopoeias are now placed on colored slides and cover the entire screen instead of the words being superimposed over the fight scene itself (apparently slides were cheaper), and b) partway through the season, the “previously on” summaries stopped synopsizing the entire plot of the episode that came before it and just told you about the death trap.  While I can understand wanting to save a buck or two, it’s clear that quite a few people were getting quite a bit lazier as time wore on.

However, the main problem with Season Two (along with the mediocre villains) seems to be that it’s just getting too gimmicky.  In Season One, things were certainly over-the-top, but they weren’t flat-out stupid.  Let’s take the death traps as an example.  In the first season, Mr. Freeze simply froze Batman and Robin and left them in the street to die; in the second, he tries to turn them into giant slushies.  The Joker was going to electrocute our heroes in the back of a truck during Season One; he fed them to an overgrown clam in Season Two.  Although the cliffhangers in the first season were goofy, there was still a touch of true menace to them.  Season Two, with few exceptions, prefers to slap on the cheese as thickly as possible.  It’s still entertaining, but it’s not nerve-wracking.  When I see Robin about to get eaten by tigers, I laugh and cringe.  When I see that giant clam about to gobble him up, I just laugh.  And I think that’s the difference.  Season One makes me root for the characters to get out of whatever mess they find themselves in.  Season Two just makes me eager to see the mess itself as opposed to the characters who made the mess and the characters who are in the mess.  The whole Colonel Klink cameo proves it—the writers no longer care if the show is believable; they just want to make jokes, no matter how silly or stupid.  It’s about spectacle, not people.  But hey, at least Season Two had one of those.  By Season Three, both of these elements are lost for good.

Next Time: Gonzo may not have the physical fortitude of an Olympian, but we can certainly make fun of those who do!

Images from Batman and Wikipedia.org

*My theory is that one of Kinchloe’s experiments went horribly wrong, turned into a wormhole, and sucked an unsuspecting Klink into 1960s America.  Still doesn’t explain why Batman and Robin were so cordial towards a Nazi officer, but I’ll leave that to the fan-ficcers.  That’s where I get the answers to all my fandom questions!

**That’s probably a giant understatement, but there is a LOT of controversy about who created what in DC’s early days and I really don’t know much about it either way.  So unless and until I learn a little more about why Finger’s name doesn’t appear in any bylines, I figured I shouldn’t go bashing anybody too badly yet.