Batman (the TV series)

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2:04 The Cat and the Fiddle

Batman remembers that a solar eclipse is due to take place imminently, which gives the two a brief respite from the magnified solar rays. The eclipse is only due to last half a minute. Given that it's a proper eclipse which renders everything dark, I don't actually think this is possible in real life. But anyway the two imperilled crime-fighters use their time wisely. The Caped Crusader has calculated that they need to shift the giant magnifying glasses by exactly 14 degrees with their feet to get the magnified rays to burn through the ties on their left wrists.

I could have sworn their ankles had been tied but they don't appear to be when they move the magnifying glasses, which they can just reach with their toes. Batman's plan works. And yet as Batman frees himself, we see that their ankles are tied again.

Anyway Catwoman and the gang have already left of course - the villains always do this, never bothering to wait around to check that their elaborate execution methods have actually worked. The Dynamic Duo follow up their next clue, which leads them to the Gotham State Building skyscraper, where a wealthy old recluse is about to conclude a sale of two priceless Stradivarius violins to a similarly reclusive and massively wealthy old woman.

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But Catwoman, made up very convincingly as a feeble old lady, has taken the place of the would-be violin acquirer. She's already got hold of the $500,000 that was the asking price. Soon she'll have the violins as well!

Or will she? On the top floor of the Gotham State Building, she suddenly pulls off her glasses and coat, and she's transformed instantly, somehow, into her usual Catwoman guise. It's extraordinary. All the grey hair and makeup just disappears. But the old bloke with the violins does exactly the same, and it's the Boy Wonder!

Unfortunately, Robin is overcome by the Feline Felon's henchmen. They're about to throw him out of the window. Can Batman make it up there in time? Well not easily, because Catwoman has had the elevator switched off. But the Caped Crusader has a trick up his sleeve - two portable bat jets. We saw him working on these in the Batcave in the last episode. He claims that they're capable of propelling a 500 pound car 500 miles into space. Actually I think even a Fiat 500 weighs twice that, but anyway - they're roughly the size of a packet of biscuits.

He attaches both of them to the bottom of the elevator car (would have thought one of them would have done) and he's on the top floor in no time. Catwoman and her criminal friends - including the newspaper man who's been working with her - mount a getaway rocket pointed at the window, to make good their escape. But it won't start. So there's a punch-up of course. Her henchmen are all subdued, but she escapes onto the ledge. Batman ends up saving her life, to her sincere gratitude. But after he gets thrown out of the window by the criminal newspaper man himself, they both end up clinging to a rope, and Robin saves both of them.

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There's a touching final scene that explores some tentative romantic chemistry between Batman and Catwoman.

I really liked this one. Any episode with Catwoman as the villain is a good one. Julie Newmar is just brilliant in that role - off-the-scale charismatic, lithe and sexy as fuck and with an impeccable comic touch. I didn't quite see what the criminal newspaper reporter added to the story, though.

One odd thing - the driver of the armoured car who brings the $500,000 to the old woman (really Catwoman) for the violins, then takes her to the Gotham State Building looks uncannily like Christian Bale, who played Batman in a successful film franchise nearly 40 years later. Second pic.

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One disappointing thing about the last couple of episodes - the KAPOW! CRUNCH! etc in the punch-up scenes, previously superimposed on the action like this:

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.. now have a solid background like this:

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[Slim]

02:05 The Minstrel's Shakedown

There's chaos at Gotham Stock Exchange, when investors start to make huge losses and inexplicable gains. The stock market is all over the place. It's total unpredictable pandemonium.

What can possibly have happened? Just as the market chaos is being described on the evening news, a new transmission takes over the airwaves. A fetching chap dressed in mediaeval minstrel garb and weilding a lute appears. After strumming out a fetching little ditty, he promises immunity from a repetition of the day's stock market calamity - for the fee of $1000 per week, per stock exchange member. Payable to his Swiss bank account of course. Blackmail! The Swiss banks were the Bitcoin of their day.

The Dynamic Duo are on the case immediately. Batman inspects the transmission systems and the coding circuits at the stock exchange. He finds that the circuits have been tampered with. Late that evening, they lie in wait at the stock exchange, waiting for The Minstrel - for such is our new arch-villain's name.

