“A Piece of the Action” / “Batman’s Satisfaction”
Written by Charles Hoffman
Directed by Oscar Rudolph
Season 2, Episodes 51 and 52
Production code 9751
Original air dates: March 1 and 2, 1967
The Bat-signal: The Green Hornet and Kato arrive at midnight at the Pink Chip Stamp Factory. The factory foreman, Colonel Gumm, is having a midnight snack of alphabet soup, which is interrupted by their arrival, and fisticuffs briefly ensue before the masked men depart. Kato questions their early departure, but the Hornet says they have what they need—this is definitely the counterfeit stamp ring they’ve been looking for, and they can wrap it up tomorrow.
In the morning, the factory’s owner, Pinky Pinkston—who has pink hair and a pink dog—calls Gordon to report the break-in by the Hornet and Kato (against Gumm’s better judgment). Gordon immediately calls Batman, interrupting Bruce, Dick, and Harriet messing with Bruce’s stamp collection. As Bruce goes to the study to answer the Bat-phone, Britt Reid, the Hornet’s secret ID, calls Wayne Manor’s main phone and speaks to Harriet. He wants to get together with Bruce while he’s in town for the newspaper publisher’s convention. Harriet sends Alfred to tell Bruce, and Bruce tells Alfred to say he’ll call Reid back.
Bruce has a lunch date with Pinkston. Reid also wants a date with her, but this is the only day he’s free, so Pinskton—who enjoys a good rivalry—invites him to come along as well.
Batman, Robin, Gordon, and O’Hara speculate about why the Hornet might be in town, and in particular why he might target the Pink Chip Stamp Factory. One possibility is a rare stamp owned by Pinkston’s father, Pincus Pinkston, which has been missing since he died.
They’re interrupted by Reid’s arrival. Reid expresses shock—shock!—that the Hornet’s in town.
Gumm plans to rob the International Stamp Exhibition in a few days, which will allow him to give up this counterfeiting and retire rich. Pinkston arrives down her private staircase (handily labelled with a sign that says “Miss Pinkston’s Private Staircase”), and Gumm urges the henchmen to “Look busy—and honest!” She has learned that the intruders from the previous night are the Green Hornet and Kato. (But didn’t she already know that? If not, how did Gordon know to tell Batman that it was the Hornet?)
The Batcomputer fails to help with identifying the Hornet and Kato because it doesn’t have a dual identity bat-sensor. And they have to go off to their civilian responsibilities—Bruce to have lunch with Reid and Pinkston, Dick to his French tutoring.
The lunch is held at the Gotham Hampshire Hotel, where a lingerie show is going on for whatever reason. After Pinkston goes off to give her pink dog Apricot a pedicure, the two millionaires head to Sevaroff’s Stamp Shop, as both of them have stamps in their collections that they think might be fake. Throughout the lunch, Gumm has been eavesdropping while disguised as an older British gentleman.
Boris Sevaroff, the owner of Sevaroff’s Stamp Shop, is also Gumm in disguise, and he assures Bruce that the stamp he bought is genuine. But the concern over the possible fakery means he needs to up his timetable.
However, Pinkston overhears the henchmen talking to Gumm, and upon the latter’s return to the factory, she confronts him, and he imprisons her in his office.
The Hornet and Kato head out to deal with Gumm. Hornet saw through Gumm’s disguise as Sevaroff, and plans to put the counterfeit ring out of business. However, since the world sees them as criminals, he’s worried that they’ll cross paths with Batman and Robin. Not wanting to harm a fellow hero, even if he doesn’t know Hornet’s a good guy, he puts his Hornet sting on half-power.
