And – for reasons not even worth going into – you, a person from today, have been thrown back in time. Deciding to say “screw you” to the space-time continuum, you become a producer on the Batman live action series and decide to introduce modern Batman villains, but fitting the existing tone of the show and using only actors around at the time (obviously – time travel isn’t just happening willy-nilly you know). So which characters do you pick and who plays them?
I’ll start. Scarface and the Ventriloquist played by Edgar Bergen (and Charlie McCarthy).
Edgar Bergen was a popular ventriloquist in the mid-20th Century. He’s in the wrap-around material of Disney’s Footloose and Fancy Free if you want a taste of his work, which, to be clear, wasn’t particularly good. He did a lot of his ventriloquism on the radio and, well, it showed when he was on camera. But that’s not really an issue for playing a campy version of the Ventriloquist on Batman. His main puppet, Charlie McCarthy was a sort of rascally wiseguy character and having him “play” Scarface would have been interesting.
