Short: (1951) A high school student is caught copying his test answers from another student.
Movie: (1966) Revealingly-clad crimefighter Batwoman is on the case after villains Ratfink and Professor Neon steal an atomic hearing aid.
First shown: 11/13/93
Opening: Mike is the dealer, the game is blackjack
Invention exchange: Frank has invented an atomic-powered hair dryer, Mike shows off his razor-back
Host segment 1: Mike assigns essays to answer the questions raised by the short
Host segment 2: The bots write essays, but Crow cheats!
Host segment 3: Mike, Tom & Gypsy meet to decide what to do about Crow
End: Crow responds to the charges against him, Mike reads a letter, Dr. F. likes his new atomic hair style
Stinger: A batgirl puts the bite on the wormy guy
(214 votes, average: 4.35 out of 5)
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• This is one of those episodes where people tend to say “not even the riffing made it bearable.” To them I say: Pah! Lightweights! :-) The movie IS crushingly horrible, though. Every scene is interminable, the séance scene in particular. The movie belongs in the top (or, rather, the bottom) five on the list of most awful movies. The pain is all the more unbearable because, like “Catalina Caper” and a few other experiments, there are moments when the movie wants to be funny. Ugh. Still, I think it brings out the best in the riffing. The segments are mostly one story line, but it leads up to a great finish, and a special moment for me.
• References.
• This title was originally released by Rhino as a single; and the original packaging had a goof: On the back was a photo of Joel. It was more recently re-released as a single by Shout.
• I think you can mark this episode as the point where the invention exchange concept begins its inevitable decline. As explained in the FAQ, there is both an “on-screen” reason and an “off-screen” reason why this happened. On-screen: the invention exchange was a form of greeting between Gizmonic Institute employees. Since both Dr. F. and Joel were both former Gizmonic Institute employees, it was the first thing they did each episode. But Mike never worked for Gizmonic (he was a temp hired directly by Dr. F.) and so he knows nothing of Gizmonic’s corporate culture. Mike would therefore not understand what an invention exchange was about and Dr. F. would see no point in exchanging inventions with him. Off-screen: the invention exchanges were mostly Joel’s doing. He was the gizmo guy. When he left, all the air went out of the concept. In this episode, the Mads’ invention is downright strange and Mike’s is only fair (although, to be fair, Joel had a lot of mediocre ones too).
• The short is a gem, SO serious and dark that it really brings out the riffing gold.
• Mike brings popcorn into the theater! I don’t think he ever did again.
• “You’re opening, Jeff’s middling and I’m the headliner,” is a car conversation the writers probably had in their standup days.
• There’s not much to say about the first segment, since it basically lays the groundwork for what’s to come, or the second one, which advances the story.
• Callbacks: “He didn’t steal no bike, neither!” (Teenage Strangler) “I am the north wind…” (Day the Earth Froze)
• Crow’s cheating causes some unusual meanness in the theater: Tom tells Crow to shut up a couple of times.
• I love all the Bob Hope-style jokes: “Toccata and WOW in D minor!”
• Are those scenes really from “The Mole People”? Are they in the version shown in season 8? I forget.
• The third segment contains a moment that is very important to me. It’s the moment Mike won me over. At this point, I still was not entirely sure about Mike. He was growing on me, but, well, I just didn’t know. But he does something in the third segment—and I’m not sure it’s even intentional—that just endeared him to me immediately. Watch Mike’s expression as a disguised Crow arrives, bearing soup, in the midst of the discussion. Mike sees Crow and puts on a completely guileless smile, warm and delighted at the prospect of a nice mustachioed gentleman offering soup. It’s just such a funny and genuine expression. It cracks me up every time I see it. It was at that moment that Mike completely won me over.
• Mike expresses a desire to hunt down Jerry Warren. Unfortunately, Jerry passed on in 1988.
• In the final segment, watch Mike sniff the Hostess Snowballs, make a face, and put them back on the plate.
