True enough, but Teresa could handle that, too-- she was Christie Love! I absolutely love John Astin, but it was painful to watch him as the Riddler. He's just not Frank Gorshin and his performance was terribly inconsistent with what had been established. Somebody should have said, "Who's this new Riddler guy."
Eartha Kitt's Catwoman was completely different from Julie Newmar's, but it still worked, because she made it her own. I still say the problem with Astin wasn't that he was different from Gorshin; it was that he was trying too hard to act like Gorshin and was bad at it. He should've done what Kitt did -- embraced his difference from Gorshin and redefined the Riddler to fit his own strengths. That's how you take over a role -- not by being "consistent" with a different person's performance, but by making it so completely your own that nobody's even comparing it to their performance anymore.
This is a bit off topic, but I can't help but find it hilarious that nowadays when they cast a nonwhite in a usually white role there's complaints but no one ever raised a fuss over Romero as the Joker or Eartha Kitt as Catwoman.
How do you know there wasn't a fuss? There was no internet to spread the fuss around back them. I know that I was disappointed with Eartha Kitt taking over the role of Catwoman. But that was because, like most other guys my age, I had a crush on Julie Newmar. I came to appreciate Ms. Kitt as I grew older.
Cesar Romero was the son of an immigrant from Spain, so I don't think he really counts as "non-white." Anyway, he built his career as a "Latin lover," a category of male screen idols admired for their "exotic," Latin or Mediterranean good looks (Rudolf Valentino being the template; Ricardo Montalban was another prominent example). So his ethnicity wouldn't have been seen as a negative. As for Kitt, I tried to search for any articles about a backlash to her Catwoman casting, but any such controversy was overshadowed by the controversy she raised the following year when she spoke out against the Vietnam War and was blacklisted by President Johnson and the CIA and forced to leave the country. But it's certainly worth noting that the ever-present sexual tension that Newmar's and Lee Meriwether's Catwomen had with Batman was completely avoided in Kitt's Catwoman episodes.
Yes, but in the view of 1960s TV censors, it wasn't good between white men and black women, so bye-bye Bat/Cat. (You can't make a good shipper portmanteau out of "Batman" and "Catwoman," since you just end up with "Catman" or "Batwoman," and those are different characters.)
Truthfully, Astin trying to mimic Gorshin's performance and doing badly at it was more likely because, as both myself and author Joel Eisner pointed out, he had no idea what to do with the character to play to his own strengths, and mostly floundered about trying to see if he could pull off Gorshin's schtick. Which ended up looking like he was playing Gomez as a criminal, because he couldn't get a handle on what exactly Gorshin's schtick was.
I just don't buy the "Gomez as a criminal" comparison, because that would've been a lot more fun than what we got.
Which is basically the point. By the standards of the era, "Latin lovers" were an "acceptable" ethnic type. And while Romero played many Latin, Italian, and other "ethnic" roles in his career, notably the Cisco Kid and Hernando Cortez, he also played plenty of characters with names like Chris Jorgenson or Tom Palmer or Jerry Richardson or Steve McQuinn.
Say what?! She was fantastic. Did I mention my deep and profound love of Teresa Graves of more than half a century? Anyway, here is my partial casting for the All-New, All-Different X-Men. Once again, it's hard because some of them are supposed to be so young or have such odd body types. Professor X - Yul Brunner Cyclops - Kent McCord Marvel Girl/Phoenix - Lori Saunders (in a wig) Storm - Teresa Graves (in a wig) Nightcrawler - Ernest Thomas (in blueface) Colossus - ? Banshee - Michael Ontkean (with a dye job) Wolverine - ?
Peter Rasputin is supposed to be an 18-year-old hunky hunk, so I don't think Lou Ferrigno would be quite right. I was trying to think of people who could play the parts at the time that the books came out, but other than that he'd be perfect. He's already playing Thor in my universe, anyway.
Peter Lupus, like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno, would have been far too old to be believable as a high school age teen in the late '70s, as RJDiogenes notes above. I was actually wondering if Ralf Moller, had he come to the US earlier, would have been more suited to the role, as he's a decade younger than Arnie or Big Lou. And he's 6'7".