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- - Chandell
Chandell was portrayed in Batman by the famous piano player Liberace. He is one of the lesser known villains on the show.
About Chandell / Harry[]
In the episode "The Devil's Fingers"/"The Dead Ringers," Chandell is a renowned concert pianist who is being forced to lead a second life as "Fingers," a nefarious criminal, through extortion from his Blackmailing twin brother, Harry. Harry knows that Chandell, whose renown came from a concert he gave for the President of the United States at the White House, had had to employ a player piano during that concert because of injuries he had sustained to his hands. These injuries could not be treated in time for the concert, nor could he call the concert off; instead, he was forced to make do with the falsification. That was the birth of Fingers, Channdel's Criminal counterpart.
The Dynamic Duo fought Harry's Piano Movers. They are unnamed.
Trivia[]
- "The Devil's Fingers"/"The Dead Ringers" was the highest-rated of all Batman episodes.
- As William Dozier told Joel Eisner for The Official Batman Batbook, Liberace, as both Chandell/Fingers and as Harry, brought his own piano and his own wardrobe, refusing to trust those of anyone else, for the purpose of shooting the episode.
- The name "Chandell," as Eisner points out, is a play on one of Liberace's trademarks, the chandelier, or candelabra.
- "Lee," as his friends called him, had some elements of his own life incorporated into the episode. Two of them were these:
- Like Chandell, Liberace was himself a twin.
- Liberace considered himself a protege of Ignace Jan Paderewski, and the player-piano roll supposedly used in "The Devil's Fingers"/"The Dead Ringers" is of a Paderewski performance.
- Madge Blake's character, Aunt Harriet Cooper, is described as one of Chandell's fans, and in the "teaser" (prologue) of "The Devil's Fingers," she actually sings with Chandell's accompaniment. (The singing voice was Blake's own.)