• Cast and crew roundup: Cinematographer William Troiano also worked on “The Slime People.” In front of the camera, Steve Brodie is also in “Giant Spider Invasion.” And of course, the great Bruno VeSota is also in “Daddy-O,” “Gunslinger,” “Attack of the Giant Leeches” and “The Undead.”
• Creditswatch: Bridget Jones switches from writer to contributing writer for the next three episodes. Host segments directed by Jim Mallon.
• Fave riff from the short: “Oh, hi, Miss Granb–AHHHHHH!” Honorable mention: “That you, student counselor??”
• Fave riff from the movie: o/` “Yes, the devil made this movie for you.” o/` Honorable mention: “Tethered to the mob!”
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The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman passes the Bechdel Test. Batwoman calls for a vote on skipping directly to the main business of the meeting.
What is that thing in Servo’s left hand during the Prologue?
Gypsy’s response to the revelation that Crow copied her report is just pure Gypsy, particularly in how guileless she is.
I don’t get the logic behind Ratfink’s scheme. Since he’s the company’s CEO, couldn’t he have just provided his goons with the necessary information on how to circumvent the security systems? For that matter, why not just fake the destruction of the atomic hearing aid? Why involve Batwoman at all?
Favorite riffs
Cheating. How to make it work for you at home and on the job.
Stop it! Stop the voice in my head!
“And right there in front of you sat your pal Mary, with her head chock full of all the answers you needed.”
Split it open now!
I envision a cheating wing.
“And you were really proud of yourself the day when you were elected to take Jack Martin’s place when he moved out of town.”
Under mysterious circumstances.
“Mary, who was only trying to help.”
Mary, who will have to take the fall.
“But did John intend to be dishonest?”
Or is he just pure evil?
Angels, you’re going undercover with Adam West.
It’s like we’re smart, but we’re not!
Little Johnny, thirty years later.
As long as I’m down here, I’m going to take his underpants.
You are a girl, aren’t you? I made a mistake one time.
Look, you’re kidnapped. Could you act scared?
“Neon, you idiotic fool! What do you think you’re doing?”
I’ve got the music in me!
I have no clue what you’re talking about, but I’m profoundly devastated.
Sorry, this is a smoke-free cult.
“This is not going to hurt you.”
It’s going to kill you.
“I’m losing my patience with you.”
Yeah, I bet he’s lost a lot of patients.
“Shouldn’t I call first?
You’re right. I am calling.
You know, that may not be really Chinese.
I’m Tubby Guy, and that’s Nerdy Guy with the briefcase.
Now see, a lot of villains aren’t bold enough to wear clam diggers.
Are we in this scene, or are we suppose to be back with the Mole People?
At this point, they could be making an electronic Santa Claus.
At this point, they could be doing anything.
You know a movie is bad, bad, bad when it makes the Monkees look good.
If I could get all the dancing Ratfinks on one side of the stage and all the singing ratfinks on the other, please?
I’ve got a pencil sharpener and a bowl of sugar, and I’ll use them!
The music’s terrible, but at least it’s drowning out the dialogue.
This is easily one of my favorite episodes. Unfortunately, not a lot of my friends have shared this opinion, seeing the movie as intolerably bad.
That Chinese seance scene was difficult to watch. The riffing made it tolerable, but just barely. If a scene like that were in a movie made today, it would (I hope) be seen as culturally insensitive, at the least. Was this sort of thing considered funny back at the time this movie was made?
Cheating is bad. Richard Basehart is good.