Both the Batmobile and the Black Beauty arrive at the Pink Chip Stamps Factory. Batman and Robin observe the Hornet and Kato confront Gumm. Hornet asks to be cut in on the action in exchange for not revealing Gumm’s disguise as Sevaroff. Gumm pretends to play along, but then shoves the faux criminals into the Enlarged Perforating and Coiling Machine. Batman and Robin burst in, then, and fisticuffs ensue. However, Batman and Robin are stuck to an undetachable glue pad (handily labelled, “UNDETACHABLE GLUE PAD”), and they’re stuck (literally!) watching the Enlarged Perforating and Coiling Machine flatten the Hornet and Kato and turn them into life-sized stamps—with Batman and Robin next!
However, when Gumm dissolves the glue, our heroes punch their way to freedom, and loosen a panel enough for the Hornet and Kato—still alive inside the machine, it turns out—to blast out with the Hornet sting. Gumm and his henchmen get away, packing their counterfeit stamps in a truck and using Pinkston as a hostage.
Batman, Robin, Hornet, and Kato stand around and babble for no compellingly good reason before the Hornet and Kato leave and Batman and Robin follow, hoping to catch the other masked men in the commission of an actual crime.
When she was Gumm’s hostage, Pinkston fed Apricot from Gumm’s precious supply of alphabet soup. Batman, noticing that the J’s, Q’s, and Z’s are missing from the bowl, decides, somehow, that Pinkston left a message for him, so he collects the soup and he and Robin try to decipher what message Pinkston might have left.
That detective work is interrupted by Reid arriving at Wayne Manor for a visit. Batman leaves Robin to continue working on the soup puzzle while Bruce and Reid worry about Pinkston, who hasn’t answered her phone anywhere. The two childhood friends talk about painting the town red like they did in the old days.
Since Robin has no luck deciphering the alphabet soup, Batman feeds the noodles straight into the Batcomputer (because that’s totally how computers work!), which reveals the contents of her note, saying that she was kidnapped by Gumm and to find her at the stamp show.
Apricot manages to gnaw through the ropes that keep Pinkston tied to a chair, allowing her to escape Gumm’s clutches. Before she did so, however, Gumm boasts that he believes Reid to be Batman and Bruce to be the Hornet. Pinkston immediately goes to Gordon and O’Hara to share this intelligence, which the cops find difficult to credit.
Gumm arrives at the stamp exhibition disguised as an Argentinian stamp collector, Senor Barbosa. The Hornet and Kato sneak into the exhibition, as do Batman and Robin. Fisticuffs ensue, with the four guys in masks beating up on Gumm and his three henchmen and also on each other. Once Gumm and his people are down, Batman faces the Hornet while Robin faces Kato.
Before the fight can continue, Gumm manages to take Pinkston hostage, getting close by pretending to be Barbosa. Batman and Robin manage to stop him by sneaking up behind him, and the Hornet and Kato get away in the confusion.
Pinkston again has lunch with Reid and Bruce. She shares the hypothesis that Reid is Batman and Bruce is the Hornet. Bruce goes off to make a phone call, having Alfred call Gordon on the bat-phone, then having Gordon call Pinkston at the hotel. Gordon holds the phones against each other, as does Alfred, and yet somehow everyone hears each other clearly as Batman thanks Pinkston for her help in capturing Gumm and driving the Hornet out of town. This convinces Pinkston that Batman and Reid aren’t one and the same, and everyone has a good laugh.
Fetch the Bat-shark-repellant! The Batcomputer has an ingestor switch—which proves handy when they feed the alphabet soup noodles into it—but does not have a dual identity bat-sensor. Batman carries an empty alphabet soup bat-container (complete with funnel) and a small broom and spatula in his utility belt.
Holy #@!%$, Batman! When our heroes realize that they don’t have a dual-identity bat-sensor in the Batcomputer, Robin grumbles, “Holy oversight!” When Hornet and Kato arrive just after Batman and Robin do at the stamp factory, Robin mutters, “Holy split second!” When he’s stuck to the undetachable glue pad, Robin cries, “Holy flypaper, Batman!” When Gum reveals the Green Hornet stamp, Robin sneers, “Holy human collector’s item!” When Hornet and Kato turn out to be alive in the Enlarged Perforated and Coiling Machine, Robin says, “Holy living end!” When Batman notices that the J’s, Q’s, and Z’s are missing from Apricot’s bowl of alphabet soup, Robin on-the-noses, “Holy uncanny photographic mental processes!” (Yes, he really said that!!!!) When Batman proposes the possibility that the Hornet is actually a crimefighter, Robin scoffs, “Holy unlikelihood.”
