TO THE BATPOLES #204: “Rembrandt III”: Watching paint dry

[bat-rss]

TO THE BATPOLES: We discuss "Rembrandt the Third Meets his Master," a rejected Batman '66 script treatment by Yale Udoff. While some parts are spot-on, a vain, goofy Batman and armed-to-the-teeth Alfred are pretty far off base!
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[AndyFish]

With the exception of King Tut, Shame and Bookworm the villains created for the series were sub-par-- even The Puzzler who was a Superman villain inserted into a Riddler script, was weak. Rembrandt fits solidly in the weak camp-- an idea that isn't fleshed out, a concept without any legs. Scripts like this one were what killed the series.

[Ben Bentley]

I think Mr Fish really hit the nail(s) on the head in his assessment.

[gerryd54]

Actually what killed the series was the fad ran it's course, as all fads do. Even if the scripts had retained the tone a quality of the first season, I don't think it would've mattered. The curiosity of the adults had waned (no pun intended) and that was almost all she wrote.

[BATWINGED HORNET]

Actually what killed the series was the fad ran it's course, as all fads do. Even if the scripts had retained the tone a quality of the first season, I don't think it would've mattered. The curiosity of the adults had waned (no pun intended) and that was almost all she wrote.

Indeed--Batman was a gimmick waiting to be burned out almost as soon as its fuse sparked. Between adults no longer finding increasingly goofy "superheroes" amusing, to kids who were not as fond of repetition as some producers imagined, to Batman comic book fans who abandoned the series early in season one, Batman was bleeding viewers almost from the start. There was no way the third season approach would have worked for even half of a fourth season.

The Rembrandt III script...its just awful and too much of a satire--even for the '66 series. I really do not know where to start or finish with a critique, other than to mention that I did not find a single thing interesting about it. Let's put it this way: if that was the standard script for the series, Batman would have been cancelled by March of '66.