User Reviews

"Batman's Waterloo" opens with the Caped Crusader escaping death by relaying his plight to Alfred in the Batcave, remaining alive underwater for over an hour due to his training in the fashion of Indian fakirs, reducing his breathing and heartbeat to a dead minimum. Robin remains a captive of King Tut (Victor Buono), who has vowed to boil him in oil once he gets the beauteous Lisa Carson (Lee Meriwether) to agree to become his queen. A phone call to her father, John E. Carson (Nelson Olmsted), results in an agreed ransom amount to be delivered by Batman, who also comes prepared with a Batpill that instantly transforms the boiling oil into a hardened substance, foiling Tut's plans and allowing Lisa a final clinch with Bruce Wayne, who actually gives in to her advances! Radio blowhard Jolly Jackson was played by Tommy Noonan, former comedy partner of Peter Marshall, just over a year before his untimely death at age 46. Tut's two henchmen are Lloyd Haynes, still a year away from his co-starring role on ROOM 222, and Tim O'Kelly, previously seen as a high schooler in "The Joker Goes to School," here graduated to Yale, his best remembered movie role coming some 10 months later, opposite Boris Karloff in Peter Bogdanovich's "Targets." Tut's jealous squeeze Neila is of course Grace Lee Whitney, recently finished with her recurring role of Yeoman Janice Rand on STAR TREK, returning for the 1979 feature film as a new character. King Tut would be back twice during the third season, again scripted by Stanley Ralph Ross.

The real King Tut died at about age 19 and never met Cleopatra, but this is tv's Batman, and Buono is really into the spirit of the show. Oddly, there really is an Egyptology program at Yale, afflicted by scandal involving a senior professor in 2013-2014. The show has sexual tension between Batman/Wayne and the daughter of Gotham's second richest man, John E. Carson. Carson agrees to pay a ransom to Tut to reclaim his daughter, with information relayed through the radio talk show of obnoxious Jolly Jackson. Batman does the talking but Jackson requires Batman to answer a trivia question (ANSWER is David Balfour. The quote has some relevance to later Batman). Curiously, Mayor Linseed (play on John Lindsay) was missing, said to be off at the Asian front (Vietnam?). The show aired in March 1967 when the real Lindsay was up to his eyeballs in city problems. Buono would play the Captain in Who's Minding the Mint later in 1967. Buono played some good villains in Wild Wild West and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but his Tut is classic. This Batman episode has a few Star Trek alums.

After suffering a blow to the head at the University, the corpulent Egyptology professor returns to his old ways as King Tut, two of his students will be his new accomplices to kidnap the beautiful daughter of a businessman who will appear disguised as Cleopatra in a costume party. Curiously, this is the second kiss on the mouth that Bruce Wayne gives a woman and it so happens that both times it was the same actress but in different characters, here he kisses Lee Meriwether who personifies Lisa Carson and previously in the movie of the series also kisses Lee who personified Catwoman. The episode is entertaining but doesn't measure up to previous King Tut episodes.