Monday, November 28, 2011

Episodes 102 & 103: The Ogg and I/ How to Hatch a Dinosaur

Season 3 Episodes 102 & 103
Original Air Dates: 11/2/67 & 11/9/67
Special Guest Villain: Vincent Price as Egghead
Extra Special Guest Villainess: Anne Baxter as Olga
Guest stars: Alfred Dennis, Alan Hale, Jr.
Written by: Stanford Sherman
Directed by: Oscar Rudolph

Synopsis: With the help of Olga and her Bessarovian Cossacks, Egghead has kidnapped Commissioner Gordon. If the tax of ten cents for every egg consumed in Gotham City is not levied, Gordon will be mailed back to Gotham City Hall in an egg carton. Meawhile, Olga and her Cossacks desire the Samovar of Genghis Khan and they'll do just about anything to get it. All these wonderful schemes get put to the side though when Egghead learns he can hatch a 40,000,000 year old dinosaur egg. He plans to let the monster loose in Gotham.

PE: Bats says he's heard rumors the two nefarious criminals, Egghead and Olga, have joined forces. Clearly, he's still rattled from the fondling he took at the petals of the man-eating plant last episode and has no memory of seeing the two criminals riding burro-back through Gotham at the climax of that show.

JS: I assumed they came right over to Gordon's office after seeing the criminals to save the Commissioner the cost of the Batphone call. How else can you explain why they would just show up unannounced?

PE: Bonnie used to be such a good voice on the phone. Now she'll let any Tom, Dick, or Baldy in the office. Chief O'Hara seems to be baffled when he enters Gordon's office and finds... egg sandwich, hold the Commish. He searches high and low, he even opens the desk drawers but... nope, no boss. I was surprised he didn't eat the sandwich.

JS: I kept waiting for O'Hara to check under the rug. And to be fair to Bonnie, Egghead was wearing a hat. What struck me as odd was everyone's failure to notice that Egghead's demands did not mention his returning the Commissioner once they were met.

PE: Nice in-joke having Alan Hale, Jr. playing a diner cook named Gilligan. Hale had just finished off a three-year tour as the Skipper on Gilligan's Island. To further the joke, Hale impersonates his "little buddy" rather than the Skipper.

JS: Nice to see him, but pure padding in what should have been a single-shot episode.

PE: I think Barbara Gordon's bird must be getting jealous since Babs confides in Alfred now.

JS: You better believe it—now that she's inviting him over. What would the neighbors think (I assume Alfred isn't scaling the wall to sneak into the single young lady's apartment, or at least if he was that they'd show it).

PE: I never pegged Gordon for the "rare Sumatra aftershave" type. He always seemed so Old Spice to me. Now we know why the babes go wild for the old timer.

JS: I'm glad we don't know what it smelled like, considering that while walking the streets of Gotham sniffing for that scent, Alfred had to do a double take when passing a garbage can.

PE: Olga and her band of merry Cossacks steal the Samovar (basically a fancy-looking coffee pot) but I really wanted to see how they got it back to their base since it was obviously too large to get out the embassy door! And how did Batman talk the Bessarovian ambassador into letting the Dynamic Duo hide inside the priceless artifact? The Caped Crusader should have smelled a rat. Obviously, they've been inside the percolator far too long and are oxygen-deprived. When they lift the top, they hear muffled eggspletives and look all around the room (this, despite the fact that the man is right in front of them):
Robin (spotting Gordon and excitedly pointing at him): There's the Commisioner, Batman!
Batman (listening keenly to the muffled rantings): I think he's trying to tell us something, Robin.
JS: I thought he was easier to understand than Olga.

PE: Hey! Don't get me wrong. I'm a hot-blooded male and I dig Batgirl just like all the other males out there (and some of the females, no doubt) but the "pause and kick, pause and kick" routine's getting old. Henchmen line up and wait to be kicked in the face. Couldn't this super-heroine work her fists as well? If we could swallow part of the bait, we could swallow it whole, I says.

JS: What about the helicopter kick? I think the henchmen take one look at those gams and are basically hypnotized into walking into those spiked Bat-heels.

PE: Anne Baxter was still a Bat-babe at the age of 44. A major Hollywood star in the 1940s and '50s with roles in The Razor's Edge (1946 Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner), All About Eve (1950), and The Ten Commandments (1956), but by the 1960s she was a regular on TV westerns.

JS: I have to wonder who was going to eat the Robin/Commissioner stew? If they had thought it through, they could have said it was Neosaurus food...

PE: Without the cliffhanger in these two-parters, episode one ends with a whimper, not a bang. The overacting in the onion egg scene is a crying shame.

JS: Yeah, that was embarrassing all around. For all that he was asked to do in the series, West almost always managed to sell it. This was one of a very few instances where he phoned it in and it really stops the episode in its tracks.

PE: Two pounds of Radium in Gotham City in 1967: $16,000. The look on Commissioner Gordon's face when Chief O'Hara says, "I can just feel those radioactive Gammas and Betas crawlin' up on me right now": priceless.

JS: Ah, the Gotham City Radium Center—where pants for female employees are optional!

PE: That Gotham Museum is full of wonderful oddities: a purple Woolly Mammoth and an extra Cheaposaurus suit from The Land Unknown. The suit's a little more flexible than his cousins in the croc pit.

JS: I was just bemoaning the absence of a good rubber creature, and here we get a biggie. Of course, we must ask what the hell a rubber Neosaurus suit is doing in a museum of paleontology. On the other hand, it sure came in handy when Batman needed a Neosaurus suit in a pinch. Lucky for Bats that Egghead didn't bother to do the standard teeth count. Otherwise he would have clearly realized this was a fake, and not a real 2562-toothed Neosaurus.



PE: How many phones in the Wayne study?

JS: Alfred had an extra line installed so he could take Batgirl's calls.

PE: In the grand tradition of the Batshield that shields only Batman, we get Egghead's "Zapping Machine," a tall hunk of metal with a window and two gloved "hands" used to "zap," which protects Egghead but not the group of onlookers.

JS: I enjoyed Egghead's pre-zapping dance with the egg.

PE: Holy Expository, Batman! You've come up with satisfactory answers to all those questions about your silly Neosaurus costume and the radium you were absorbing and why the heck you did it in the first place but I got a couple for you. How did you get into the egg and when?

JS: Forget about that—I want to know when hindsight is better than foresight? There's something for you to think about, Batman...



PE Rating: 




JS Rating:





Next up... The Joker! Same Bat time, same Bat URL!

1 comment:

  1. Wow, those are some REALLY tight t-shirts on Joker's henchmen in that preview picture for the next episode! Is Joker going for more muscular help...or gay-bait to trap the Dynamic Duo (by now those sorts of rumours about Batman and Robin MUST have been going around the Gotham underworld...)

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