The Batscholar on Episodes 11 & 12

by Joel Eisner

The return of the Riddler was by far his weakest episode of the first season. It wasn't until his next episode did he have a gang of his own. In the first episode he hired the Mole Hill Mob and for this one he scraped the bottom of the barrel with the River Rat Gang. The three grown men in hooded sweatsuits living in a sewer and eating cheese like rodents. Along with them is the current moll, Mousey. Riddler plans to use the visiting King Boris to pull off an extortion plot, to destroy Gotham's version of the Statute of Liberty aka Queen of Freedom. King Boris played by Reginald Denny (soon to play his last role as Commodore Schmidlapp in the Batman movie) proved a descent foil for the Riddler. But the episode is deadly dull. The episode lacks any sort of suspense, the henchmen are a joke especially at the end of the episode where they are knocked out during the final battle. This could be the basis for the bizzare Mouse men sketch Monty Python created a few years later.

Susan Silo as Mousey, who has since created a profitable voiceover business for herself, tries to bring some life to the show, by showing her range from playing the little innocent girl to the teenage juvenile delinquent. The show is too dark to be funny. Even the cliffhanger is filmed in a dark shadowy setting. Just not a very colorful episode.

Also in the cast is another Superman veteran, Tris Coffin, who appeared a number times on the old series and was also Captain Reid, the brother of the Lone Ranger on the Clayton Moore tv series. Reid was the greatgrandfather of Britt Reid, aka the Green Hornet. Marvin Miller, the tv announcer who gives the tour of the museum inside the statue, besides being the star of the Millionaire tv series, as Michael Anthony, the secretary to an unseen rich guy, each week he would give a check for one millionaire to some unsuspecting guest star to see what they do with it, he was also a popular cartoon voice actor, and the original voice of Aquaman on the 1967 Filmation cartoon series. I almost forgot to mention that Miller was also the voice of Robby the Robot in the film Forbidden Planet (he later revived the role in the film Gremlins).

John Archer, a guest at the Mushroom club was the lead in the George Pal film Destination Moon as well as the father of actress Anne Archer. Of the River Rats, Roy Jenson was another Trek guest star (he was Cloud William, the leader of the Yangs in Omega Glory. He also according to Susan Silo, doubled for Adam West as Batman in this episode.

" I remember Roy Jenson, who was a stuntman and also an actor. I remember when we had to go to lunch; they had wrapped him in that awful kind of the cocoon webbing stuff. We went to lunch but they left him in the webbing, because they didn’t want to waste time to web him again. I felt so bad for him. I came back and brought food for him and kept him company. It was a great fun project and there was nothing like it at that time.”

“I had not seen the Batman show prior to filming, but we all had a ball doing it because it was high camp. It was farce, but we had no idea what kind of hit it would be. It was an amazing phenomenon. I was very young at the time and they kind of played on that youngness. If you remember, the scene where played the little girl who gives the exploding flowers to Reginald Denny. For those days, it was pretty prurient, that was like a guy’s fantasy and pretty risky for those years. I remember that Reginald Denny was a very, very dapper man, kind of like Leo G. Carroll, who was very sweet and kept to themselves. They were from another era. (Denny went back to silent films), so, for you to have big dialogue with them it was just not appropriate”“I didn’t have much to do with Burt, he was cute and he was fun. I loved Adam! Adam was a prankster; he just made everything a lot of fun.

I loved Frankie, Frankie took everything seriously, to him it was Shakespeare and he was Hamlet. None of us could camp it up but in rehearsals Adam was always very funny. We did everything on the 20th Century lot and I believe the giant turbines used to as a trap for Batman and Robin were in the guts, in the basement of some building. I remember going underground and it was right on the lot.

There is a major goof in the episode, during the recap scene at the beginning of the second part of this episode, we are supposed to be shown a sketch of the Riddler’s hideout at the waterworks, but instead we are shown the sketch of Dawn Robbins’s penthouse apartment, which appeared in “Fine Feathered Finks.” Apparently, whoever was in charge of the recap scene was not paying careful attention to details. Some of these episodes were so rushed; it’s quite possible no one had time to review the show for goofs of this nature.

Actor Tim Herbert who played Whiskers returned to portray the only villain never broadcast on the network or anywhere. He portrayed the evil Killer Moth in the original Batgirl test pilot. The costume was ridiculous (he wore a pillbox hat with two wire antennas) and carried a cocoon gun in a briefcase. The film has been on the collectors market for years (along with Dozier's busted Dick Tracy pilot with Victor Buono as Mr Memory, and the five minute test footage for Dozier's Wonder Woman pilot). Frequent henchman Joey Tata, returned as one of the Mothmen. Killer Moth faired better in the comics (especially his costume).

Riddler's next episode Ring of Wax, is my favorite Riddler show. It had a straight forward plot from beginning to end.

Next Batman's oddest and campest villains of the first season, David Wayne as Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter.