Egghead (Edgar Heed) is a fictional character created for the 1960s Batmantelevision series. Played by Vincent Price, the character was identifiable by his pale bald head and white and yellow suit. He believes himself to be "the world's smartest criminal", and his crimes usually have an egg motif to them; he also includes egg-related puns in his speech and uses various egg-themed weapons. Additionally, Egghead used deductive reasoning to deduce Batman's secret identity.
Background
Similarly to King Tut, Shame, the Siren, Chandell, the Bookworm, and Louie the Lilac, Egghead was created specifically for the 1960s Batman TV series. Much like Harley Quinn would decades later after initially being introduced in Batman: The Animated Series, Egghead would go on to be introduced in the comics.
There had been several minor characters known as Egghead, but they were bald secondary gangsters that had little to do with the TV series character. The first, spelled Egg-Head, was an associate, along with bespectacled Fish-Eyes, of jewel thief Michael Baffle in Detective Comics #63 (May 1942).[1] Another Egghead was in Mike Optik's gang in "Dick Grayson, Telegraph Boy!" in Batman #22 (April-May 1944).[2] He was not very intelligent, and Professor Hendricks tricked him into thinking he was on a rocket in outer space to get him to reveal the location of Optik's hideout.
Introduced in the second season consecutive episodes "An Egg Grows in Gotham" and "The Yegg Foes in Gotham", Egghead joins forces with Chief Screaming Chicken (Edward Everett Horton) of the Mohican Indian tribe to revert control of Gotham City to the chief's people in exchange for governing the city allowing the criminal underground to run amok, only to be foiled by Batman and Robin.
In the third season, Egghead is joined by his new partner and love interest Olga, Queen of the Cossacks (Anne Baxter), as they attempt to hatch an egg containing a Neosaurus and feed Robin and Batgirl to it and steal the Sword of Bulbul and the Egg of Ogg, only to be foiled by Batman on both occasions. In "The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra", the titular Cassandra Spellcraft and her husband Cabala free Egghead, among other criminals, from prison to help them take over Gotham, giving them camouflage pills to better facilitate their crime spree and promising Egghead control of Gotham's poultry farms.
Comics
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Egghead's first named appearance was in the 2010 issue of Batman: The Brave and the Bold #16. Here he has teamed up with an egg-shaped villain named Ygg'Phu Soggoth. This comic is the first to give Egghead the name Edgar Heed.
^Bill Finger, Joseph Greene, Jack Schiff, Edmond Hamilton. The Batman Chronicles Volume Six. DC Comics, 2008.
^Bill Finger, Don Cameron, Alvin Schwartz, Joseph Greene, Mort Weisinger, Joe Samachson, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Schiff. Batman: The Golden Age Volume 6. Burbank, California: DC Comics, 2019, 153-155.
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