Well he does turn up, but he blinds the noble crime-fighters with some sort of bizarre electronic firework device. He gets away. Once Batman has recovered, he inspects the modifications made to the stock exchange equipment - and realises that The Minstrel is an electronic genius.

At this point I must say it did occur to me that all the stock exchange folks had to do to prevent their members being fleeced for $1000 a week was to fix the equipment and improve security. But perhaps that's not the point. After all - who could know where he'd strike next?

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Well - the troublesome troubador decides he has to eliminate Batman and Robin. But his two noble adversaries have a plan of their own - to track down his studio, next time he makes an unauthorised TV transmission, using a radio-tracking drone. It looks a lot like a model aircraft.

I thought this was really interesting, this idea of a remote-control drone being used in the 1960s. They were already being used in Vietnam for surveillance when this episode was filmed, but they were not a familiar idea in the public domain. There's a brilliant moment when Batman asks Alfred to retrieve the drone - by activating the bat drone retriever switch. About ten seconds later, it glides gracefully through the Batcave entrance.

Anyway, the villainous lute-wielder makes another TV transmission, the Dynamic Duo track the fiend's unauthorised TV studio down to an old warehouse, they go there and enter it via an open window on an upper floor. I love those bat rope moments when they walk up the side of a wall.

But it's a trap! The Minstrel's henchmen are waiting for them. There's a punch-up. The henchmen are overcome fairly easily after half a minute of KAPOW! etc. But when the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder go to look for the boss, they get caught in a villainous trap.

It's not clear how this happens, exactly. We see them breaking down a door. Then there's a cut to a scene in which they're trussed to a giant rotating spit, over a barbecue. And that, of course, is the cliffhanger.

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He's an odd sort of villain, The Minstrel. His persona - being an Olde Worlde minstrel with a lute - is at odds with his gimmick, which is that he's a criminal electronics mastermind. Would have made more sense for him to have been called Electron, and wear a costume based on wires and transistors. Or something. In any case I recognised him immediately; he's Van Johnson, star of many an old war movie. He had a prominent role in 1954's The Caine Mutiny alongside Humphrey Bogart. Brilliant film.

One interesting moment in this episode early on - Commissioner Gordon tells Batman to be careful. In response, the Caped Crusader lists all the super-criminals he's successfully overcome - Penguin, Catwoman, Joker, King Tut et al. He even mentions one we haven't seen yet - Clock Face. But he doesn't mention The Riddler, even though the Prince of Puzzles has made more appearances (four) than any other villain in the episodes up to and including this one.

Why? Well, I suspect that this little exchange was concoted as a deliberate middle finger to Frank Gorshin, who doesn't appear at all in this second series as The Riddler - because he wanted a salary hike that the studio didn't agree to. There is a Riddler story in the second series, but John Astin (Gomez in The Addams Family) plays the riddling rascal.

I do believe that no-one succumbs to knockout gas in this one, which is highly unusual.

[Slim]

02:06 Barbecued Batman?

Unusually, the villain and his dastardly associates hang around to watch Batman and Robin meet their end over a barbecue. How then can they possibly escape? Well, it turns out that the Caped Crusader took the precaution of planting some bat-bombs in the building on his way in. These go off, creating an effective diversion - the bad guys run off to investigate and the two crime-fighters manage to shake themselves free.

There's a punch-up when the villains return of course, but The Minstrel escapes. His criminal sidecandy surrenders, but Batman very graciously declines to take her into custody, allowing her to go free. Because he's planted a homing device / bug in her handbag, to lead him to The Minstrel.

However, the melodic mischief-maker discovers the bug quickly, and he tells the Caped Crusader that he is about to invoke a dastardly plan. He tells him to be at the conference room of the stock exchange in 30 minutes, with Commissioner Gordon and the assorted stock exchange personnel.

Thirty minutes later, at the stock exchange .. the building shakes dramatically. But it's not an earthquake. The Caped Crusader surmises that the villainous lute player has made the building shake by installing subsomic devices to hit exactly the right resonant frequency. Next, the crooked mastermind appears on TV. He'll cause irreversible calamity by nightfall unless his extortionate terms are met.

But Batman has an idea. Switch off the power to the building at 6pm exactly. Then the devices, wherever in the bulding they're installed, won't work. The building engineer and electrical crew are put to work to rig up a master switch.