Gotham City’s finest. Gordon and O’Hara are shocked at the notion that Reid could be Batman and Bruce could be the Hornet. They also totally fail to stop Gumm from kidnapping Pinkston literally right under their noses.
No sex, please, we’re superheroes. The lingerie models flirt with both Bruce and Reid (one offers her name to Reid, the other her phone number to Bruce), while the men both flirt with Pinkston, who enjoys the attention from them both.
Also at one point Batman says, “I smell pink.” Yeah, we’ll just let that one go…
Special Guest Villain. Roger C. Carmel plays Gumm, but for the first time in the show’s history, there is no special guest villain credit in the opening, as poor Carmel is relegated to the closing credits only, not even listed as “special guest villain,” but just another guest star, albeit with single-screen billing. Carmel was a master comedic character actor, probably best known for playing Harry Mudd in two live–action episodes of Star Trek, as well as one animated episode.
Instead, Van Williams and Bruce Lee get billed as “Visiting Hero” and “Assistant Visiting Hero.” They both wandered across the lot from The Green Hornet to appear on this show in an endeavor to boost the flagging ratings of the Hornet’s own show. It didn’t work, and The Green Hornet tragically only lasted the one season.
Na-na na-na na-na na-na na.
“It’s a good thing they’re on our side, even though they don’t know it.”
“It’s a good thing those guys aren’t in town every week.”
–Kato and Robin being all cutesy and meta.
Trivial matters: This episode was discussed on The Batcave Podcast episode 43 by host John S. Drew with special guest chum, Justin Michael, host of Batman: The Animated Podcast.
This episode crosses over with William Dozier’s other ABC show that season, The Green Hornet. Also adapting a masked hero for the TV screen, The Green Hornet had a similar feel to Batman, though it was a bit darker and was played much more straight. The show never caught on, not being campy enough to draw in the Bat-crowd and not having enough mainstream appeal to be popular. Indeed, this crossover was done to try to bolster Hornet‘s anemic ratings, but Batman was having ratings issues of its own, and it didn’t help. The show was cancelled after a season.
The Green Hornet‘s primary claim to fame was to introduce the United States to legendary martial artist Bruce Lee. Lee would go on to become arguably the most famous martial artist in history, having pioneered his own style, Jeet Kune Do. He’s generally considered responsible for the martial arts craze in the 1970s, both in film and in real life. Lee’s popularity sparked a lot of interest in Asian martial arts in this country, leading to several styles, particularly from Japan, China, and Korea, working their way over here.
The Green Hornet originated as a radio drama in the 1930s, and had previously been adapted to movie serials, comic books, and kids’ novels. In the years since, he’s continued to appear in prose and comics, as well as a feature film in 2011.
This is the third time the Hornet and Kato have been seen or referenced on Batman, and the three aren’t compatible. The Hornet and Kato were the window cameo in “The Spell of Tut,” in which Batman and Robin treat them like fellow heroes, and then Bruce and Dick sit down to watch The Green Hornet TV show in “The Impractical Joker.”
In 2014, DC published a companion miniseries to Batman ’66 entitled Batman ’66 Meets the Green Hornet, by Kevin Smith, Ralph Garman, & Ty Templeton, which was a sequel to this crossover, as the Dynamic Duo once again are thrown together with the Hornet and Kato against Gumm.
Diane McBain plays Pinkston, having previously played the Mad Hatter’s moll Lisa in “The Thirteenth Hat” / “Batman Stands Pat.”
