BATMAN: “THE GREAT ESCAPE” (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Western villain Shame (Cliff Robertson) shows up for the third season’s final two-parter, courtesy of Stanley Ralph Ross. The frontier felon is accompanied by a new posse: a mostly silent Indian, a Mexican bandido who talks with a British accent, new girlfriend Calamity Jan (Dina Merrill, one of the few moll-actresseses to get top billing), and Calamity’s mother (ensuring lots of mother-in-law jokes). Calamity breaks Shame out of jail with the help of a tank, the first jailbreak seen since “The Joker is Wild.”

Shame sends the Terrific Trio a clue to his next crime: that he plans to rob the Gotham Stage. This proves to be a feint: instead of holding up the attendees at a stagecoach recreation, the owlhoots assail the local theater (where the doorman is played by Jerry “Leave It to Beaver” Mathers). The three heroes show up and battle Shame’s gang, but the women’s auxiliary—Calamity and her mom Frontier Fanny-- paralyzes the crusaders with fear gas. With all of the heroes scared of their own shadows, Shame takes Batgirl hostage as protection against the cops. Though Batman and Robin are almost incapacitated, they somehow manage to drive to the Batcave, where Alfred neutralizes the fear gas with a convenient antidote. The two heroes figure out Shame’s hideout, but the villain deserts the hideout with his henchmen and his hostage. By chance Frontier Fanny gets left behind, and this leads to the heroes’ attempt to trade Fanny for Batgirl. The first segment ends without an explicit death-trap, though the apprehension of Fanny sets up the action of the second segment, wherein Shame tries to assassinate his enemies during the hostage exchange.

One of Batman’s many Bat-toys preserves the heroes’ lives, but though the villains escape again, Batgirl, who’s recovered from the fear gas sans antidote, is liberated. Batgirl reveals that she heard Shame talking about a “great train robbery,” and Batman deduces that the frontier felon plans to hijack a load of discarded bills being sent by train to the treasury for destruction. The information comes too late to prevent the heist, so Batman seeks to draw Shame by challenging the vain villain to a personal duel. Shame accepts with the intention of bushwacking the crmefighter. Batman honorably goes it alone, but Robin and Batgirl trail him, knowing that Shame won’t play fair. While Batman’s allies neutralize the henchmen, Batman and Shame enact the series’ only one-on-one battle.

In fact, all of the fights in the episode are above-average for the third season, and this may testify to the pervasiveness of the western-hero myth and all of the concomitant tropes. The script doesn’t come up to the mythicity-level of “Londinium Larcenies,” but like “Wail of the Siren,” “Escape” is as well-constructed as any of the better episodes of the first and second seasons.

BATMAN: “PENGUIN’S CLEAN SWEEP” (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

For Penguin’s final appearance on the show, Stanford Sherman gives the villain a more venturesome plot than his antics in “Enter Batgirl” and “Sport of Penguins.” Penguin (Meredith), his moll and his henchmen infiltrate the Gotham Mint, but the villains’ purpose is not to take anything away, but to leave behind the poisonous effluvia of the lethal Ligerian fruit fly, so as to contaminate the money being printed at the mint. Despite evidence that the mint’s employees have been stricken with sleeping sickness, it takes the heroes a while to work out the specifics of Penguin’s plans. However, when Penguin steals the only vaccine in Gotham that can cure the disease, the good guys make the connection. Because some of the contaminated money is issued to Gotham residents, every citizen is forced to toss his paper money into the street—and Penguin is just the bird prepared to collect this windfall, in the episode’s most memorable image. Batgirl is first on the scene, but Penguin subdues her, though he doesn’t bother to kill her.

However, Bruce Wayne puts a crimp in Penguin’s plan by informing every financier in the world that the Birdman Bandit’s money is tainted. Batman then fears that the frustrated fiend will unleash all of the flies upon Gotham, but he takes preventive measures. Thus, when Penguin emerged from hiding to gloat over a city stricken with sleeping citizens—including his nemesis—the Terrific Trio spring to life and batter the villains into submission in an above-average end-fight.

