“The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra”
Written by Stanley Ralph Ross
Directed by Sam Strangis
Season 3, Episode 25
Production code 1722
Original air date: March 7, 1968
The Bat-signal: It’s midday at the Gotham City Alchemical Bank & Trust Company which, according to the sign on the door, is “A financial institution so conservative it pays no interest at all.” Okay then.
Dr. Cassandra Spellcraft and her husband Cabala swallow their invisibility pills and proceed to invisibly rob the bank, so it appears only that a bag of money is floating out of the bank. Gordon is informed of the robbery, but before he can call Batman, Cassandra and Cabala enter the office, still invisible and, after subduing Gordon and O’Hara, call Batman. Cassandra taunts him and assures him that he won’t be able to stop her from entrancing the city.
Bruce and Dick waste no time in sliding down the bat-poles and heading to GCPD HQ. They arrive to find that Barbara showed up to visit her father and has applied first aid to Gordon and O’Hara. Batman suggests accompanying Barbara to the library to check some books on the occult.
After stealing $600,000 from various places, Cassandra and Cabala return to their hideout. While Cassandra’s family history is one of failure—an alchemist who created TNT and blew herself up, another who fell in her universal solvent and was dissolved, and another who was crushed by her perpetual motion machine—she intends to succeed by freeing all the arch-criminals from the Gotham State Pen and turning them into her invisible army.
Batman finds Cassandra—and her family history of failure—in Who’s Who in Alchemy. Cassandra meanwhile challenges Batman, announcing to Gordon that she’ll steal the Mope Diamond from Spiffany’s this very day.
Cassandra and Cabala arrive at Spiffany’s, and threaten to steal the diamond. Batman, Robin, and Batgirl show up and she hits them with her Alvino Ray-Gun, which alters the structure of their molecular cells (seriously, that’s what she said—it’s almost hard to believe her family failed at science) and renders them all two-dimensional. Cabala piles them on the floor while Cassandra takes the diamond.
She delivers three flat heroes to Gordon’s office. They’re still alive—O’Hara can feel their pulses—but there’s nothing anyone can do for them. O’Hara suggests calling “the voice” who sometimes answers the Bat-phone. A devastated Alfred has Gordon ship them to the main Gotham City Post Office, and he’ll see what he can do. He picks up the flattened heroes in a ridiculous disguise and puts them in the Three-Dimensional Bat-Restorer.
Cassandra is not satisfied with beating the Terrific Trio—now she wants to bring Gotham to its knees. She and Cabala enter the Gotham State Pen while invisible and turn visible in time to hold Crichton and his captain hostage. She breaks Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Catwoman, Egghead, and King Tut out of the Arch-Criminal Wing. (Why Catwoman is Caucasian again, and why King Tut is locked up when we last saw him restored to his professorial persona are both left as an exercise for the viewer.)
In the Batcave, Alfred summons the Batmobile back to the Batcave, then beats a hasty retreat so Batgirl doesn’t see him.
Gordon calls on the Bat-phone to inform Batman of the prison break, and the Bat-computer reveals their location. Once the Batmobile returns, they hie themselves to the basement of the Mortar and Pestle Building on Abracadabra Alley.
Cassandra meets with her new allies, and explains how they’ll divvy up Gotham: Catwoman gets the fish markets, Egghead the poultry farms, Penguin the ponds and parks, King Tut the museums, and Joker and Riddler split the amusement parks. Cabala gives them all invisibility pills, and when Batman, Robin, and Batgirl arrive, they all take them.
Invisible fisticuffs ensue, as our heroes get their butts kicked by foes they can’t see. Batgirl hits on the notion of turning out the lights, which Batman does with a gadget. Darkened fisticuffs ensue, and our heroes are triumphant.
With the bad guys put away, Gordon and O’Hara arrive at Minerva’s Mineral Spa…
Fetch the Bat-shark-repellant! Batman keeps a mini-bat-phone in his utility belt, thus almost anticipating the advent of cell phones. Or at least it would be if it wasn’t a toy phone…
The Batcave comes equipped with a Three-Dimensional Bat-Restorer, and Alfred also makes use of the Batmobile remote control. Our heroes use the Bat-computer to determine Cassandra’s hideout and Batman uses the Bat-sleep on Batgirl so she won’t know the Batcave’s sooper-seekrit location. He uses some manner of gadget—a bat-laser?—to turn out the lights in Cassandra’s hideout, a bat-flashlight, and an anti-Alvino Ray bat-disintegrator so Cassandra can’t flatten them a second time.
