The shot will consist of a silent Gotham City being suddenly topped with the Bat Signal, followed by the back of Catwoman's head rising into frame. Michelle Pfeiffer is unavailable, because she's too busy bathing in the virgin blood that has kept her from aging since 1984. What do you do? Again, all you see is the back of a head, covered by a Catwoman mask. What logical method do you use?

I bet your answer is to find a body double, put the top half of a Catwoman costume on her, and collect your paycheck. But that answer just illustrates why you're not working in the movie industry, dummies. Finding a body double is Plan B, at best. Plan A is to build a robot Catwoman. Jeez, guys. Keep up.

Warner Bros.
Desperate times call for batshit measures.

Faced with the task of bringing a Tim Burton sketch to life, the Batman Returns special effects team immediately went to work building an animatronic Catwoman torso and head. Some people, when they decide to boldly reject sanity, end up doing things like punching bouncers or self-publishing their short stories. When you're working on Batman Returns, a movie that is 90 percent about costumed characters trying to bang each other, I guess this sudden craze manifests itself in "No, we build a fucking robot, because that's what humans do. I haven't seen the sun in a year."

The shot would eventually cost $250,000 to complete, and the robot would end up being replaced by an actual double, because, as you can see, it moves like a leather-bound periscope.

Skip to 0:18 for another case of robots taking American jobs.

The best part about all of this is the fact that no one who worked on the Catbot seems to show any kind of hindsight. There is no admittance of "Yeah, that was strange" or "Maybe we should've gone with an actual person first, seeing as we're not Terminators." They all treat it as if that robot was an average part of their day, a part with the same kind of inevitability as putting on clothes or brushing your teeth. Michael Keaton didn't sign on for Batman Forever, but it's probably not because he had issues with the script. It's probably because he got a memo that said "Very glad to be working with you, Michael. Now go meet MechaKeaton. He'll be doing all of your scenes."

Warner Bros.
We can make him better than he was. Stronger, faster, broodier.

The director, Ed Wood, was very close with Bela Lugosi, who mainstream movie fans remember from Dracula, and horror movie buffs remember from every bad thing in the late '30s, '40s, and '50s. From The Devil Bat to Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla, Lugosi was a comforting hand on the shoulder of everyone who ever asked themselves, "What and why is this movie?" during that time period. And then, in 1956, he passed away, leaving a used-vampire-cape-sized hole in Hollywood. But that wouldn't stop Ed Wood, the patron saint of never wanting a second take, from putting him in movies.

That's Bela on the right, very sad about the next two paragraphs.

Ed Wood had filmed bits and pieces of other movies with Bela, and when he finally got around to Plan 9, he decided that it would make for a great final tribute to his friend. This idea was complicated by the fact that he didn't really have enough footage of Bela for a role to actually make sense. It was mostly Bela doing a few totally unrelated things, and Ed Wood did his best to try to make it make sense. Luckily for us, Ed Wood tried to make things make sense in the exact same way that he did everything else, resulting in a beautiful implosion of weirdness.

Ed Wood hired Tom Mason, a chiropractor, to fill in the blanks. Wood didn't pick this guy out because of his stunning resemblance to Lugosi. Mason was noticeably taller than Bela and very noticeably not Bela if you looked anywhere near his face. To compensate for the discrepancy that occurs when you cover up an actor's death by hiring someone that was wrong for the role in nearly every way, Wood had Mason hold his cape up in front of his face every time he showed up.

"Please don't tell my friends about this."

Since I'm not Ed Wood, I can't tell you with any certainty whether this is the laziest or most brilliant thing ever. The character's called "Ghoul Man," so why wouldn't he want to hide his face? Dammit, Ed, you baffling little gem.

If a ghost farted a 90-second film roll into Ed Wood's hands, Wood would've found a way to turn it into a feature-length science-fiction "epic." But in the case of the Pink Panther franchise, it was producers putting millions of dollars into a movie that only features Peter Sellers clips that were deemed unfit and cut from their last few multi-million-dollar movies. It couldn't be a more obvious cash grab if they retitled it Give Us Your Money, You Don't Want To Make Your Favorite Actor Peter Sellers Sad, Right? of the Pink Panther.

MGM
Too late; he's sad. Insert another dollar bill to cheer him up.

The first half of the movie feels like some kind of awful Inspector Clouseau sketch show that includes a few body doubles. And when Leftovers Of The Pink Panther ends, the character of the Inspector disappears. I don't want to tell filmmakers how to do their jobs, but if the guy playing your main character has been publicly declared dead for longer than it takes to write this sentence, maybe don't have his character "disappear." There's no better way to tell audiences "We ran out of living actor" than by having a plot where the protagonist abruptly leaves for reasons that are unknown to everyone.