BATMAN: "NORA CLAVICLE AND THE LADIES CRIME CLUB" (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

Whatever good feminist vibrations BATMAN ’66 may have generated with its use of powerful females like Batgirl and Catwoman, some might find those vibes wiped out by the insipidity of the “Nora Clavicle” episode. While an intelligent spoof of second-wave feminism is certainly feasible, Stanford Sherman’s script is merely reactionary and stupid.

Clavicle (Barbara Rush) is established as some sort of feminist activist, though her reasons for turning to crime are never addressed. She shows up in Gotham, garbed in a somewhat mannish suit, and attended by two statuesque blondes in archaic Greek attire. Said blondes don’t do much of anything except function as eye-candy—and perhaps suggest some naughty allusions to the Isle of Lesbos. On the night that Commissioner Gordon is honored with a dinner and a gold watch, Clavicle puts a feminist bug in the ear of Mayor Linseed’s wife, who haraunges her husband into firing Gordon and installing Clavicle in his place. Chief O’Hara is also out of a job, as Mrs. Linseed takes his place, and Clavicle also replaces all the male cops with completely inexperienced women. (Nothing is said about the disposition of any female officers.)

Clavicle anticipates that the Terrific Trio will become nuisances, so she sends her henchwomen to hold up a bank. The new female cops are too preoccupied with makeup and recipes to bother enforcing the law, so Clavicle manages to lure the crimefighters into the entire series’ chintziest death-trap. Batman, Robin and Batgirl are locked together into a “Siamese human knot,” so that they can’t move without mutually strangling one another. Once again, the villains then depart without killing the heroes, so that eventually Batman frees them all thanks to his uncanny knowledge of human anatomical responses.

Clavicle also explains her insidious plot to the heroes. The female fiend has bought a high-ticket insurance policy on the safety of Gotham City, and she plans to cash in by unleashing on Gotham a horde of mechanical mice, all primed to explode in one great cataclysm. It’s not clear whether or not Clavicle models her bomb-robots upon rodents because all the lady cops will be scared of mice. Neither Clavicle nor her henchgirls fear the mechanical mice, and neither does Batgirl, though the heroine seemingly agrees with the stereotype, stating that “You can’t get policewomen to help you catch mice.” (Given how incompetent Gotham’s cops usually are, it’s difficult to imagine them faring much better.) Batman naturally comes up with the solution: he contrives electronic pipes for himself and his compatriots, and the tunes they play guide the robots to Gotham’s docks and into the ocean. Dumb as the politics of the episode are, the image of the heroes playing Pied Piper is a memorable image in the episode. There is of course no final punch-up; Gordon, O’Hara and Alfred receive instructions from Batman to corral the three women. (No one asks why Batman would summon the aid of Bruce Wayne’s butler.) It may be of passing interest that while most villains never try to kill anyone but the starring heroes, Clavicle’s plot depends upon the wholesale slaughter of everyone in Gotham—though the script treats this enormity as if she were only assailing Gotham’s property values.

BATMAN: “LOUIE’S LETHAL LILAC TIME” (1968)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

I’m reasonably sure that no one begged for a return of Louie the Lilac. Still, Charles Hoffman’s script for the character is marginally better than Dwight Taylor’s original outing. Once again, Milton Berle struts around in forties gangster garb, ordering his similarly garbed minions about their duties—but this time the villain’s big score makes a little more sense than suborning hippies. This time Louie hopes to gain control of Gotham’s perfume market, with particularly emphasis on perfumes made from lilacs. To this end the floral felon lays in a supply of the many animals (muskrats, musk deer) or animat substances (ambergris) used in perfume-making. (Given the show’s budget, Louie’s zoological acquisitions are never seen on camera.) Louie also has this thugs kidnap Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson because the crook knows that Wayne has the expertise to extract the glands of perfume-bearing animals, and apparently Louie would rather get a millionaire dilettante, rather than an expert, to perform his operations. Dumb as this is, the episode generates a tiny bit of suspense from the fact that Bruce and Dick remain captives for most of the story.