Holy #@!%$, Batman! When Batman likens Cassandra’s invisibility to a magician’s trick, Robin grumbles, “Holy disappearing act.” When Batman reveals who Cassandra is, Robin mutters, “Holy unrefillable prescriptions” for some reason. When our heroes are hit with the Alvino Ray-Gun, Robin shudders, “Holy helplessness.” When Batgirl discovers that she’s in the Batcave, Robin sighs, “Holy giveaways.” When informed that all the arch-criminals have been released from jail, Robin screams, “Holy catastrophe!”
Gotham City’s finest. O’Hara takes the glass off the bat-phone before Gordon can even say anything, and Gordon compliments him on his mind-reading abilities. Right, because it was so surprising that Gordon might call Batman when something weird happens.
More impressively, though, O’Hara has finally, after all this time, noticed that there’s some weird British guy who answers the bat-phone sometimes and maybe he can help? And indeed, Alfred saves the day by having the two-dimensional heroes shipped to him anonymously, restoring them, bringing back the Batmobile, and keeping his connection to Batman and Robin secret from Batgirl, who thinks he’s just Bruce’s butler and her confidant. Take that, Sean Pertwee!
No sex, please, we’re superheroes. Robin rather creepily notices that Batgirl is very pretty when she’s asleep, and Batman proudly states that that’s a sign of the first “oncoming thrust of manhood” for the Boy Wonder. Wah-HEY!
Special Guest Villain. The husband-and-wife team of Ida Lupino and Howard Duff play the husband-and-wife team of Cassandra and Cabala, a couple whose dialogue is almost painfully hip. (For what it’s worth, Lupino sounds more natural utilizing the groovy-speak of 1968 than Duff, who sounds way too much like an old guy trying and failing to sound cool. The couple were both over 50 at this point, but being written as young cool cats.)
Na-na na-na na-na na-na na.
“I feel like I’m getting flat!”
“What a pity.”
–Batgirl expressing what the Alvino Ray-Gun is doing to her, and Cabala providing the double entendre.
Trivial matters: This episode was discussed on The Batcave Podcast episode 67 by host John S. Drew with special guest chum, Jim Beard (editor of Gotham City 14 Miles).
The Mope Diamond is a play on the Hope Diamond, while Spiffany’s on 15th Avenue is the latest riff on a New York City location, in this case the famous jewelry store Tiffany’s on 5th Avenue. The Alchemical Bank, besides being a fitting place for an alchemist to rob, is also a play on the venerable New York bank Chemical Bank, which has remained a venerable New York bank since 1896, though in 1995 they acquired Chase Bank and took on their even-more-venerable name.
G. David Schine, the former assistant to Senator Joseph McCarthy, does an uncredited turn as the floor-waxer at Spiffany’s. The character’s name is also G. David Schine, which must have made it easier for him to shoot the scene where he introduces himself. His casting is also a major insult to all the Hollywood people who were blacklisted by Schine’s boss in the previous decade…
David Lewis makes his final appearance as the beleaguered Warden Crichton.
Cassandra’s Alvino Ray-Gun is named after Alvino Rey, the big band musician. Stanley Ralph Ross wanted to name it after the then-current California governor (and future U.S. president) and call it the Ronald Ray Gun, but the producers wouldn’t allow it. He later made Ol’ Dutch into a weapon on Monster Squad.
The six villains are played by the actors’ stand-ins, and their faces are rarely seen. Old recordings of Riddler’s laugh, Catwoman’s purr, Penguin’s “waugh,” and Joker’s giggle are inserted into the production, but none of them get any dialogue.