The window cameo is Edward G. Robinson, who engages the Dynamic Duo in a discussion about art, including a dig at pop-art guru Andy Warhol, whose art Robinson despised.
There are several Star Trek connections in this one. Besides Carmel, there’s also Angelique Pettyjohn, who plays one of the lingerie models, who appeared in “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” and the title of the first part is also the title of a second-season Star Trek episode. Also Seymour Cassel, who plays one of the henchmen, went on to a major career as a well-regarded character actor, including a role in Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “The Child.”
Pink Chip Stamps is a play on Blue Chip Stamps, popular collectible stamps of the time.
Another minor crossover: when Batman is dumping the alphabet soup into the alphabet soup bat-container, the letters form an S, which is positioned right at Batman’s chest, thus making a sly reference to Superman.
Pow! Biff! Zowie! “Green Hornet usually comes out the winner.” I have always had a soft spot for The Green Hornet. It got lost in the Bat-shadow, and never really found an audience. The Hornet has always been a minor hero in the grand pantheon anyhow, and honestly if it hadn’t been for Bruce Lee’s meteoric rise to fame (not to mention his tragic death), both the show and the character might have been confined to the dustbin of history. But it was actually a fun little action-adventure show that deserved more acclaim and viewers than it got.
As a result, I have a great fondness for this crossover. It helps that Roger C. Carmel leaves no piece of scenery unchewed as Gumm (not to mention his various disguises), that Diane McBain turns in another strong performance as Pinkston—who, like her prior role as Lisa, is a much more together and intelligent woman than the show usually manages to provide—and that Van Williams and Bruce Lee bring the same relaxed charm that they have in their own show. Plus Robin actually says, “Holy uncanny photographic mental processes!” With a straight face, no less! Seriously, the whole episode’s worth it for that line.
The story has some holes in it, not least being the complete lack of any follow-through on Pinkston’s father’s famous lost stamp. There’s not enough of Kato fighting, which is half the appeal of The Green Hornet in the first place, and it’s laughable to see him face off against Robin, because you just know that the Boy Wonder doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning that fight. (It doesn’t help that Burt Ward plays the fight scenes with tremendous hesitation, borne of a practical joke on Lee’s part. Having heard that Ward boasted often of his barely-there karate skills, Lee acted all surly around Ward, scaring the other actor and making him fear he might actually get hurt. One of the crew, who was in on the gag, referred to their confrontation as the black panther versus the yellow chicken.) And the climax is very anti, sadly, as the bad guy is stopped by Batman and Robin walking up behind Gumm.
But overall, this is a fun crossover. Too bad it wasn’t enough to save the other show…
Bat-rating: 8
Keith R.A. DeCandido can’t believe that anyone ever thought that Robin stood a chance against Kato.
I last saw this a year ago on MeTV, and I think that was the first time I’ve seen it since I finally saw The Green Hornet. It’s weird to see the more serious Hornet and Kato inserted into Batman’s campy world. Keith said the two shows were similar in tone, but I see them as very different. Both Batman and The Green Hornet were accurate, faithful interpretations of their properties as they existed in the 1960s. Batman comics for over a decade had been just as goofy and wild and intentionally ludicrous as what we saw on the show — more so, in fact, because Adam West and Burt Ward never had to contend with Bat-Mite* or alien invaders or time travel or weird transformations or prank wars with Superman. But The Green Hornet came from a radio series and movie serials that had always taken a serious tone. Batman was a beloved public hero who fought against colorful, themed bad guys who robbed banks and museums, while the Green Hornet worked outside the law of a deeply mob-infested city in order to battle its rampant corruption and racketeering the only way he could. Basically, the Green Hornet always used the narrative that Batman wouldn’t adopt until the late 1980s.
Even their cars show their differences. Both are gadget-laden, state-of-the-art custom vehicles, but the Batmobile is colorful and garish and fanciful, while the Black Beauty is the kind of car that can blend into traffic or the shadows, a sensible ride for a clandestine hero.