Harkening back to my own Post #135:
Seriously, how many films are there that *wouldn’t* benefit from a sudden shift into super-heroics? Or perhaps ninjas. Or kaiju. Or…
Other super-hero films/shows clearly or at least *debatably* created to cash in on the Batman TV series craze include:
Captain Celluloid vs. the Film Pirates (1966)
Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966, Czechoslovakia)
Captain Nice (TV series, 1966)
Mr. Terrific (TV series, 1966-1967)
Avenger X (1967, Italy/Spain)
Fearless Frank (1967)
The Incredible Paris Incident (1967, Italy)
Kilink uçan adama karsi (1967, Turkey, with two sequels)
Superargo contro Diabolikus (1966, Italy/Spain, with one sequel)
Fantabulous Inc. (1967, Italy)
Flashman (1967, Italy)
Goldface, the Fantastic Superman (1967, Italy)
The Three Fantastic Supermen (1967, Italy, a “franchise” that yielded ten sequels across the film industries of at least three nations)
The Batwoman (an entirely different one from our current subject)(1968, Mexico)
The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl (1968, France)
Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen (1968, Italy)
El ataba gazaz (1969, Egypt)
Mr. Freedom (1969, France)
Rüzgar hafiye (1969, Turkey)
Hydrozagadka (1971, Poland)
Kalimán (1972, Mexico)
We knew we could count on the Italians, right? ;-)
Films that simply appropriated Batman and Robin for themselves include:
James Batman (1966, Philippines)
Batman Fights Dracula (1967, Philippines)
Fight! Batman, Fight! (1973, Philippines)
Yarasa adam: Bedmen (aka Turkish Batman and Robin) (1973, Turkey)
With the variations Batwoman and Robin (1972) and Batwoman and Robin Meet the Queen of the Vampires (1972), both also from the Philippines.
Can we talk about Mitchel?
While this isn’t one of my favorites, I do enjoy the episode. I like when they do a continuous story through the host segments.
For those that couldn’t even get through this: really? I know the movie is terrible, but the riffing is great. I’d watch a 24-hour marathon of this episode rather than watch Kitten With a Whip or Girl in Lover’s Lane even once.
By Season 6, though, it started to become desperate: Not only was it ONE joke stretched literally for two hours (look, Crow’s still playing the Garcia riff! Nuveena’s still dancing! Emmet Kelly’s still eating!), it was starting to become a glaring coverup that they either didn’t want to make scene-specific parodies of the movie, couldn’t find anything about the movie that stuck out enough to parody, or just plain didn’t know how.
When scene-specific parody in the SciFi S9-10 started to become “Look, Bill-Crow dresses up as the character! Look, Mike…sort of imitates the character!”, and then turning their sketches Meta about how lame their ideas for comedy sketches were, like the first Invention Exchanges, it just started to look like they weren’t that into doing somebody else’s job.
That said, this is one of the last great blasts of Season 5, and one of the core classics–Until Hobgoblins and Invasion USA, we wouldn’t get that many movies truly bizarre enough to drive hip, giggling M&tB to the breaking point, and to put it as the second episode of the new regime, and two episodes after Mitchell at that, should have laid down the ground rules: It won’t always be about the fat guy and the drunk guy, sometimes, you’ll get something you just can’t explain.
(And one of the great out-of-nowhere running gags: “You just don’t care about my lunch at all, do you? You know it’s there and you deliberately sit on it!”)
And, as @42 already pointed out back at the beginning, Ray Dennis Steckler’s “Rat Pfink a Boo Boo”, which I always used to confuse with this movie for the obvious reason.
And no, from what little I’ve seen, that is a movie that should not be tackled even by the bravest of Incredibly Strange Creatures survivors…
When your comic action/sci-fi movie scrupulously follows Robert’s Rules of Order, you just KNOW you’re in for a good time/horrible pain.
Jerry Warren must have been a very special individual. Frankenstein Island, his last film, reeks very much of a person of questionable sanity just letting loose all of his pet obsessions and harmlessly kooky theories.
“I want to let you know, I’m completely disgusted with the work of all of you over there.” “I think he speaks for all of us.”
But don’t worry, Bruno Vesota, I still respect you despite the séance sequence. It wasn’t your fault, it was just the 1960s!
This short/film pairing to me, is probably the zenith of combinations.
Sure, ‘Wild World of Batwoman’ is on the level of some of the worst of Coleman Francis, but what saves the film for me are the numerous jokes leveled at the film.’
And much like the emotional first minutes of ‘Up’ create a smoke-screen over the logic of talking dogs and eternally-living former adventurers, ‘Cheating’ manages to dull the pain of ‘Batwoman.’
