10 (Mostly) Forgotten Batman '66 Villains Created for the Show

Everybody loves Batman, but the fact is that he's a character that relies heavily on both his supporting cast and his rogue gallery. Tragic backstory aside, it's hard to pinpoint many great stories that examine Bruce Wayne without either pitting him against one of his foes or showing his larger friend group to balance out his heavy personality. As the saying goes, it takes a village to make a Batman, and sometimes that means introducing characters that just don't stick around.

There are plenty of DC comic characters that'd be great in Batman movies or TV, but there's a ton of great forgotten villains of the Adam West era, as well. Revisited occasionally in nostalgia-driven ventures like the Batman '66 comic series and the Batman: The Brave & the Bold cartoon, these are characters that are very much of their time. Still, most of them remain a lot of fun to revisit. Emphasis on most!

King Tut

Of all the unique-to-the-series villains, King Tut is perhaps the most famous. Making repeat appearances throughout the original series, this was a character that defined a lot of the best and worst aspects of the series all at once. For instance, to say that there is a lack of cultural sensitivity from this "professor of Egyptology at Yale" is to say water is wet, yet the over-the-top theatrics are easily be read as someone wholly missing the point.

Genre fans may recognize actor Victor Buono from his role as the manipulator who inevitably ends up well over his head in the camp horror classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. As unrestrained as his performance was there, he truly outdoes himself as King Tut. Bringing a sense of raw theatricality to the table while wholly baffling the big bad bat makes Tut a memorable villain.

Egghead

Vincent Price spent much of the early-to-mid-1960s starring in no less than seven Roger Corman produced adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories, and if he'd done nothing else, that would have still left the world with a pretty significant impact on genre film and television. Yet, Price wasn't finished and jumped at the chance to play one of Batman's strangest villains. Unlike many of the characters listed here, Egghead successfully made the jump to the comics, and he's hanging around DC proper to this day.

The Dark Knight trilogy is known for epicness, while TAS leaned into psychological studies of villains and heroes alike. Batman '66, however, begat films like Batman Forever and Batman & Robin by embracing the camp aspects of the comics with open arms. Throwing a skullcap on Vincent Price and handing him a magnifying glass while giving him the space to go off is the kind of inspired choice that the hyper-serious early aughts era of Batman could have used a little more of.

Ma Parker

Like many on this list, Shelley Winters was an actor of the highest order, capable of turning out Oscar-worthy performances or simply embracing the cheese and running with it in camp horror classics like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Winters is given nowhere near the credit she deserves in Hollywood history, but maybe that's because she's so easy to have fun with.

Clearly inspired by the real-life criminal Ma Barker, Ma Parker is the matriarch of a family of evildoers, including three sons and one daughter. Hyped up by Commissioner Gordon as the ultimate criminal mastermind, her greatest skill is using the sympathy that being a single mother "struggling to provide" for her children garnered her. Though Batman is a little too fast for her, she nearly gets one over on him, too.

Chandell

Some Batman villains just happened to be performers that were tapped to more or less play themselves. Lesley Gore as Pussycat, the villainous sidekick to Julie Newmar's Catwoman, is one such character. Still, perhaps none are so memorable as Liberace showing up as a piano player gone rogue known as Chandell. Accompanied by three women known as Doe, Rae, and Mimi, this guy rolled with a sense of style that most of us can only dream of.

Fleeced into helping his ne'er-do-well brother Harry in his plot to kill Bruce and Dick Grayson in order to woo Aunt Harriet with promises of love eternal and gain access to her fortune, Chandell wasn't all bad. Hoping to lead an honest life after paying off a blackmailer, he never quite got the chance due to his intended target being, well, Batman. Still, even after he got caught, he continued to sing songs from his jail cell. A true performer at heart, if you ask us.

Shame

Cliff Roberston is another of the great working actors that this series employed for a one-off role. Known for his roles in military and western films, he was likewise well-known to genre fans through memorable appearances on shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Here, he appears playing a direct parody of the famous cowboy of the film Shane (1953). Perhaps it's obvious from the name, but Shame is significantly less heroic than his Western counterpart.

Tagged as "the conniving cowboy of crime," Shame's main plan is to create a truck that goes faster than the Batmobile (legal) so that he can steal four prize bulls (illegal). Though he has a lot of fun tricks and a cool hideout with Westernland Amusement Park, he's no match for the caped crusader.

Colonel Gumm

Colonel Gumm is a truly wild guy brought very much to life by actor Roger C. Carmel. Gumm remains one of the stranger villains of the series, with a penchant for counterfeit and henchmen with hilarious names like Block, Cancelled, and Reprint. Working for rich ladies and sporting an eccentric, excitable personality, he might seem like the ideal Batman one-off villain of his day.

One edge that Gumm has, however, is that he didn't try to take Batman on in a direct confrontation. This is the rare criminal that was happy doing crime behind closed doors. Batman ultimately got to the root of his evil schemes, but for a guy in a bright pink jumper, Gumm was surprisingly reserved as Batman foes go.

Black Widow

Tallulah Bankhead is widely considered one of the great theatrical performers of any era, which is why it's a little frustrating that her screen work is comparatively sparse. Yet, her excellent line delivery will live on forever via film and television appearances, including Batman's Black Widow (not to be confused with a certain Russian spy we could name).

"Darlings, we are about to play a dear little game; The Spider and the Fly!" the Widow declares, and that gives her a better introduction than anything we could type here. Using clever traps, hypnosis, and drugs to ensnare the dynamic duo, this was a woman who was an equal to Batman when it came to sheer intellect and determination. Though she is ultimately undone by her own device, the Widow very nearly got the drop on our hero, and she deserves a comeback.

The Siren

The hilariously named Lorelei Circe is a singer with the kind of octave range that only the likes of Yma Sumac and Mariah Carey can swing in the real world. While in our reality that could lead to serious credibility as a world-famous performer, Circe chose to funnel that raw talent into a life of crime as The Siren. Frankly, we respect it.

It's no secret that, much later, shows like Batman: The Animated Series thrived through its villains, but the tendency to sympathize with the big bads wasn't entirely absent from the West era, either. While she isn't portrayed as especially redeemable, she does ultimately sacrifice her voice to prevent Batman's death. In prison, she's regarded as a model prisoner, so long as she never sings a note.

Doctor Cassandra Spellcraft

Ida Lupino as Dr. Cassandra Spellcraft in Batman '66

Doctor Cassandra Spellcraft is an ambitious woman who seeks to break new ground as a scientist even if she has to turn to crime in order to achieve her goals. This holds a strange mirror to the actor who portrays her, Ida Lupino, today well-known as one of the most groundbreaking women of her era due to her ahead-of-its-time work as a director on genre classics like The Hitchhiker (1953).

Though Lupino might be a better actor than the role warrants, there's no denying that she plays Spellcraft with a sense of genuine fun. Showing up in a bright pink bowler hat with her hilariously devoted husband Cabala in tow, she goes toe-to-toe with the Batman using her skill as an alchemist and her ingenious camouflage pills to take on Gotham's protector.

Minerva

Zsa Zsa Gabor is the kind of real-life figure that sounds made up until you see confirmation of her existence. A Hungarian woman who escaped the Nazi occupation by a few years and became a world-famous actor with no less than a final tally of nine husbands, this is a human being that already sounds a lot like a Batman character.

Assisted by henchmen with hilarious names like Aphrodite, Adonis, Apollo, and Atlas, Minerva uses her proximity to Gotham's elite through her day spa to birth a criminal enterprise on the side. Though she is quickly caught and sent to prison, our girl thinks on her feet and turns that lemon into lemonade by musing that the prison could likely use its own spa.

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