Anyway, even aside from the tonal discrepancy of the crossover, this is a weird story overall. Colonel Gumm is a pretty lame villain — a stamp counterfeiter? — and Pinky Pinkston is just bizarre. And after four decades, I’m still no closer to understanding what alphabet soup and stamps have to do with each other. It’s the same sort of random association of gimmicks that the Puzzler had with puzzles, Shakespeare, and aviation.
The first half is quite cluttered what with setting up all the guest characters. But the Bruce-Britt friendship/rivalry allows for an unusual amount of screen time for Bruce out of costume, which is nice. Part 2 is better than part 1, with a couple of classic bits. The Empty Alphabet Soup Bat-Container is an awesome gag, and I love the bit where Robin and Batman sort of swap personas for a few lines and Burt Ward does his Batman impression.
Still, it really fizzles out at the end there. The whole “Britt Reid is Batman and Bruce Wayne is the Green Hornet” bit is random and pointless — on top of being ridiculous in the first place since they operate in different cities. And I knew the final confrontation between the duos was inconclusive, but it was so inconclusive that it barely even got started. Plus, Gumm was defeated in too easy and halfhearted a manner.
I think this is only the second time that the main villain in a Batman episode has not gotten up-front billing — the first being “Zelda the Great,” where the real villain was Eivol Ekdal. Colonel Gumm is certainly one of the weakest villains the show ever had. One wishes they would’ve used someone more impressive for the Bat/GH teamup, but I guess they didn’t want the GH and Kato to be overshadowed.
Alex Rocco (henchman Block) would return to Batman’s world 44 years later to voice Carmine Falcone in the Batman: Year One animated movie.
In addition to the three incompatible Green Hornet mentions on Batman, there was at least one episode of TGH where the characters watched Batman on TV. So both shows were fictional in each other’s universes, except that the Green Hornet was also real in Batman’s universe. Confusing, ain’t it?
*Well, not until West and Ward reprised their roles for Filmation’s New Adventures of Batman in 1977, with Bat-Mite as a regular character.
This is one of the great traumas of my early childhood. I watched both of these shows avidly with my father and was very eagerly looking forward to the crossover. Then I committed some infraction and was punished by my mother by not being allowed to watch (I think) part two. Close to 50 years later I can still remember how upset I was.
But really, it’s a bit of a waste of both the Hornet and Roger Carmel. The Hornet’s problem, as Keith notes, is that he doesn’t really fit in with the goofiness of this era’s Batman. And Roger Carmel was so flamboyant and larger than life, he deserved a better villain. He’s best known for his comedic talents, but he could do menace pretty well, too. He could easily have given us another villain like the Riddler and Bookworm who could go from manic to mean at the drop of a hat.
By the way, DC did a Batman ’66/Green Hornet crossover comic not long ago, written by Kevin Smith and Ralph Garman, and it’s terrific. The regular Batman ’66 comic took some liberties with the show’s format, in part because its stories were shorter and more compact; a typical issue often had more of the pacing of a one-and-done third-season episode. But this was a single story spread out over six full issues, so it was able to have a pacing more like the first two seasons, and it really feels authentic to the show, even truer to its voice and style than the regular comic (and the Green Hornet elements feel pretty authentic too, aside from being grafted into Batman’s goofier world). It’s a sequel to this 2-parter, bringing back Gumm as the main villain, but despite that, it kind of feels like… well, like a Batman vs. The Green Hornet feature film that was designed to be recut into a 6-episode arc within the show. It has the scope of a film (and alludes to the events of the actual film) but follows the cliffhanger format of the show. (And it seems to be set between seasons 2 and 3, because Robin has just passed driver’s ed.) The art is solid too, and there are some great Alex Ross covers. All in all, it’s a better Batman/Hornet crossover than the TV episodes were. Although it found a rather unusual solution to not having the likeness rights to Roger C. Carmel.