Much like ‘A Case of Spring Fever,’ John’s life-wrecking attempts to go against the norm, and his ostracizing by society is still enjoyable (“maybe if he had parents!”)…and of course, it leads to the skits that link throughout, as Crow pushes Tom to the brink of requesting immolation!
Plus, love Kevin Murphy’s painful cries of “EEEEENNNNNDDD!!! EEEEENNNNNDDD!!!”
I don’t remember much about this one except:
The short is very funny
There is real cute Batgirl (the one who gets captured)
#72 Thanks for the explanation I never did understand that stuff very well.
This episode, wow, not one of my top ten, but I don’t really hate it either. I love the riffing, but the host segments don’t do it for me, i would have loved to see them tackle the movie more, but I understand how sick they must have been of the film, sitting through it once unriffed gave me a severe headache.
As for the short, as Sitting Duck pointed out, Johnny never had factoring explained for him, so it’s hard for me to blame him for getting a little panicky. Granted he shouldn’t have cheated( I would have taken the bad grade and then asked for extra help or tutoring) but to me Mary holds some responsibility too, she, while helping him with homework, could have explained it better, but said that on the test he was on his own. the narrator’s response that Mary “was just trying to help” is idiotic, to me. Do we let drivers from a bank robbery off because they were “just trying to help? No, and neither should Mary be let off the hook. I don’t know whether the ending sketch where crow confesses and is sentenced to eating snack cakes, was a rebuttal to the shorts bleak outlook for Johnny( When he applies for a job or college or enters the military is anyone going to care that he cheated on a junior high math test everybody did stupid things while they were young, and he didn’t physically hurt anyone) but it kinda felt like it to me. And i loved how the one kid said ” i don’t think anyone who cheats should hold an office”. Yeah okay pally, take a trip to Washington, D.C. and then tell me that ya Pollyanna.
( I know it’s just a short and I should just relax, but man, the narrator bugs me)
The movie was so bad that it’s just jaw-dropping. It is like an accident scene; you don’t want to look but you can’t turn away. We have the “atomic” (wha?) hearing aid, the horrendous seance scene, the chase scene, the girls dancing without music, the relationship between Heathcliff and Neon, Rat Fink’s secret identity, and the meetings between Batwoman and the Batgirls and Rat Fink and company. None of these scenes are handled with any degree of skill.
Mike and the ‘bots tear it to shreds though, and the movie deserved every blow landed. The only bright spot for me was Tiger, who seemed like a really nice guy and hey he ends up joining the batgirls at the end which isn’t that bad of an idea since he could get into places that are mostly or all male and report back to Batwoman. Yes, I just said one of the ideas in this film wasn’t so bad. That frightens me as much as anybody else.
Sampo’s Theorem in full effect here. Kitten With A Whip and Girl In Lovers Lane are two of my all-time favorites (Kitten, especially), and I have come to love and appreciate Batwoman, although that one took a while.
Anything with Bruno Vesota in it rocks!
It is worth noting that the Shout! Factory reissue of this episode is missing the bumpers around the commercials. It’s the only one I’m aware of that didn’t correct the Rhino omission of these.
It’s a real problem when Bruno VeSota gives the best performance in your movie. This one makes “Secret Agent Super Dragon” look like a marvel of concise storytelling. I’ve watched it at least twice now and I still have only the barest idea what the heck was going on half the time.
Someone mentioned Heathcliff bearing a resemblance to Joel. I actually thought he looked more like Burgess Meredith, appropriate for a Grade-Z Batman rip-off.
But once again the short makes it all worthwhile.
Fave Riffs:
“You were busier than ever, with sports…”
Servo: …shaving points.
“The necessity of keeping your grades up…”
Servo: …and your enemies DOWN!!
Kind of awkward how despite her prominence in the plot, the abducted Bat Girl never got a name or even an identifying number (and a roll call would’ve fit in so well with the Robert’s Rules thing, too…). A prominent female character also went nameless in Jerry Warren’s “Frankenstein Island.” So, there’s that, anyway.
thequietman:
Someone mentioned Heathcliff bearing a resemblance to Joel. I actually thought he looked more like Burgess Meredith, appropriate for a Grade-Z Batman rip-off.