Well .. the switch is thrown at 6pm exactly. The power goes off .. but it's to no avail! It comes back on a moment later! The Minstrel is somehow broadcasting power into the building!

Oddly though, the twisted technical trickster has turned up in person there, in a sharp black suit and heavy-framed specs. The old Clark Kent gambit.

Why he's done this is not really explained, but Batman recognises him. His henchmen emerge from the shadows. There's a punch-up. The arch-villain attempts the trick with the blinding electronic firework again, but it won't work. Robin explains that he and Batman are wearing "particle bat accelerator units", to create an anti-charge to deflect the effect of the weapon. I suspect that Burt Ward got the words "bat" and "particle" the wrong way round there. I think they were scripted the other way round.

And it's off to jail for The Minstrel.

I must say the stuntmen playing the henchmen in the final punch-up scene do some very good work. Robin sends one of them flying into a spectacular sliding reverse somersault over the surface of a conference table.

Always nice to see a change from the usual Joker / Riddler / Catwoman ideas, apart from Catwoman. But I don't think The Minstrel is a great villain. In any case, I don't think we'll see him again.

[Slim]

Frank Zappa wrote and arranged this, in 1966.

[Slim]

02:07 The Spell of Tut

A safe is broken into, somewhere in Gotham City. But the thieves - dressed in ancient Egyptian garb - make off only with a string of amber beads, leaving behind priceless diamonds and rubies.

Could it be the work of the university professor who, following a blow to the head, became convinced that he's a reincarnation of Tutankhamun, with a divine right to rule over all Gotham City? Certainly Gommissioner Gordon thinks so, and he's not wrong. The wayward academic has had a relapse. The Dynamic Duo are on the case immediately.

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Gordon's usual secretary is on leave, and her temporary replacement seems very eccentric.

Well - it turns out that Tut wants the amber beads because several specimens of a long-extinct scarab beetle are encased in them. He plans to create an ancient potion, called aburabusimbutu. One of its critical ingredients is the distilled essence of scarab limbs. It's capable of paralysing the human will. If he can get enough of the stuff, and get it to the populace somehow, the whole of Gotham will be at his mercy!

He manages to bring the scarabs from the amber to life, Frankenstein-style, by putting 200,000 volts through them. He only has a few of them of course, but they reproduce very quickly. Batman and Robin track Tut and his gang down, but following a brief punch-up, they get away.

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Meanwhile .. Bruce Wayne has bought Tut's talking sphinx statue, as featured in the first Tut story. The mad monarch dispatches two of his henchmen to steal it from the gardens of his stately home. They do. But Robin is hiding inside it!

Unfortunately, the Boy Wonder is discovered once the sphinx is relocated to Tut's secret hideout. Fortunately Batman has tracked him there. But the Evil Egyptologist attempts to administer a dose of his newly created potion to the lad. Robin escapes through a side door .. but it leads to a platform suspended over a crocodile pit! As the Boy Wonder maintains his balance.. the platform starts to retract into the wall! Can Batman get there in time?

I must say the crocs look ridiculously fake, but that's all part of the fun.

By the way Commissioner Gordon's temp turns out to be Tut's villainous cutie sidekick. She's planning to give the old boy a dose of the wicked aburabusimbutu potion in the guise of one of his vitamin pills.

A couple of Tut's henchmen are authentically Egyptian-looking and a bit bonkers, like he is. Last time his hired help were all locals who realised he was a nutter, but were happy to get paid.

There's a cameo from Van Williams and Bruce Lee (no less) who starred in The Green Hornet, which was made at the same time as Batman. Never seen it myself. This was a couple of years before Lee went on to be a martial arts cult hero of course.

Good one. Tut is definitely one of the best of all the Batman villains. He chews the scenery delightfully when called upon to do so - especially when his evil beetle experiment initially fails, and he's distraught. I don't quite understand though how a university lecturer manages to afford a grand hideout with all the monarchical Egyptian furniture, a handsome set of evil laboratory equipment and a team of paid-up loyal henchmen. And a pit of crocodiles.

This story sees Tut in equal fourth place (with Catwoman) in the villain appearances league table.

