Dec 12, 2019

And so we arrive at the last episode of Batman. Of course, the show didn't get a spectacular sendoff; they didn't even give us any of the major villains. Instead, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who had twice almost appeared on the show, finally gets her turn, as (relatively?) evil spa owner Minerva. ("How could she be evil? She's so...

Nov 28, 2019

How might a longtime Batman comics reader in 1966 have reacted to Burgess Meredith's portrayal of the Penguin? That's the question our friend Kyle hit on a few months ago, and in this episode he joins us to read pre-'66 Batman comics to compare how similar Meredith's Penguin was to the character in stories by Bob Kane,...

Nov 14, 2019

As Batman neared the end of its run, the budget situation got worse (occasioning the need for an invisible fight), and the writers threw caution to the wind: witness at least half a dozen double entendres in "The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra" — this at a time when most viewers who were old enough to get these naughty...

Oct 31, 2019

When Batman was the hottest show on TV, it naturally became a major target of humor and parody as well. In episode 115 we looked at a couple of contemporaneous Bat-parodies from 1966-67, and this episode we examine three more:

• The Adventures of Jerry Lewis no. 97, featuring the actual Batman and Robin, who are both...

Oct 17, 2019

In Cesar Romero's final appearance as the Joker, he seems hamstrung, and not only by the lousy plot and the single episode in which to tell it. Ken Holtzhouser, who grew up rating Batman episodes based on their Romeroian content, joins us to identify the problem, separate out the chaff from the episode, and see if...