Pow! Biff! Zowie! “Batfink?” This episode has to set a record for double entendres in a single Batman ’66 episode. Besides the two mentioned above—Batman’s comment about the oncoming thrust of Robin’s manhood and Cabala lamenting Batgirl getting flatter—there’s also Cabala’s line about how husbands and wives should bump into each other every once in a while, Cassandra dismissively telling Batgirl that other women’s numbers don’t interest her, Gordon’s reference to the prison matron nicknamed “Mrs. Frisk,” and Minerva’s line about how she would feel like a new man.
It’s like Broadcast Standards and Practices didn’t even care anymore. Then again, there’s only one episode after this…
Anyhow, this episode is a fitting swan song for Stanley Ralph Ross, consistently the best of the Bat-writers, filled as it is with absurdity, Bat-gadgets, a ridiculous deathtrap—our heroes being flattened had already been used once as a cliffhanger—and the usual nonsense. Ross also does the best he can with the third season credo of Thou Shalt Not Spend by providing villains who spend half the episode invisible, no henchmen or molls, and a bat-fight that is either three people flailing against nobody while the crew throws things at them from off camera or entirely in the dark.
Sadly, they’re done in by the casting of Lupino and Duff, who just are an awkward fit for the oh-so-hip dialogue the characters spout. (You have to wonder if they envisioned Sonny and Cher for this—they’d have been perfect. They’d even proven their acting chops by this point on an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that was directed by Bat-regular george waGGner.) And while freeing all the old villains for one final go-round is a nifty visual, it doesn’t even hold up in what passes for in-universe logic in Batman ’66. I don’t mind them all being imprisoned in the same wing, or that they can be freed by a single switch in Crichton’s office, because that’s in keeping with Crichton’s general spectacular incompetence as a warden. No, I just can’t see the six of them agreeing to be the toadies to some villain nobody’s ever heard of. Just four of them working together in the feature film was fraught with arguments and such, so why would they just sit and go for it now? (Also, King Tut should be back at Yale teaching Egyptology, not in jail, and seeing Catwoman be tall and white again is confusing, and not really fair to Eartha Kitt.)
Still, this would’ve made a decent final episode. However, we’ve still got one more to go.
Bat-rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido is running a Kickstarter for Mermaid Precinct, the long-awaited fifth novel in his series of fantasy police procedurals. Please consider supporting it! He will be a guest at Lunacon 2017 this weekend in Tarrytown, New York. He’ll be performing with the Boogie Knights on Saturday at 11am and again for a kids concert Sunday at 11am. He’ll also be doing a reading Saturday at 5pm.
Don’t have much to say you haven’t already said, Keith. The last King Tut ep might’ve been the most dignified send-off for ’66 Gotham, but this one does strike me as the most appropriate for Season 3’s ethos in general…
Batman drugging Batgirl (even with her consent) will never not be creepy, but the truly amazing thing is that what we see here is almost respectful, compared to Batgirl’s first “trip” to the Batcave in Batgirl: Year One, published almost forty years later.
(Also, I think the six-way archvillain teamup might be excused be headcanoning that they all plan to betray each other at the first opportunity, and are calling a temporary ceasefire to beat the crap out of B&R&BG. The lack of art, too, might be explained as the result of three solid seasons of defeats- none of the archvillains are in the mood to play with their food anymore, and who can blame them?)
This is a weird one. A couple of middle-aged alchemists who talk like beatniks? Invisibility that “isn’t really” invisibility but might as well be? Flattening the Terrific Trio? And it teases a team-up of all the arch-villains and then just gives us a bunch of non-speaking photo doubles, and the big fight is invisible/in the dark. Which is mildly amusing, but still frustrating. It just didn’t really work.
The show really was taking a more fanciful tack toward the end. I wonder, if there’d been a fourth season, would we have seen more of the fantasy and sci-fi elements of the Silver Age comics? A time machine? Batman turned into Bat-Mummy or Bat-Baby or Bat-Ape? Billy Barty as Bat-Mite?
I think this is the first time we get “Special Guest Villainess” and “Extra Special Guest Villain,” rather than the other way around. Nice having the female character in the lead (something we also saw in the Catwoman-Joker team-up), but the characters just didn’t work that well. Ida Lupino was fairly good given the limits of her material, but Howard Duff’s Cabala was just annoying. Enough with the “Doccy-Baby” all the time!