[Slim]

02:08 Tut's Case Is Shut

Batman arrives just in time to save the Boy Wonder. He zaps the iron bars over a high window in the crocodile room with a sort of laser pistol, climbs up there, swings down and retrieves the lad on the end of a rope. He only just makes it. It did occur to me that he could just have zapped the crocs with the laser weapon.

Meanwhile Tut's villainous cutie persuades O'Hara, in Commissioner Gordon's absence, to take one of the wicked potion pills. Tut turns up in Gordon's office! And in no time, Tut has the hapless policeman, completely under his spell, performing acrobatics on the high ledge outside for his entertainment. The wicked cutie loves this; she has a delightful gleeful laugh.

The Dynamic Duo turn up, but Tut and his latter-day Queen of the Nile manage to leave just in time.

The talking sphinx arrives in one of Gotham's parks, to give proclamations to the general public. He's going to provide more drinking fountains! And Tut has managed to get Commissioner Gordon to take some of the evil potion. The mad monarch's will is now the commissioner's command.

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Batman arrives at the park. Gordon is there, and gives the Caped Crusader a lemonade from a refreshments stand, spiked with the potion. Robin watches helpless as Batman turns into a subservient zombie. They're both taken away to Tut's palatial hideout. The Evil Egyptologist has created thousands of gallons of his mind-bending drug, and he's going to introduce it to the water supply.

But not before he's fed Batman and Robin to his crocs.

Of course, and I think most viewers would have suspected this, Batman was never affected by the potion. He'd consumed several glasses of buttermilk to line his stomach, as protection.

So there's a punch-up and it's game over. In the final scene, we see Commissioner Gordon pondering whether it's really appropriate to try Tut, who's returned to his persona as a harmless university professor, for his crimes.

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02:09 The Greatest Mother of Them All

The infamous Ma Parker turns up in Gotham City. She and her four delinquent children have terrorised numerous American cities over the years but until now, she's never troubled the sprawling metropolis defended by Batman and Robin.

She and her ill-mannered hillbilly kids pull off a number of robberies in the city. She manages to escape the Dynamic Duo and Gotham Police even after they have her surrounded in a house (lovely moment this - she tells the kids to finish their dinner while she takes aim at the forces of law and order with a submachine gun out of the window).

The Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder manage to apprehend one of her kids every time they catch up with them .. but it's all part of her plan!

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Not long after she gets taken to the penitentiary herself, it turns out that she's had all of the guards substituted by members of her gang. As soon as Batman and Robin leave, she takes the governor prisoner, and she's in charge of the place! Not only that, but she's had dynamite installed in the Batmobile. As soon as it hits 60mph on the way back to the Batcave, they'll be blown to pieces!

Parker only trusts her three sons. She thinks her daughter, "Legs", is useless because she's a girl. I loved that. But Robin quite likes the malfeasant matriarch's daughter: "her legs sort of reminded me of Catwoman's", he says to Batman in an unguarded moment. "You're growing up, Robin", his mentor replies.

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I didn't think this was a great one but Ma Parker - played by Shelley Winters no less, and she does have a nice comic touch - is a lot more down to earth and less loony than your typical Batman super-criminal. There is one odd moment, when she's seen to drive a rocket-powered wheelchair while disguised as a care home resident. Holy Werner von Braun, as Robin points out. Seems completely superfluous.

Presumably, like Boney M's Ma Baker, she's based on the real life Ma Barker. Made a change, I guess. I was reminded of The Dukes of Hazzard.

Notice how, in both pics, the camera is on a tilt. I think this was done to give the photography a DC Comics sort of feel. But, it's only ever used at villain hideouts.

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02:10 Ma Parker

Batman keeps the speed down below 60 on the way back to the Batcave. The speed limit is 55 on that stretch of road. He articulates the importance of following the law to Robin (strange then that at the end of the last episode, we did see the speedo just about nudging 60).

But he starts to wonder about the penitentiary inmate who was having a curious look under the bonnet during their visit. Was the Batmobile tampered with? He stops, has a look, and finds the dynamite in the engine. He throws it as far as possible, and it explodes. I didn't really understand why. Perhaps he threw it at a speed in excess of 60mph. In any case - wouldn't it have been easier to rig it up to a timer? Why doesn't the Batmobile have a lock on the engine cover?