Barbara Gordon, not aware of the Dilettante Duo’s secret identities, coordinates with Alfred in order to figure out the location of Louie’s hideout. However, in order to burn up screen time while Batman and Robin are nullified, Barbara gets delayed at her apartment by an officious maintenance man who comes close to discovering the heroine’s change-room. Thanks to Alfred’s help, Batgirl shows up at Louie’s hideout, where the villain captures her and dooms her to be scalded to death in boiling oil. Bruce and Dick escape, change into their work-clothes and briefly confer with Gordon’s cops, who make a rare appearance outside a villain’s hideout. (Possibly Hoffman was channeling old Jimmy Cagney movies.) Batman and Robin break into the hideout and engage their foes, while Batgirl gets herself free of her death-trap and joins in the low-energy “fun.” Louie repeats the phrase “lilac time” about four times in the episode, but I doubt this story ever inspired anyone to check out the provenance of the phrase in Walt Whitman’s poetry. (Batman also calls Louie’s gang a “lavender mob,” a reference to a British crime comedy film.)

BATMAN: “THE FUNNY FELINE FELONIES” (1967-68)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

“Funny” opens with yet another instance of Warden Crichton’s “revolving-door” policy with regard to hardened felons, when the Clown Prince of Crime (Cesar Romero) is once more paroled. At least one previous episode showed Batman becoming slightly frustrated with Crichton’s methods, but here Stanley Ralph Ross decides to have Bruce Wayne sponsor the Joker’s early release. Wayne’s sponsorship serves no purpose in the overall plot, so Ross may have included him in the scene simply so that Batman would find out quickly what was going on—particularly when Joker is openly abducted—right in front of the prison—by Catwoman (Eartha Kitt) in her attention-getting Kitty-Car.

Naturally, Joker is complicit in this kidnapping, which is a second plot-element that comes to absolutely nothing. Joker and Catwoman later rendezvous in a sleazy hotel—whose actual name is Sleazy Hotel—because the room overlooks the commissioner’s office, where Batman and Robin are conferring with Gordon. In keeping with the way most Bat-villains broadcast their intentions, Catwoman sends Batman a message via her “catgun.” The message doesn’t amount to much, but when Batman and Robin suss out the room from which it was shot at them, they—and late arrival Batgirl—somehow dope out that Joker and Catwoman are working together.

Whereas Joker dominated his partnership with Penguin in “The Zodiac Crimes,” Catwoman’s in charge here—although it’s not a particularly impressive plot, in that she wants to get hold of an ancient cache of gunpowder in order to assault the Gotham Mint. Joker himself points out how dumb this “dumb-zany” scheme is, noting that it would be a lot easier just to blow the Gotham vault with dynamite. Catwoman’s response comes down to admitting that they just have to follow the asinine plot.

The episode takes a slight upswing when Batman and Robin next overtake the villains and their goons, though the only improvement is that the resultant fight takes place in a decent set, that of a flamboyant record producer. But then the story takes a huge dip in quality when the Duo fall for a ridiculous Joker-ploy, and the heroes have to rescued by Batgirl, who almost doesn’t arrive in time due to Gotham’s traffic laws. (“You wouldn’t have wanted me to speed, would you?”) The first segment of this two-parter concludes with another lame quasi-cliffhanger, as the villains prepare to ambush the three heroes.

The second segment doesn’t even deliver on this mild promise of excitement. Joker and Catwoman wait until Batman and Robin take their leave, and then ambush only Batgirl. The villains leave the heroine in what counts as the third season’s second least expensive death-trap: rawhide cords that will slowly strangle Batgirl to death. Lame though the trap is, at least Batgirl escapes it on her own resources.

Joker and Catwoman utilize their recent plunder to buy a treasure-map, and this leads them to the storage-place of the gunpowder cache, that of a lighthouse run by a husband and wife who are both eccentric and incredibly unfunny. The heroes show up for a second battle, but following the heroes’ triumph, Joker accidentally drops a match amid the gunpowder. Batman pulls an essentially magical device out of his belt and keeps the explosion from decimating the lighthouse-set and everyone in it, though it is stated (not shown) that the rest of the structure still gets destroyed.