Cute meta reference with Gordon saying “A Batfight rarely takes more than 40 seconds.” And, yes, the “first oncoming thrust of manhood” line was pretty brazen innuendo — although it would’ve been a bit less disturbing if they hadn’t just roofied Batgirl. In addition to the innuendoes mentioned above, there’s also a bit where we see the couple from the waists up and Cassandra reacts in a way suggesting that Cabala has just swatted or goosed her rear. Plus there’s the preview for the final episode putting “The End” over Zsa Zsa Gabor’s derriere.
Seriously, why was Batgirl so content with the idea of being kept in the dark about the Duo’s secrets? Surely they’d make a more effective team if they all knew each other’s identities. That’s bugged me pretty much my whole life. I never got why they didn’t team up fully. (In the ’77 Filmation animated series that brought back West and Ward and was kind of a pseudo-sequel to this, Batman and Robin did know Batgirl’s true identity, though it was ambiguous whether the reverse was true.)
The jailed Newmaresque Catwoman could be taken as support for the hypothesis that Kittwoman is a different felon who’s taken over the mantle of Catwoman during Catwoman Prime’s imprisonment.
My brain understands that this episode represents complete surrender on the part of a series that was out of money and past caring. But my heart still reserves a small place for it, just because it contains a bunch of stuff a kid finds easy to love. Like cameos by six of the top villains, which is cool even if they are all obviously stand-ins. (And yeah, it always struck me as weird that they would willingly take orders from a pair of nonentities – – especially since all they were getting out of the deal was control of cutesy, on-the-nose operations like fish markets and amusement parks. Like the Joker and the Penguin would settle for less than actual banks.)
Sonny and Cher in the lead roles is an interesting idea, although I’d be surprised to learn that that was the intention — given that, in the episode as written and filmed, the female half of the duo is the one who’s squarely in charge. And Sonny and Cher’s public persona at the time was exactly the opposite.
And of course, Alhemical Bank and Trust is a play on the venerable New York-based Chemical Bank.
I am going to miss these rewatches! I had little interest in classic Batman before this and so I thank you for inspiring me to care. You haven’t announced what (if anything) you are doing next for this rewatch series (not to mention, Star Trek is ending soon) but I hope it is something as fun as this for both you and us.
If you want to extend this even a little bit more, perhaps you could take a quick look at “Legends of the Superheroes”? Two more episodes starring Adam West, Burt Ward, and Frank Gorshin couldn’t be as bad as I’ve heard, right? (Right!? Okay, it would probably be worse.)
Or the Filmation Batman cartoons (a breezy 16 episodes)… or the Batman crossover episodes with Scooby-Doo…
Whatever you decide to do next, I look forward to your announcement with anticipation.
Steve: Ack! Thanks for the reminder! I meant to add Chemical Bank to the litany, but I spaced on it. Will edit….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’d love to see this “re-watch” extended into Return of the Caped Crusaders and maybe segue into a re-watch of Wonder Woman ’77.
@6/vinsentient: Keith already covered The Return of the Caped Crusaders last November.
Speaking of which (though I should perhaps leave it for the comments of the next review… ah, well), the Batman ’66 Meets Wonder Woman ’77 comic has put a rather… depressing coda on the ’66-verse as a whole. The comic is still three installments from completion, and I’m sure its actual ending will be plenty upbeat, but I doubt they’ll undo Certain Developments just like that.
@5/krad: You’re welcome! And nice use of the word venerable. Just typing it made me feel like Desmond Doomsday, but your purposeful repetition is even more authentic. You’re totally ready for Ireland Yard! (Two weeks ago, I was going to suggest that Mount Ararat hospital is a riff on the famous Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. But I looked up the latter, and it seems to have never housed any sort of psychiatric ward. So maybe I’m wrong.)
I just watched the Cassandra episode again, and I noticed something kind of fun: Cassandra refers to Robin as a junior birdman. Twenty-one years later, Jack Nicholson’s Joker will call Michael Keaton’s Batman the exact same thing.
Also, the Alvino Ray Gun sure reminds me of one of the floor-mounted lighting fixtures my uncle used to use to shine multi-colored light on his Christmas tree. I’d love to find out that’s exactly what it was.