But I'm being far too picky about a minor detail, and we're only about a minute in. Let's crack on. The Caped Crusader decides to head back to the pen. Clearly, something is amiss.

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The Costumed Crimefighters decide to sneak in over the wall once they get there. But they're met by one of Ma's guards, with a rifle. He threatens to shoot them, but Batman reminds him that it's only 48 years until he's eligible for parole. Why throw away the chance of being free in 2014? So he lets them pass, but nonetheless they do get captured and strapped to electric chairs in the penitentiary's execution chamber. Ma plans to apply the necessary voltage at midnight, when no-one will notice the additional drain on the city's electricity supply.

Once the two are left alone in there, Batman manages to snap one of the electric cables, and uses the chair's power to send a signal to the Batcave - in Bat code (it seems to be very similar to Morse). Alfred gets the message, urging him to have the Gotham City Electric Company shut off the power at precisely midnight. Which they duly do, in the space of 15 minutes.

Well, the switch gets thrown, nothing happens, the two break out of their ties (there's a suggestion that they weren't able to do this earlier because it would set off the power), punch-up, Game Over.

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I thought Ma was a pretty decent villain actually. Very well portrayed by Shelley Winters. And it's quite nice to have the villains engage in good old-fashioned armed robbery and wearing normal clothes, or what passes for normal clothes in the American Midwest of the 1960s.

One very endearing thing about this episode - Catwoman has a cameo. There's a scene where Ma addresses the rest of the inmates once she's in charge. The feline felon speaks up, wanting to know how Ma's made sure Batman won't spoil their plans. Clearly, she's been excused prison uniform.

Another nice touch - Legs' prison number is 25-23-24.

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02:11 The Clock King's Crazy Crimes

When an antique clock with a hidden camera dispenses knockout gas at an upmarket jewellers, enabling the theft of some highly valuable diamond brooches, it can only mean one thing - Clock King!

Who? Well we haven't seen this particular villain before and I don't remember him from my childhood TV viewing activities, but he's an ingenious, odd-looking old chap who's obsessed with clocks, and time.

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Batman and Robin catch up with him after he robs an art gallery of a priceless masterpiece, using a time-based mechanised art installation that surreptitiously saws a hole in the wall of the strong room. But he activates a counter-measure in his art object that wraps them in coils of elongated clock springs, allowing him and his cronies to escape.

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A clue leads the Dynamic Duo to his hideout, an abandoned factory that made synthetic jewels for watches. They enter via an upper window as usual and who should pop his head out of a lower window to say hello than Sammy Davis Jr! I did actually remember that, wondered when it was going to come up.

The factory and the wall they climb up are exactly the same sets used in the one with The Minstrel, a few episodes back. Anyway it's a trap, because of course it is, and after the two noble crime-fighters slip up in a pool of super-slick watch oil and get knockout-gassed, they get incarcerated in a giant hour glass. Will they be buried alive?

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[Slim]

02:12 The Clock King Gets Crowned

The two imperilled crimefighters manage to escape their temporal trap by swaying from side to side, until the giant hourglass falls over. It doesn't break - but they manage to roll, hamster wheel style, out of the entrance to the building and on to the road. A truck driver pulls up just in front of them. We don't actually see them climb out of the hourglass. The viewer is left to assume that they receive assistance.

It's Bruce's birthday, and Aunt Harriet has bought him an unusual antique windmill clock. But Clock King has had a secret camera installed, to help him rob Bruce of his collection of antique pocket watches. I'd say the plot takes a bit of a liberty here. We're meant to believe that he's provided the clock to dealer in the certain knowledge that Harriet would buy it. A bit of a stretch.

But anyway there's a hitch - one of his henchmen (or "second hands" as he calls them) has fitted the clock with the wrong secret device. He's installed an atomic energy directional control switch instead of a knockout gas activator.

So the Hideous Horologist and his villainous crew have to get it back! He badly needs the atomic energy directional control switch to pull off a big crime later on! So they break into Wayne Manor, cosh Alfred and nab the clock. Alfred manages to set off a Batcave alarm, so the Dynamic Duo come speeding up the batpoles - they're fitted with compressed steam elevators - and arrive on the ground floor as Bruce and Dick, just in time to prevent Harriet from being kidnapped (it's not really clear why the villains want to do this). The villains get away.

Batman deduces, through the usual risible logic applied to the sparse available evidence, that Clock KIng intends to steal an extremely valuable caesium clock being delivered to a heliport in Gotham City. He's going to do this by the unfathomably elaborate method of having a mechanised bronze figure in a clock tower facing the heliport strike his "atomic energy directional control switch" with its hammer. I think this is supposed to disable the helicopter somehow. It's not really clear. The whole plot is nonsense quite honestly, you've just got to roll with it.

So of course the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder turn up in the nick of, er, time. There's a fantastically choreographed punch-up in the inexplicably huge clock tower chamber, involving the life-sized bronze figures (really human actors and very well done). And of course it's job done.

I would say that was a poor one, except that the clock tower and hourglass sets do elevate it a bit - they really put a lot of artful design into these.

So that's six two-parters done in the second series, six different villains. I didn't think Clock King was a particularly good character, but it's a change from watching Riddler and Joker all the time.

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02:13 An Egg Grows in Gotham

This time it's the turn of Egghead, the smartest villain in the world, to pit his considerable wits against the Dynamic Duo. It's Vincent Price! The criminal mastermind steals a priceless, historic copy of the Gotham City charter from Gotham City Hall.

Gotham's charter states that, each year, nine racoon pelts must be paid to the last descendent of the Mohican tribe from whom it was bought, centuries earlier. These are provided by the three remaining descendents of the original settlers, all of whom are millionaires and one of whom - of course - is Bruce Wayne. The ceremony in which this quaint tradition is honoured is due to take place on the very same evening.

But Egghead has scrutinised the charter very carefully, and he discovers that if, for whatever reason, the nine racoon pelts are not provided to Chief Screaming Chicken - who runs a modest roadside business selling inexpensive items from a tepee - then Gotham City reverts to its original owners.

So he makes a deal with the noble old Indian chief. $100 a month, and all the eggs he can eat, in return for Gotham City. All the eccentric
egg-obsessed villain has to do is prevent the ceremony from taking place.

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I think that some might find the Chief Screaming Chicken character a bit troubling. He speaks in broken English, always substituting "me" for "I". He's remarkably naive and stupid and all in all is a ridiculous caricature of a Native American. He's actually a browned-up American actor of British and German descent called Edward Everett Horton, and I was surpised to find that he was 80 years old when this Batman episode was filmed. His character is supposed to be 60 years old, and in what I thought was an odd bit of dialogue, one of Egghead's henchmen comments that he hopes he looks as good when he gets to 60.

Anyway Batman and the Boy Wonder track the villains down to a new egg firm that's just opened in Gotham - the Ghoti Oeufs Caviar Company. The Caped Crusader of course explains to Robin why Ghoti is pronounced "fish".

The two crime-fighters turn up there and wade straight in with a punch-up - they don't bother asking the villains to come quietly. But the yolk's on them. They're overcome by laughing gas, dispensed in an egg-shaped bomb, of course, while the baddies get away.

Batman / Bruce confirms with the other two millionaires that they're planning to attend the ceremony, which they are. But the car that comes to pick them up is driven by Egghead. They get overcome by knockout gas and taken to the dastardly villain's secret hideout. But it gets worse! The brilliant criminal mastermind has worked out that one of them is Batman. After all, the Dark Knight could only be a millionaire with time on his hands. Furthermore, he's pretty sure it must be Bruce. One of the other two is left-handed, the other one has a strong French accent.

And to test his assumption, he's restrained Bruce in an electro-thought-transfer device. Soon, all of his knowledge will be transferred to Egghead. But either way, Bruce's brain will be emptied, destroyed.

The laughing gas scene is priceless. Very funny.

Decent villain, I think. Couldn't really be anything other than a highly charismatic performance from Vincent Price. Actually I always thought he'd make a good Joker. Always thought Cesar Romero's performance as the giggling fiend is a bit Vincent-Price-ish.

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02:14 The Yegg Foes in Gotham

Dick, who's been kidnapped along with Bruce, manages to flip the power supply to the mind hoover contraption from 440 to 220 volts while no-one's looking. There's a huge sign labelled DANGEROUS next to the improbably massive switch, so why he's been left right next to it, albeit his hands are tied, is anyone's guess.