The rest of the film features extended "interviews" with people that knew Clouseau, sequences from prior movies, and scenes of actors portraying a younger Clouseau at different bumbling points of his life. These performances range from "Aw, he's just a kid" to "Fuck THAT guy." That latter reaction comes from scenes where a mediocre Clouseau Halloween costume goes to college and then tries to stop some Nazis, and the Clouseau impression you hear sounds like a French accent being performed by a sphincter.

MGM
"Theeees mouiveeeee eeeeeees builllsheeet."

The end of the movie features another body double being shown from behind as a seagull shits on his coat. The double suddenly transforms into the Pink Panther cartoon, and we end up seeing a bunch of clips from other Pink Panther films. You know, clips that were actually approved to be in movies, unlike the clips that you saw an hour ago that were originally deemed not good enough to be in movies. Peter Sellers' widow ended up winning over a million dollars in a lawsuit against the studio, since Trail Of The Pink Panther had been a drunken autopsy of Sellers' whole career.

MGM
Bye, everyone. Happiness is a myth.

Many soap operas air a new episode every weekday, which is a quicker rate than any comic book or any TV program that isn't the news. They juggle multiple relationships and rivalries that have to evolve constantly, and while we usually think of soaps as shows that grandmothers watch to wean themselves off the joys of youth, keeping up with all of them means that your granny is a more dedicated nerd than you'll ever hope to be.

Pixabay Public Domain
"Piss off, you dumb jock."

Because there's no rest for The Young And The Restless, you'd think that actors would have to be replaced every once in a while. What's surprising is how often it occurs and how easily they switch back to the original actor as if nothing happened. In other genres, switches usually happen once, mainly because the original actor just isn't working out. But if you applied soap opera tropes to movies, Iron Man 2 would've started with a voiceover saying, "And the part of War Machine will now be played by Don Cheadle. You'll get over it."

General Hospital, a soap opera that's been going on for more than 50 years, recently had to recast one of its main characters with another actor. The second actor had already stepped in when another actor had to be recast on a different show. And that first actor? He'd already been recast on General Hospital once before and then came back and was expected to come back again when the second actor got done with his shift. I can understand why they'd want that first actor back, though, and also why he's played two roles in the same show. He's Tyler Christopher, and he is America's second husband. One day, I am going to come home to find Tyler Christopher moving his stuff in, and I'm just gonna have to deal with it. Who am I to argue with the natural order of things?

ABC
One day, that child will grow up to bone the world as well.

In the show The Edge Of Night, the character of Mike Karr was played by three different actors over the course of the show's run. This is something that you'd expect to see in superhero franchises, which end and restart in an eternally looping quest to make sure that we get a wave of "Who Is The Best Joker?" lists every few years. But in soap operas, it's standard business. It's par for the damn course, champ. Your grandmother told me to tell you that. She also said that she saw you angrily commenting on that "Ranking The Spider-Men" article and that she's disappointed in what you've become.

Over two decades of sitcoms went by, and plenty of Darrin situations occurred. By the time Roseanne aired, sitcoms were much more willing to joke about actors being replaced. This goes double for Roseanne, which was the most bearable sitcom of the early '90s because you never knew if Roseanne was going to praise her family or insult them for being permanent morons. It's an arguable mothering tactic, but it makes for infinitely better television.

Roseanne's oldest daughter, Becky, was played by Lecy Goranson for the first five seasons of the show. They wrote her off so that the actress could attend college, but then freaked out and decided that they needed the character back. Since it would be in poor taste to say, "Drop out of college and pursue the ultimately haphazard career of a TV actress where no job is ever secure," they inserted Sarah Chalke, who you may remember from her starring role on Scrubs and for being the fiance that wisely dumps Ted Mosby on his wedding day in How I Met Your Mother.

ABC
I'm gonna ask her to prom.

Sarah Chalke was Alpha Becky for two whole seasons, before producers decided that the eighth season might be the last. So, they brought back Goranson, and Goranson played Becky for most of the season, while Chalke played Omega Becky and acted in only a few episodes. It was bizarre, and the writers of Roseanne handled it as gracefully as they could. And by that I mean they poked fun at it at every opportunity and bulldozed the fourth wall. If they were given the chance to hint "Hey, is this alternating Becky mess not the weirdest fucking thing ever?" they took it. Chalke would play Becky for the entirety of the ninth and final season, putting an end to the Kafka experiment that Roseanne had become.

And though it didn't happen in the eighth season at the peak of Roseanne's lunacy, television came full circle in Season 6, when it showed the family watching Bewitched, with Chalke mentioning that she liked the second Darrin better. See, it's funny, because Chalke was the second Becky, and because no one liked Darrin 2 better. We were all cool with the new Becky until she had to go and reveal that she was a Second-Darrin fan. Outside of burning down the family home, it was the best way to reveal that Becky had returned as an unstable psychopath.

The Carsey-Werner Company
"Please don't murder us while we sleep, honey."

Read Daniel's other columns. They're decent.

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