Top 100 Batman VILLAINS

54 - Egghead

#54 - Egghead
First Appearance: Batman S02E13 (Oct 1966)

"You have sinned, Batman. You have broken the rules of the establishment. It is necessary that you be taught a lesson. What you are going to learn is humiliation." ~Egghead

I'm not a huge fan of the 60s Batman show; not because of its camp or its goofiness, but because I think that it doesn't depict the characters with the level of ability they actually possessed. Batman was out-of-shape and lacked that keen detective mind that makes him such a great hero; Joker's schemes weren't always up to the level of his comic counterpart, and Catwoman was never the agile thief she's supposed to be. However, there's definitely a place for brighter humor in the Batman world when its tempered with a dose of skill and threat, and I think Egghead was probably the best thing to come out of the 60s show.

Portrayed by the master of villainy, Vincent Price, Egghead has everything that I look for in my Silver Age villains - either villainous might or villainous wit (the latter in Egghead's case), a well-demonstrated desire for some form of evil and most importantly a fatal flaw that can lead to his defeat (in this case, his arrogance). When you're playing in the campier world of the Silver Age, all of these components are completely necessary - what the show gets right with Price's excellent turn as Egghead is that Price's very diction and mannerisms speak exactly to Egghead's arrogant brilliance. It's too bad that Egghead never made a transition into the DCU proper - I think he maybe appeared once or twice, but it was always in an extremely small role.

All in all, there's a lot I don't like about the original Batman show, but Egghead is definitely a fine shining facet of this long-gone piece of Batman history.

Greatest Egghead Story Ever Told: "The Yegg Foes of Gotham" - In this episode, Egghead teams up with Native Americans to help them claim all of the land of Gotham as it was originally theirs. In return, he would become the lord of the new Gotham underground. Great Egghead episode that helped set back Native American rights a half-century.