The contraption explodes, freeing Bruce. The villains run off, leaving a "radar egg" to ensure they can't be followed. It will blow up if their ex-captives make a sudden move.

Bruce, Dick and the other two millionaires do manage to escape, but it's too late - it's after midnight when they arrive at the ceremony. Chief Screaming Chicken now owns Gotham. And he's leased it to Egghead.

The Cranially-Overdeveloped Criminal's first act is to fire the Mayor and the Police Commissioner. He has complete control. He forces the police department to ignore serious crime, and focus instead on minor misdemeanours like parking offences and littering. He banishes Batman and Robin from the city.

But Dick and Bruce steal the charter from its case in the City Hall, where, conveniently for the plot, Egghead has returned it. Bruce wants to have a careful look at the small print. And it turns out that there's a stipulation that the city can never be leased to anyone who's "committed crimes against the city, territory, or crown" - that latter part referring to Gotham's distant past as part of a British colony, of course.

Back in the Batcave, the Caped Crusader works out what Egghead's up to. He's going to loot Gotham's treasury! The logic for this conclusion is largely based on the fact that another word for treasury is exchequer, which sounds a bit like "eggschequer".

They rush there - but it's too late. The criminal mastermind has made off with all the cash. But he's left Chief Screaming Chicken behind. The Chief tells Batman that Egghead intends to lay low, then emigrate to South America.

Well the Caped Crusader knows that Egghead's diet consists solely of grade AAA white eggs, and that he'll need a substantial supply of them for his trip. So he and Robin catch up with him and his gang at Old MacDonald's Chicken Farm. There's a splendid punch-up, involving a massive quantity of real eggs being broken - must admit it made me uncomfortable to see all that food go to waste, let alone the thought of clearing up the mess. Apparently Vincent Price ad-libbed part of this scene. He was supposed to crack an egg on Burt Ward's head but he lets him have a whole tray of them, which explains why Robin's reaction is very realistic.

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And that of course, once the Dynamic Duo have prevailed, is job done.

I quite liked Egghead. There have been five new villains so far for this second series. Only Egghead and Ma Parker have worked for me, the rest have been poor. But Vincent Price really excels in this.

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02:15 The Devil's Fingers

A benefit concert is due to take place at Gotham Town Hall for the Wayne Foundation, and Aunt Harriet has been given an opportunity to rehearse with the great Chandell - a brilliant pianist of some renown. It's only flippin' Liberace!

But as they rehearse their Highland Airs at Wayne Manor, three ghostly Scots lassies appear, with bagpipes - ghosts called from their slumber by the bonny music. They rob Harriet of some jewellery and help themselves to some other items. Their Scottish accents are terrible. But that's alright, they're really three villainesses in the employ of Chandell. It's a triple helping of eye candy in this story. And he's the villain.

Or I should say that Chandell and his twin brother Harry are the villains. Harry, also played by Liberace, is much less flamboyant and camp than his brother. And I must say Liberace does a decent job of playing Harry as a down-to-earth and masculine sort of fella. It must have been a strain.

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Harry is blackmailing Chandell. He knows something that his brother doesn't want made public. So he's taking a huge percentage of his ill-gotten gains.

Anyway as soon as Wayne Manor is robbed, Commissioner Gordon gets onto the Batphone straight away. But to their dismay, Alfred tells them that the two crime-fighters are on holiday! They're going to have to solve a case themselves!

Which is unfortunate because the unprincipled pianist has a big job planned. He's going to steal the entire fortune of the Wayne family.

That evening, the illicitous ivory-tinkler plays the benefit concert. As he performs a Burmese piece, three dancing girls appear in front of a Burmese import company premises, in front of a police officer - then a bomb goes off and they stroll in, presumably to rob the place. It all seems a bit unnecessarily elaborate and pointless to me. And it could almost be designed to draw attention to Chandell. But oh well, I just went with it.

Fortunately though, Bruce, who's on holiday - which is why Batman's on holiday of course - is listening in to the concert. He notices that Chandell plays a wrong chord. And that's enough for him to contact Dick using a secret transmitter and return at once to Gotham City.

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It's a great shame, because Dick is on a date, and he seems to be on to a very good thing. But the fight against crime comes first. The young lady will have to do without Dick tonight.

The two return to Wayne Manor, only to see the three phantom floosies appear like wraiths at the window. Believing that Chandell is responsible, Batman rushes to the Town Hall - only to find the pernicious pianist apparently unconscious, knocked on the head with an empty bottle. Chandell claims that his brother Harry did it, and gives the Caped Crusader his address.

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The Dynamic Duo go there - but it's a trap (because of course it is) and there's a punch up. Harry gets the upper hand, and they get strapped to a conveyor belt, about to be fed into a huge machine designed to perforate music rolls.

I suppose that the notion of music rolls was probably more familiar to the TV viewer of the 1960s, but they were rolls of perforated paper that operated automatic pianos. I sort of doubt that the machines that perforated them were as huge as depicted here.

This is actually a pretty good one - Liberace's innate campiness fits the '60s Batman paradigm very nicely. And the script is a bit more imaginative than usual. But we'll see how it concludes.

[Slim]

02:15 The Dead Ringers

It looks like it's curtains for Batman and Robin as they're conveyed helplessly into the mouth of the enormous music roll perforator. Then suddenly, Batman finds a solution! He sings a set of carefully selected notes to make the perforations fall precisely around the outlines of their bodies, overcoming the music that's being piped into the microphone of the perforator. Brilliantly, he's visualised the chords in his head.

Amusingly he tells Robin to sing along, matching his notes exactly. Robin conspicuously fails to do this. They both sing random dissonant quasi-melodies with nothing in common. I suppose it would have been a lot of work to rehearse one.

Once out of the machine, they confront Harry and the girls. The villainous wenches run off, but Harry gets knocked out with a Batarang, then delivered to the police. Unfortunately his lawyer, a sort of 1960s Saul Goodman, gets him out on the basis that there weren't any witnesses. But not before he's told them that a master criminal named "Fingers" is planning to steal the Wayne fortune.

Batman soon works out that "Fingers" is Chandell. He further surmises that the malevolent maestro plans to get his hand on Bruce's fortune by killing Bruce and Dick off, and marrying Aunt Harriet - which explains the queasy scenes from the first part in which he's coming on to her.

So - the Caped Crusader fakes a tragic explosion in Dick's photographic darkroom, in which they're both apparently killed in a huge explosion. It's not clear to me that this was really necessary to the plot. But anyway - once the three villainesses find out that Chandell is planning to go straight and leave them out in the cold once he's got the cash to pay off his brother for good, they side with Harry and turn on the master pianist with the bagpipe weapon that they used at Wayne Manor in the first part. It emits some sort of ultrasonic disabling audio beam. The usual Batman hokum.

Harry's lawyer, a criminal attorney in both senses, gets the same treatment once he asks Harry for his rather exorbitant fee.

Then Harry comes up with a plan - he'll impersonate his brother - using the outfit Chandell wore for Elizabeth's coronation, no less - and woo Harriet himself. But she works out that he's not Chandell, and in a remarkable scene, she whips a revolver out of her handbag and holds him at gunpoint. It's to no avail - she gets zapped from behind by one of the girls with the bagpipe weapon.

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Harry orders his henchmen to stuff her into a trunk, which, once it's been taken to his hideout, he liberally sprays with bullets from a Thompson submachine-gun. But the Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder emerge from it - from behind a Bat shield, of course. They've rescued Harriet and substituted themselves!

There's a punch-up, naturally. One of the villainous cuties attempts to subdue the Dynamic Duo with the bagpipes, but it doesn't work. We aren't told why. Perhaps the solution was in the original script; it looks like there's an edit at this point, perhaps for timing purposes. In any case, it's Game Over. The two crime-fighters rescue Chandell and the lawyer from the perforator, where Harry was about to dispense with them permanently - and everyone's off to the nick.

Despite some curious plot holes - what was the wrong chord in the Town Hall performance about, for example? - this was a really good one. The basic story, despite its flaws, is a lot more substantial than usual. There are some priceless comedy moments. And although Chandell doesn't have the ridiculous costumes or gimmicks of the typical super-criminal, Liberace does endow him with a huge amount of camp personality. Clearly he wasn't a great actor, even in a light entertainment context, but he was clearly having a very good time playing these two characters, and I found that quite infectious.