Finally, the Sonny & Cher idea has sure colored my perception of this episode. This time, I kept hoping there’s an alternate universe somewhere where Cassandra and Cabala are played by Grace Slick and Frank Zappa…
@9: My curiosity about the phrase “junior birdman” has led to another Trivial Matters discovery. Turns out that the Junior Birdmen of America was, in Wikipedia’s words, “a national organization for boys and girls interested in aviation and model plane building, founded (ca. 1934) and promoted by the Hearst newspaper chain, with the cooperation of the U.S. Bureau of Air Commerce.” So both Cassandra here and the Joker in the ’89 film were no doubt referencing that group, which I guess was pretty well-known for a while.
If I hadn’t found that reference, I would’ve thought it was a play on the Junior G-Men, a similar youth organization that was oriented toward law and order, since that seemed like a more natural fit for crimefighters like Batman and Robin.
@10/ Chris: Yeah, I had a vague recollection of something like that, but it was the dimmest of memories. Cool find!
And while we’re voting for the next rewatch, I notice that the Batcave podcast has recently started covering the first Filmation Batman series. I’d definitely be into reading something like that here, especially if the emphasis were on similarities to the 1966 live action show. The cartoon may not be its fourth season the way Star Trek is, but the debt is still there.
@11/Steve: I think of the ’77 Filmation show as more of a logical continuation of this show, since it had West and Ward and reused a number of elements from the show (the Batphone, Robin’s “Holy” exclamations, etc.), while being more comics-based in others. Still, I think it used the same character designs and some of the same stock animation as the ’68 cartoon, though I’m not sure.
I’ve always found it odd and amusing that Olan Soule and Casey Kasem played Batman and Robin for Filmation while Adam West and Burt Ward played them for 20th Century Fox/Greenway Productions, and then a decade later, Soule and Kasem played B&R for Hanna-Barbera while West and Ward played them for Filmation. And then in the early ’80s, West and Kasem teamed up for Hanna-Barbera. And now, more than three decades after that, West and Ward are playing B&R again for Warner Bros.
@12/ Chris: Yes, the 77 series relied on the character designs and overall art Direction of the 68 one, albeit with smoother animation. But in terms of storylines, the later series struck me as a lot sillier and more in line with a typical kids’ show, thanks to that insufferable version of Bat-Mite, the over-the-top voice performances of West and Ward, and the muted action ( thanks for nothing, outraged parents groups). Though I guess we could go on forever debating which villain is more woefully juvenile, Simon the Pieman or Sweet Tooth. ;)
Also, I’m pretty sure that the Casey Kasem Robin came out with plenty of “holy” exclamations.
@13/Steve: Also, the ’77 show had rotoscoped action scenes, which I don’t think Filmation was using back in the ’60s (they didn’t have any in Star Trek a few years later).
And yes, I do recall Kasem-Robin saying “Holy ___” a lot in his Hanna-Barbera career, though I don’t remember if he did so on the ’68 Filmation series.
@15/ Chris: Yes, the 77 series featured rotoscoping, including that nice closing-credits sequence of Batman running the world’s greatest gymnastics gauntlet through the streets of Gotham. I remember wishing the entire show had been that cool. But are you sure Star Trek didn’t use rotoscoping? The first time I heard that term was in an article about the series that ran in one of the kids’ magazines, probably Dynamite but maybe Smash. They explained what rotoscoping was and how it would make Star Trek look superior to the usual cartoon.
And it was the 68 show I was thinking of in terms of Robin and his exclamations. I didn’t immediately remember him using them in the Hanna-Barbera stuff, maybe because Kasem’s delivery in 68 had been a lot more energetic and thus more memorable. Then again, Super Friends always struck me as somewhat of a snooze, especially early on, when I was still young enough to be watching Saturday morning stuff.
@17/Steve: ST:TAS only used rotoscoping for a few shots of the Enterprise that were traced from TOS — the planet-orbiting turn, the tilt-in on the bridge dome from “The Cage,” and a shot of the ship whizzing toward the camera from the main titles. The only thing I can think of that might’ve been a rotoscoped sequence of a human being in motion was a single reused sequence of a character running toward the camera at a slight angle. Generally characters held static poses, made simple movements like head and body turns, or ran or walked straight across the frame using non-rotoscoped movement cycles. There was nothing like the smooth, gymnastic action moves we got later in Tarzan, Batman, and the like.
