The third chapter of Columbia's 15-part Batman serial from 1943 delves with further detail into the evil machinations of arch-villain Dr. Daka (J. Carroll Naish). A foreign agent of the Japanese empire, Daka is less a typical Batman villain than a proto-James Bond supercad, whose base of megalomania is concealed behind the papier-mâché walls of an atrocity-themed wax museum called The Japanese Cave of Horrors and whose pit of pet alligators (to whom he feeds rotisserie chicken and mutinous henchmen) anticipates the SPECTRE shark and piranha pools of Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967). Though shot on the cheap, Columbia's serial proved a hit with moviegoers and added specifics to the Batman mythos that would become canonical, among them the innovation of the Batcave and the physical depiction of Alfred, the Dynamic Duo's loyal valet. Introduced to comic book readers in the spring of 1943 as portly and clean-shaven, Alfred Pennyworth would be drawn thereafter to resemble epicene actor William Austin. In "The Mark of the Zombies," Batman (Lewis Wilson) and Robin (Douglas Croft) race to stop the Axis from blowing up an Allied supply train, while Dr. Daka utilizes a diabolical contraption to turn patriotic Americans into mindless zombies. Even before America's entry into World War II, Monogram's King of the Zombies (1941) had broached the conceit of our Axis enemies employing mind control toward their endgame of world domination, a concept furthered here and in Monogram's Revenge of the Zombies (1943).

By Richard Harland Smith