When Heathcliff turns into the rich obnoxious ascot guy at the end (completely ripping off Stan Laurel in “A Chump at Oxford”), only 90’s Comedy Central fans will appreciate the riff of “He’s that Kid in the Hall!”
Me, OTOH, I kept wondering why not one single joke was made about Dr. Neon’s arguable resemblance to Dr. Forrester…Too easy, or too self-aware?
If the Neon/Forrester resemblance had been pointed out, someone might have moved into “wait a minute…he’s got Mole People…and HE’S got Mole People…and they’re both mad scientists…and they look so much alike…” territory. Which might’ve been bad or something, I dunno.
“Glaydon…*I* am your vadder…”
The film makes it clear that Batwoman and Ratfink have some sort of prior history as each other’s nemeses OSLT. Maybe fleshing that out would’ve helped the film. Or maybe not.
As I noted in Post #135, Ratfink apparently borrowed/stole his costume from a villain named the Bat. Unless he in fact IS the Bat and what we see here is just a later stage of his career. So the two have the bat theme in common.
Per the IMDB, the footage of Ratfink in costume is taken from 1957’s The Aztec Mummy (no co-headliner, it was all him, baby). So there’s a lucha libre connection.
Coincidentally, the Batwoman from the 1968 film of that name is…a lucha libre. Who fights a mad scientist who creates monsters. Hm.
In an earlier role, actress Katherine Victor played a mad scientist (Teenage Zombies (1960)). And in an even earlier one, she played…a monster created by a mad scientist (Mesa of Lost Women (1953)). Which…
Yeah, I’m just kinda spinning my wheels on this. Sorry about that.
The Devil did make this movie for us. EEEEEEEENNDD!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNDD!!!
@ #162: Your welcome. Factoring equations is one of those things which has stuck to my brain, even though I don’t really recall what its specific purpose is.
I put this on the fun side of trashy.
Resurrecting this post for the sake of the review.
#162:
I like narrators because they cut down on the amount of time we need to spend listening to the “actors.”
Maybe if the narrator approach had caught on when “talkies” were first introduced, more silent film actors and actresses would’ve stayed in the industry. Ah well.
@174
a “talkie” never heard of them. like the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
I have a theory regarding the Cheating narrative. As is plain, Mary has a much firmer grasp of algebra than John. So much so that she can’t comprehend why he can’t see the process which is so obvious to her. She’s this close to losing it and shrieking, “WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, YOU $#%$&#ING MORON!” This is why Mary so readily lets John copy her answers, as well as the indiscrete fashion in which she does it. Mary is so enraged by his cluelessness that she’s willing to take a hit to her own grades so that John will go down in flames. That’s right, it’s not John who’s the manipulative dickweed, but Mary. What do you think, sirs?
Just rewatched this a couple of weeks ago for the first time since it aired. Hilarious short and I loved the host segments all continuing the theme. Unfortunately this was few and far between after Joel left, another great example of good host segment writing continuing a theme of the movie is Time Chasers. Typical ’60s I guess in that Batwoman’s agents don’t actually do anything besides dance in bikinis and don’t seem to have any real agent skill whatsoever. I took a while to adjust to Mike and like Sampo, this episode helped me accept Mike as well. I think the rest of season 5 was still good but that season 6 started a slow inexorable decline of the show’s quality as classic episodes started to be spaced out more and more. Back to this episode, it was fun. My coworker who first turned me on to ths show would use the phrase “You might not want to go. It’s about you.” any time an upcoming work meeting was announced.
I am afraid I am one of the “Lightweights” refereed to.
This is about the worst film I have ever seen (I cannot really call it a movie) and the ONLY episode of MST3K I returned when it was offered on VHS by Rhino.
It makes “Manos” look like Citizen Cain in comparison. “Plan 9” is Gone with the Wind up against this poor excuse to waste silver in developing.
It is not Mike and the Bots. They do a fine job the one and a half times I have seen this film. I just could not make it through the second time.
Even “This is not a drill” could be forgiven for its mistakes, but not this one. I have seen Middle School AV projects with better writing, editing and acting.