I realize I’m in the minority, but I’ve always like this episode. Mostly, it’s because of the Alvino Rey gun reference. (but the ridiculous Alfre disguise is so absurd I find it a real hoot) Much later in life, it got me looking up who Alvino Rey actually was. That led me to discover the connection to the King family and finally to Tina Cole, part of that family and part of that family’s sub-group called the called the King Cousins. They actually released some albums. But, of course, Tina Cole is best known for playing Katie Douglas on My Three Sons. She might be my all-time crush as a kid. So incredibly, incredibly beautiful. And she actually can sing. Here’s a video of her singing just a bit of Petula Clark’s “Downtown” with accompaniment from Fred McMurray, William Demerest, Don Grady and Stanley and Barry Livingston. (I know that McMurray, Demerest, and Grady legitimately played those instruments in real life; I haven’t been able to confirm if the Livingstons did.) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcEM_xdHe7c
“Who’s Who in Alchemy.”? There was a branch of the Hogwarts Library in Gotham City? Holy Crossover Batman!
Having all the Bat-villains as an invisible army from the start could have been a cute way to cut costs and avoid actor scheduling hell…. but they went with the stand-ins and recordings.
@krad: Are you going to rewatch the ’77 Filmation show? Since you’re doing it with Star Trek…
@9 – Steve: I believe Mount Ararat is definitely a riff on Mount Sinai.
@7 That sound you heard was me slapping my forehead. I hadn’t read the Crusaders “rewatch” because I didn’t want to spoil myself.
That said, I still want a Wonder Woman rewatch. With the new movie coming out soon, it seems like a great time to start.
I always thought I had seen all of Batman 66 (as a kid I used to make sure my mom called me into the house in time for it) but more and more I realize I must have missed the second half of the last season. At first I thought I was just forgetting some of the less memorable episodes, but now I have to dig up some DVDs to catch the episodes I missed.
It appears that they packed the DVDs with 8 episodes per disc. Does that mean video quality is only passable? Or is the re-mastering into cleaned up HD?
This was not a favorite of mine. I thought Lupino was good, though and I would like to have seen her with a better script/character. As others have said, I also thought there’s no way major supervillains would take orders from a couple of schmos.
hey….the Alvino Ray Gun also Rev’s their 3rd Dimension does it not? as well as altering the structure of their molecular cells??
thoroughly enjoyed reading.
#BatFunFact: Batgirl took her only trip with The Dynamic Duo in The 1966 TV Batmobile in “The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra” (#1722).
(Or was about to, anyway, since she was Batgassed to sleep beforehand…)
Referring to your King Tut comments, the episodes were broadcast in a different order than they were filmed. This episode (Prod. #1722) was actually filmed before “I’ll Be A Mummy’s Uncle” (Prod. #1725), even though “Mummy’s Uncle” was broadcast first. This episode was filmed first, so that’s probably why Tut is in prison instead of back at Yale teaching. (I got the production numbers from Joel Eisner’s Official Batman Batbook.) Stanley Ralph Ross more than likely wrote the episodes in that order, not knowing that the network would flip them around.
So, in the case of King Tut, it was more than likely a case of ABC shuffling around the broadcast order of the episodes, rather than a continuity problem.
And I too find it rather strange that Julie Newmar’s stunt double was used for the Catwoman, rather than Eartha Kitt’s double. Perhaps Eartha’s stand-in was unavailable, but who knows?? You’re right though; it wasn’t really fair to Eartha to do that.
I’ve always kind of liked this episode, not as bad as it’s reputation IMO…There was a certain bit of ingenuity to the black out batfight, and not a bad way to get around the budget issues. Even though they weren’t the “real” ones, it was fun to see all the villains together on screen, though Tut would have been in Gotham Pen’s Psychriactic Wing, and Penguin would have been sleeping off the Fruit Fly sickness. Have come to think this might have been a fitting final episode, ending with Batman and Co seeing the villains being placed back in to their jail cells, with Batman addressing them (and the audience) about justice again being served and vowing to continue his battle against crime…