Christopher: thanks for the mention of the Batman 66 comic sequel, which I meant to mention and then promptly forgot to amidst all the other Trivial Matters in this one. (BTW, I haven’t read it, what’s the solution to not having Carmel’s likeness rights?)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@4/krad: In the comic, Gumm (now General Gumm) had a glue accident that left his face permanently covered with a “mask” of pink glue, with eye and mouth openings.
Odd that they’d need to go there, though, given that the comics have redesigned a lot of the characters due to likeness issues. They’ve generally drawn Gordon more like his comics version with glasses and a mustache, and some of the celebrity villains have been changed as well — Chandell is blond, Black Widow is much younger and has none of Tallulah Bankhead’s mannerisms, etc. So the contrivance here seemed unnecessary. Especially since DC’s Trek comics just redesigned Harry Mudd when he appeared, drawing him in a way similar to Carmel but not identical.
krad is right. Roger C. Carmel is the only villain not to be credited as such in the opening titles. Even Anne Baxter got a special guest villainess credit as Zelda despite the fact Eivol Ekdal was the mastermind.
My biggest problem with the ep was Carmel’s casting. He was very talented, but Gumm wasn’t really his kind of villain, IMO. He was much better, I think as the charming rogue as he was on Star Trek, especially in his second appearance.
I liked McBain, but I don’t think her character was the sharpest tool in the shed. I mean, her foreman has assistants named Reprint, Block and Cancelled, and she thinks nothing of it. The name Pinky Pinkston itself likely was a takeoff on Pinky Pinkham, a character from the early 1960s series The Roaring 20s. The characters, however, had little in common.
Oddly enough, I never saw this episode. I’d need to check it out, particularly for Carmel.
Alex Rocco also went on to play Moe Green in THE GODFATHER.
This is the first episode I’ve seen that I liked substantially less than our intrepid rewatcher (the reverse is a little bit more common). It’s probably all down to my not only lacking a soft spot for the Green Hornet but also lacking the basic knowledge of his premise that the script assumes the viewer has. Not only did I have no emotional investment in the character or his sidekick, but I spent the first half of Part 1 confused because I didn’t know people were supposed to think the Hornet was a crook. And I agree with the people who think that Britt and Kato kind of clash with the tone of this show. They’re very po-faced, and not in the self-conscious straight man way Batman is. (I also found the villain of the piece to be below-average, which is absolutely guaranteed to doom any Batman episode to a low rating in my book. It’s a sad state of affairs that Roger Carmel’s Star Trek character was more flamboyant than his Batman villain.)
That said, I did like the scene in Part 2 when Batman saves the Green Hornet from Gumm’s death trap and then clearly takes a perverse joy in repeatedly showing him up. And I smirked at the bit where Robin turns the tables and gives Batman the pompous pep talk that Batman usually subjects him to.
Bat-rating: 4
It was Chekhov’s alphabet soup!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun
The outfit that Pinky is wearing in the photo above where she’s on the phone turns up on Barbara in “The Sport of Penguins.” But whereas Pinky wore it as business attire, Barbara wore it as loungewear. Yvonne wore it again for this photo:
I have a fondness for this episode, no matter how ridiculous. Gordon is in the office with Batman when Britt Reid comes in and they meet, so there’s no possible way that Gordon — unless he is completely mentally defective — wouldn’t have replied, “Oh, no, just yesterday Batman was in this office when Britt came in, so he can’t be Batman” when Pinky made the suggestion.
And loads of great and ridiculous dialog — when Gumm and his gang are leaving, Robin says, “Hey, they’re getting away” and Batman says, “No, they’ve had it and they know it.” But they don’t, they get away. And I love when The Green Hornet chides Batman for letting Gumm get away and Kato says, “None too smart for a smart crime fighter!” And I am still searching for “Clam Chowder Alphabet Soup”…
Ahh, but Commissioner Gordon has such deep reverence for Batman that he no doubt assumes he could be in two places at once if he so wished.