Batman: "Penguin is a Girl's Best Friend"/'Penguin Sets a Trend": Programming note: These are the first two parts of the show's second villain-teamup 3-parter, teaming Penguin with Marsha, Queen of Diamonds. Part 3 will air next week, followed by part 1 of the first teamup 3-parter, which will conclude on the 26th. Odd that they're showing them in reverse order. But at least they're showing them. After MeTV skipped past them before, I was afraid they'd be left out of the sequence.
Yet another story about Penguin using a legitimate business as a front. How does he keep managing to convince people that he's clean? But this time he's a filmmaker, so the show gets to use the studio itself and its equipment as part of the episode. And Marsha is his... financial backer and leading lady? It's an odd pairing of villains, unless they were going for some kind of "ice" theme. But that's a tenuous connection. (One of the earliest storylines in the Batman '66 digital comic is a Penguin-Mr. Freeze teamup, and that's just so perfect that you wonder why they never did it on the show.) And Marsha really doesn't have much of a role to play at all, especially in part 2.
"Oh, Pengy, you don't really think there's a billion dollars in filmmaking, do you?" Right -- nobody could ever make a billion dollars from a movie starring Batman!
Not crazy about Batman siding with the forces of censorship in the name of "decency." Not one of Aunt Harriet's finest hours. Meanwhile, the other aunt, Aunt Hilda, is even more useless here than she was before.
Penguin going after military secrets, using medieval super-armor of all things, is a really weird plot twist, but just look at the guest cast -- the general is Alan Reed (Fred Flintstone), and the major is Bob Hastings, the contemporary voice of Superboy and the future voice of Commissioner Gordon. (Too bad he and Neil Hamilton didn't have a scene together.)
Kind of a weak cliffhanger, too -- B&R knocked out, Pengy farming the deathtrap out to the garbage man? And it's way too easy to guess how they get out of it. Well, we'll see next week, half a Bat-hour earlier, same Bat-channel.
Wonder Woman: Season 3 begins with "My Teenage Idol is Missing." Seriously? Guest-starring Leif Garrett, a singer I seem to vaguely remember my sister being into back in the late '70s. I don't remember him being this young or this annoying, though. Maybe it was the early '80s? Anyway, this plot about a rock star being kidnapped is such an awkward fit for the show that they have to spend the first third of the episode just making an excuse for Diana to be convinced to get involved. Not a promising start to the season. The idea of a kidnapper replacing his victims with doubles to conceal the abduction is somewhat clever, admittedly. And I like the girl, Whitney (Dawn Lyn), who brought a fair amount of charm to what could've otherwise been a rather annoying role. But Garrett is just so dull and vaguely creepy-looking that I can't bring myself to care much.
Nice new stunt with Wonder Woman using her lasso to climb a skyscraper. I was wondering at first why she had her cape on when she transformed, but no doubt it was to hide the stunt climber's safety harness. I was a bit reminded of the climbing scenes in the '70s Spider-Man, particularly with the funky guitar sounds.
Speaking of which, the season premiere debuts a new series composer, Johnny Harris. The new theme arrangement is the one MeTV has been using in its promos for the show -- I was wondering where that came from. I don't think I like it much.
And... Wonder Woman steals a motorcycle to get to the junkyard. They really have backpedaled on that whole "can run faster than the speed of sound" thing, haven't they? No pun intended. And, oh, we've got our second scrapyard-crusher deathtrap in as many hours (is this a theme night?), but nothing really comes of it, because Wonder Woman saves the day by using her wondrous super power of... um... driving around on a motorcycle and making people jump aside? I gotta say, after two motorcycle climaxes in as many weeks, I really don't see what the point of them is. So she's riding around on a bike. What's so superheroic about that? It's not even an invisible bike!
Lousy split-screen work at the end there with the "twins" -- the matte line is visible and the background lighting varies differently on each side. And one of the twins inexplicably changes from a black shirt when standing next to Whitney to a white shirt in the concert moments later.
