The Wild Wild West - Villains

Villains

A memorable recurring arch-villain was Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless, a brilliant but megalomaniacal little person portrayed by Michael Dunn. Like Professor Moriarty for Sherlock Holmes, Loveless provided West and Gordon with a worthy adversary, whose plans could be foiled but who resisted all attempts to capture him and bring him to justice. Loveless was introduced in the show's sixth produced, but third televised episode, "The Night the Wizard Shook The Earth", and appeared in another nine episodes. Initially he had two constant companions: the huge Voltaire, played by Richard Kiel; and the beautiful Antoinette, played by Dunn's real-life singing partner, Phoebe Dorin. Voltaire disappeared with no explanation after his third episode (although Richard Kiel returned in a different role in "The Night of the Simian Terror"), and Antoinette after her sixth. According to the TV movie The Wild Wild West Revisited, Loveless eventually dies in 1880 from ulcers, brought on by anger and frustration at having his plans consistently ruined by West and Gordon. (His son, played by Paul Williams, subsequently seeks revenge on the agents.)

Though several actors appeared in multiple villainous roles, only one other character had a second encounter with West and Gordon: Count Manzeppi (played flamboyantly by Victor Buono, who played another, different villain in the pilot), a diabolical genius of "black magic" and crime, who – like Dr. Loveless – had an escape plan at the end. (Buono eventually returned in More Wild Wild West as "Dr. Henry Messenger", a parody of Henry Kissinger, who ends up both handcuffed and turning invisible with the villainous Paradine.)

Agnes Moorehead won an Emmy for her role as Emma Valentine in "The Night of The Vicious Valentine". Some of the other villains were portrayed by Leslie Nielsen, Martin Landau, Burgess Meredith, Boris Karloff, Ida Lupino, Carroll O'Connor, Ricardo Montalban, Robert Duvall, Ed Asner, and Harvey Korman.

While the show's writers created their fair share of villains, they frequently started with the nefarious, stylized inventions of these madmen (or madwomen) and then wrote the episodes around these devices. Henry Sharp, the series' story consultant, would sketch the preliminaries of the designs (eccentrically numbering every sketch "fig. 37"), and give the sketch to a writer, who would build a story around it. Episodes were also inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne.