YEAR 1966: GOLDEN SWALLOW

I confess that it's been quite a while since I screened King Hu's influential kung-fu drama COME DRINK WITH ME, and I don't remember being knocked out by its somewhat old-fashioned plot, though I accept the verdict of authorities who consider it a pivotal work in the history of commercial Hong Kong films in this genre.  But it deserves a mention here in that it's credited with being the first modern film to focus upon the adventures of a female kung-fu diva, one "Golden Swallow," played by Cheng Pei Pei (best known to contemporary viewers for her role in CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON),

Given that I don't have that much new information to impart, I'll pass over the usual summation and simply link to an online essay that explores the film and its director in more depth than I can.

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YEAR 1966: POISON IVY

The appearance of Julie Newmar as Catwoman not only stimulated the character's return to comic books for the first time in ten-plus years, it also bestirred the comic book's creative personnel to come up with the first major Bat-villainess since Catwoman's creation in 1939.

Despite the misleading cover, in her first appearance Poison Ivy doesn't sow "trouble between the dynamic duo," except in the sense that Robin has to constantly rein in Batman when he gets an "itch" for Ivy. The Robert Kanigher story makes an amusing attempt at duplicating the TV show's camp attributes, since the story starts off with Bruce and Dick in a museum, observing huge comic-booky posters of three never-before-seen female costumed crooks.  Giant wanted posters as "camp?" Well, maybe. Anyway, Poison Ivy shows up, tells the assembled reporters (quite an active cadre of art-journalists in Gotham City) that she's a bigger and better crook than the other three no-talents, and then makes her escape. She then schemes to get the other three lady-crooks captured by Batman and Robin while trying to mesmerize the elder hero with her charms-- some of which admittedly include drugged lipstick.

Camp elements aside, I imagine Kanigher had already done a lot of stories about alluring devil-women in his war-books, so Poison Ivy wasn't a new idea, however alien her overt sexiness might be in the overall Batman series. And though the Infantino-designed villainess wears a leaf-covered leotard, in her first few stories she doesn't pattern her crimes on plants. If anything, Kanigher seems to have conceived of her as an incarnation of feminine glamor-devices, for in addition to drugged lipstick she uses weapons like exploding pieces of hair and the like.

Fans can thank Gerry Conway for transforming Ivy into a mistress of plants, in a two-part Wonder Woman story appearing in WORLD'S FINEST #251-52.  While it was a poorly written story, the idea caught on, and from then on Poison Ivy's nature and origin were rewritten to fit this concept-- which prompted continuity linkages to other DC vegetable-characters like Swamp Thing and Jason Woodrue.

Increasingly she's been made more, like Catwoman, more sympathetic, both in the humorous series HARLEY AND IVY and the more recent, semi-serious GOTHAM CITY SIRENS.

ADDENDA: Though I would not retract my statement that Gerry Conway is principally responsible for making Poison Ivy a "mistress of plants"-- which eventually led to her becoming a sort of plant-woman in her own right-- I have to fill in some blanks that led to this association.

Ivy's creator Kanigher wrote a total of four Poison Ivy tales: two for Batman feature-stories, and a two-part continuity in 1971 for ROSE AND THE THORN, a backup feature in LOIS LANE. The character then apparently went into limbo for the next three years, until she was revived by writer Len Wein in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #111 (1974), where she became a member of Libra's "Injustice Gang." Wein possibly realized that Kanigher's conception of Ivy wasn't powerful enough to hold her own in a standard superhero set-up, and it's in this issue that she starts using a gun that can accelerate the growth of plants, so that said plants can then attack or entangle heroes, as needed. Perhaps because Wein was working from the concept that Ivy was NOT any sort of scientist, Ivy tells Mirror Master that fellow gang-member Chronos, who was a scientist, helped Ivy design her plant-stimulating weapon. In the same issue, in a text-piece credited to Martin Pasko, Poison Ivy's "wanted poster" gives her the name "Pamela Isley" and says that she "uses knowledge of horticulture against the Batman," which I would regard as a bit of back-dating, since the Kanigher version did not actually plant-gimmicks as such, unless her hypnotic lipstick was supposed to be plant-derived. The text-piece also mentions her ability to creep up a wall like real ivy, which was definitely in Kanighter's first story, but the piece strangely credits her tendency to make men fall in love with her only to "psychological trickery."

The version of Ivy with her trusty plant-accelerator gun seems to last for the next few years, appearing in SUPER FRIENDS #1 (1976), before Gerry Conway's WORLD'S FINEST story portrays her as turning human beings into plant-creatures-- which may have spurred later authors to portray Ivy as making herself into a plant-like entity.

YEAR 1966: THE CATWOMAN

Prior to the 1966-68 teleseries, Catwoman, like the rest of Batman's classic villains, had never been translated to audiovisual media. For its first season, the BATMAN producers seemed incapable of making a bad casting-choice-- though they'd make up for it by going in the opposite direction in the following two seasons.

Like the other villains introduced in the first season, this version of Catwoman is a ruthless career criminal, capable of double-crossing a hireling at a moment's notice.  Unlike the comics-Catwoman, the villainess appears more than willing to kill the Dynamic Duo on several occasions.  She becomes a little more merciful in the second season, when the writers incorporate her frustrated desire for Batman, and on occasion she merely tries to reduce the Crusaders to helpless slaves rather than killing them.  Nevertheless, even the more merciful death-traps have a strong sadistic vibe.

Strangely, though Julie Newmar only played the role once in the Spring 1966 season, the version of Catwoman that appears in the big-screen BATMAN movie-- quickly filmed in the summer to take advantage of the teleseries' mammoth popularity-- seems a much less formidable character-- perhaps making it fitting that she's played by another actress, Lee Meriwether.  In all likelihood this bush-league Catwoman came about because the scripter chose to focus on the evildoing of her three male partners-- Joker, Riddler, and Penguin.  Still, she seems to possess so little supervillain-moxie that one wonders why she's even in the group.  Her only skill appears to be her ability to pull off a masquerade as a Russian journalist, which seems to have no great relevance to the villains' overall scheme.  That scheme rested on the improbability that the Batman in this filmic universe had never seen the Princess of Plunder unmasked, but I doubt that the scripter was even thinking of continuity here.


In the second season Newmar returned to the character and she takes on a much stronger persona once more, in spite of being played for more romance and more humor.  Like the TV-Batman she makes a lot more use of super-scientific gadgets than the comic-book character had up to that point, but resembles the comic-book version in that neither possessed any martial abilities.

Newmar was perhaps wise not to play the character in the third and last season.  The character was played with some aplomb by Eartha Kitt, though the plots had become silly and threadbare.

During this period Catwoman made her first prose appearances, in an original novel-- BATMAN VS. THE THREE VILLAINS OF DOOM-- and in a novelization of the film, retitled BATMAN VS. THE FEARSOME FOURSOME, both credited to one "Winston Lyon."  Interestingly, THREE VILLAINS describes Catwoman's costume along the lines of her classic green-and-purple togs.