Vincent Price as Egghead is as good as any villain in the Adam West Bat-canon. Physically large, he looms ominously and awkwardly, while rolling every “eggs…actly” and “eggs..quisite” off his lips and past his moustache with an gigantically delicate delight. The preposterous plot lurches back and forth precariously, culminating in a delightful, messy egg battle in a barn. Bat-goodness all around.
Except, alas, for the racism.
Egghead’s plot involves gaining control over Gotham by subverting the city’s contract with the original Indian tribe, the Mohicans. Chief Screaming Chicken is the last of the Mohicans, and he is played by white actor Edward Everett Horton with mugging, unwittingly vicious contempt. Every Native American stereotype is blithely trotted out — Screaming Chicken performs silly rituals; he is thunderingly dumb (when given the chance to reorganize his contract and get more than nine raccoon pelts, he bargains gleefully for tens of dollars); he speaks in pidgin Tonto English; he is an anachronism, an amusing relic of a lost, irrelevant past, to which his quaint idiocy forever confines him.
A big part of the pleasure of the Adam West Batman is the way it presents the superhero as all powerful, ridiculous…and ultimately benign. Batman always wins, but he always wins while obeying traffic cops, driving below the speed limit, endorsing prison reform, and drinking wholesome milk. Batman’s power is super-niceness — and the show mocks the unrealism of that while enjoying the fantasy that the heroic daddy protecting us all is somehow also utterly harmless.
Chief Screaming Chicken, though undermines all that. Suddenly, Batman doesn’t seem so nice. It’s not nice for a millionaire like Bruce Wayne to enforce manifestly unfair contract terms in order to screw over someone who is obviously struggling (Chicken runs a roadside concession.) For that matter, it’s not nice to mock the descendents of the people whose forefathers you butchered and robbed, or to pretend that you bamboozled them through superior intellect rather than superior firepower, wielded with cold, ugly ruthlessness. Batman in this episode is not an avatar of niceness and decency. He’s a Bat-dick.
At one point in the show, Batman and Robin corner Egghead, who manages to escape by using a laughing gas egg. Batman and Robin start chortling and giggling uncontrollably.
Adam West’s performance quickly veers from over the top to maniacally unhinged; there’s something about the combination of his masked eyes and nose combined with his gaping, gasping mouth which is more disturbing than Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger ever managed to make the Joker. The good, wholesome daddy is gone; in his place is an unaccountable, unpredictable leer — not a grim avenger of the night, but a feverish white grin, which might do anything, and then laugh about it.