If you like this episode (and I do like the short) then God bless you. You are a better MSTiee than I am, Gunga Din.
Yes, that kinda cheesed me off too – bought it twice, and still don’t have a complete copy of the show. Plus, my original copy-of-a-copy VHS is completely unwatchable.
I’m pre-disposed to be interested in super-hero films. Besides, as noted, it was obviously influenced by the Batman TV series, which didn’t take itself MUCH more seriously than this film takes itself.
Regrettably, the effects of the Batman TV series linger to this day, since super-hero films (ASIDE from those from Marvel and DC) that take themselves seriously are relatively scarce. A super-hero film is BTW not at all necessarily the same as a film about superhumans…as exemplified by the fact that neither Batman nor Batwoman are superhumans.
What so many people fail to grasp is that the idea of a super-hero would be taken more seriously in a world with a HISTORY of super-heroes. In the Marvel Universe, for example, people have been putting on strange outfits* and fighting crime for over a hundred years; the general populace should be used to it by now.
===
*As an entirely irrelevant aside, super-heroes do NOT wear costumes; they wear OUTFITS. To wear a costume is to PRETEND to be something, and super-heroes are, in fact, super-heroes. Someone who is impersonating Spider-Man wears a Spider-Man costume; Spider-Man himself wears a Spider-Man outfit, because he’s not pretending to be Spider-Man, he *is*.
ADDENDUM:
It occurred to me that, in support of my point (such as it is), super-hero serials from the 1940s and 1950s, THEY took themselves seriously, as did the 1950s Superman TV series. Both concepts, obviously, from before the 1960s. So, you know, there’s that, too.
For no discernible reason whatsoever, one of a handful of examples of how the Batman TV series perspective infiltrated Archie Comics. Regrettably, they were all strictly cover-only appearances (except when Archie and the Gang *themselves* acted as super-heroes, which is something else entirely).
http://www.comics.org/issue/231207/cover/4/
@171 I think that was part of the problem with me, i was wondering why I was learning, I thought “Okay, outside of Algebra when am i going to use this?”.
Anyways, I actually have a collection of Jerry Warren movies, and if Bruno VeSota is right, in that Warren was the only director he worked with who set out to make a bad movie, then brother, did he ever succeed. All of the movies I have seen by Warren a punishingly bad. I don’t know whether any are as bad as WWWOB, but I would never care to see them more than once unless I was riffing them or getting paid. Anywho, I looked at my previous post and saw that I neglected to put up my favorite riffs. So here they are:
“I have a feeling Satan would regret making this movie.”-Mike
“Oh, stop pretending there’s a plot. Don’t cheapen yourself further.”-Crow
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m profoundly devastated.”-Servo
It’s the same reason they made you break down every single number into its “chemical elements” of prime-number factors, ie. 40 = 2 x 2 x 2 x 5.
It’s the thinking process that in order to see a number, you have to field-strip it, break it down into parts, and reassemble it, and that applies to unknown numbers as well. And if you see X2 + 3X + 2= 72…you can break it into two easy halves and won’t be stuck there like an idiot for what X is. (You’ve got seven minutes to figure it out.)
There were word problems that expressed this idea in scenarios–trains that left stations at different speeds and at what point they were going to crash–but none spring to mind right now.
@180
@181
IT’S NOT A COMIC BOOK IT’S A GRAPHIC NOVEL
Wow, I’m still amazed at the plethora of stupid in this movie. There were a lot of pretty ladies in the bat squad, but Bat Woman looked like a worn out 50-60 year old hooker that never smiled even when she was smiling. With the truckload of eye candy they hauled in, where did this woman come from? I hope that wasn’t too sexist.
This actually goes along way to explain the EricJ equation.
I wager most of us would have a blast field-stripping him.
Pants! Not just a noun anymore.
well… because of the horrific events in dallas just recently… and in baton rouge, and… too many elsewheres lately to mention – gahd it’s enough just reading the news; listening or watching it will just drive ya mad. so, i personally recommend just finding “sensible” news sources online and sticking with ’em.
anyhow, i held off mentioning how i get a weird “made in dallas” vibe from this flick… i dunno much about “batwoman”; where it was filmed, when it was shot (what, reportedly 1966 or so??) – but out of all the mstied flicks where the “jack ruby” jokes come out… -this- one, i swear, feels like some sort of sleazy, cut-rate mid-summer/fall-63, filmed-in-flat-level-homes flick straight outta weirdo dallas, made just to cover up the jfk assassination.
picture some sleazy, greasy stale-smoke-filled room reeking of bourbon so old, it’s about to spoil, filled with inherited-wealth doughy-man arms-and-petroleum pimps, all planning how to grease off jack (“okay, you supply the funds for the filmstock… ruby’s gonna supply da broads; ferry’s gonna mule in some of the cia’s acid stash.”) it just… reeks of it.
i suppose especially the second-opening scene, the girl getting dragged out of the cafe… surely a rare example on an mst flick of a girl getting “roofied!” it has all the earmarks of it, at least with that sudden edit. it’s just, damned yucky to think about.
well, thought by now i’d caught up with at least the most “risque” eps of mst, since i’m still catching up on mike epis… and this one, even with the “cheeky” dance right near the end, and “the girl in the invisible bikini”, still feels so dang yucky in comparison to the others! until i (re)review more mikey-eps, this one takes the bundt-cake for being the most bundt-ist to me.
p.s. do i actually “like it??” heh… well, sickly, yes. hey, it ain’t “irreversible!”
#185
Of course Batwoman was older than the others. She was the den mother, or the equivalent.
Based on the actress’s age, Batwoman would’ve been 18 in 1941; clearly, she started her crimefighting career during the golden age, as so many other super-heroes did. By the time of the film, she’s in her forties, the older, wiser (?) veteran who’s training the next generation of super-heroes. OSLT. Maybe after graduating from Batwoman Academy, one gets to choose a new super-hero identity of one’s very own. And, yes, obviously, I just gave the matter more thought in a few minutes than Jerry Warren probably did throughout the entire production. ;-)
The film’s Wikipedia entry includes an image that allows us to see what colors her costume was, which I found mildly interesting. Like Batman’s, it’s predominantly blue.
1868 Mexico’s Batwoman’s costume, on the other hand, well…
https://balladeer.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/batwoman-1.jpg
And OBVIOUSLY that should have been *19*68, not 1868. Sorry about that, but typos happen. :-|
According to the The Divine Comedy sins of fraud are the worst kind. The unrepentant guilty of such sins are punished in the lowest depths of the Inferno, as close to The Devil as as distant from God as you can get. So our little cheater in the short could get in to trouble if he doesn’t change his ways. But if the kids are going to cheat they should really learn to do it better.
Technically treachery is at the bottom where Hell has frozen over.
Though I suppose you could argue that treachery is another kind of fraud.
Treason is considered “complex fraud” and punished in the 9th circle, as opposed to the ten variations of simple fraud punished in the 8th. I was referring to both circles collectively to distinguish them from the upper circles where sins of violence and sins of appetite/emotion are punished.
To those who looked at the Wild World of Batwoman poster image on Wikipedia, I ask, which do you think is less representative of the, for lack of a better term, reality, that or this?
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/f6/5c/69/f65c694b2880d1d26cd77bffd360976a.jpg
You know what would’ve helped this film? Psychedelic sixties COLORS. Yep, that’s what would’ve helped this film, all right…
“The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman passes the Bechdel Test.”
Which is pretty much exactly why the “Bechdel Test” is a pathetic joke.
Weird movie, funny riffing, and the cheating segments are great.
Favorite riffs:
Mike: A lot of villains aren’t bold enough to wear clam diggers.
Crow: Stop pretending there’s a plot. Don’t cheapen yourself further.
Tom: Can this please be the end of the pill-taking scene?
Servo’s out-of-nowhere, anguished scream of “EEEEENNNNNNNNDDDDDDD!!!! EEEEENNNNNNNNDDDDDDD!!!!” is one of his finest moments.