In most Bat-tales this would be the end of the story. But Joker, Catwoman and their henchmen are tried as a group in the next day or so, and the felons engage the services of famed attorney Lucky Pierre. (This is one of the few sex-jokes in the series, given that this name carries various disparate connotations in erotica.) Batman worries enough about the trial’s outcome that he volunteers his services as prosecuting attorney. He makes his case, but the jury finds the fiends innocent. In no time at all, Batman, Robin and Batgirl discover that the jurors are all disguised criminals hired by Lucky Pierre. A goofy courtroom free-for-all transpires, and this mediocre episode marks the last outing for any version of Catwoman in BATMAN ’66.

BATMAN: “THE OGG COUPLE” (1967)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*

Egghead and Olga make their third and final appearance, and for the first time Stanford Sherman attempts to come up with a plot that melds Olga’s Cossack criminality and Egghead’s egg-obsession. It just so happens that the Gotham Museum is hosting a pair of conjoined Cossack artifacts. One is “the Silver Scimitar of Taras Bulbul” (a pun on the novel “Taras Bulba” and the Eastern word “bulbul,” meaning “nightingale”), while the other is a gigantic sculpture, “the Egg of Ogg,” in which the scimitar is impaled like Excalibur set in a boulder. Once Olga has the sword, she plans to use it as a rallying-point to help her regain the throne of Bessarovia, which in theory ought to lead to her and her Cossacks splitting from Gotham. However, Egghead can only prove himself worthy of marriage if he brings a substantial dowry to the table. So Egghead and Olga plot to steal a load of precious caviar (i.e., “fish eggs”), and thus incur the wrath of the Terrific Trio.

This is a Batgirl-centric episode, for she tracks the Ogg Couple to their hideout while Batman and Robin spend most of the episode floundering about. Yvonne Craig gets to show off her dancing-skills when Olga orders her Cossacks to treat Batgirl to a sword-dance, in which the heroine gets to dance out of the way as the goons try to stab her tootsies. Further, though BATMAN ’66 was not exactly a haven of feminist thought, the episode includes a exchange between Batman and Batgirl, in which the hero opines that crimefighting isn’t woman’s work, to which the heroine replies, “But I’m no ordinary woman.”

THE PRINCESS BLADE (2001)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

This swordplay film is billed as a re-imagining of the seventies manga LADy SNOWBLOOD and its cinematic adaptations. Regrettably, PRINCESS BLADE lacks the earlier works’ strong characterization and period flavor. Indeed, BLADE essentially takes place in modern times, though a vague SF-apocalypse is conjured up to account for the absence of firearms. (That said, if one can judge the original film by the English-dubbed version, the script doesn’t even come up with a future-history as elaborate as that of BUNRAKU.)

Heroine Yuki (Yumiko Shaku) resembles Lady Snowblood in sporting a name that means “snow” in Japanese. In addition, this Yuki is also out to avenge an injustice done to her parents, though here the parents have some aristocratic background. Some old retainers address Yuki as “princess,” though it’s never clear as to why the scion of a royal house is first seen running around assassinating enemies with her samurai sword. The script has so little interest in establishing Yuki’s backstory or the ambitions of her enemies that both concerns are largely ignored in favor of a romantic subplot. Early in the film Yuki is wounded by her foes, but in escaping finds her way to a Japanese farm and takes up residence for a time with a handsome farm-boy, who’s even less well characterized than Yuki.

Though the script pays some lip-service to the conflict between normal life and the existence of an action-hero, BLADE’s only strong elements are the swordfight-scenes, and these are far from top of the line. Yumiko Shaku delivered a powerful performance in GODZILLA AGAINSTMECHAGODZILLA—a perf strong enough that she almost outshone the Big Green Guy—but in BLADE she has nothing to work with.