My own personal #1 choice for Poison Ivy was always a lesser known actress who in all honesty wouldn't have been viable unless the show was still on in 1970-71. Barbara Rhoades was a tall, Amazonian redhead who first appeared in a 1968 Don Knotts comedy "The Shakiest Gun In The West" and then a lot of episodic TV in the 70s as a larger than life presence who could also show the ability flip a man over her shoulder (as she did to Robert Wagner in an episode of "Switch" when playing an undercover cop). She was no empty airhead but someone with a slightly brash street-smart NY type of persona. And IMO she would have personified a tough villainous Poison Ivy like no other name IMO could have even if she would have been off the radar screen for 1967-68 since she was just starting at the time.
Back in the day when I used to write 66 Batman fanfic for the long defunct site run by "twof" I believe his handle was, I contributed two Poison Ivy stories that were specifically written with Rhoades as the template. In those days the stories we'd submit would be illustrated through the use of publicity pix or screencaps from the show or other projects. Since Rhoades of course was never on the show, I had to "sell" the illusion of her as Ivy by mixing in appropriate pictures of her in civilian garb and then saying elsewhere that she was wearing the costume in other scenes. The idea of seeing her in the actual Ivy costume was something that could only be rendered as comic style art (and I remember twof did come up with a comic generated scene of Rhoades as Ivy once when the site was still up) and any live action envisioning could only exist in the mind or badly photoshopped.
But AI technology now is really advancing to the point where it doesn't require too much effort to create a realistic picture of an actor in a role they never played provided you have good reference imagery to work with and in this case all I needed were a couple head shots of Rhoades a picture of a Poison Ivy costume on a mannequin, combining elements to create a "reference image" (with textual description to get her body type correct) and then using reference pix of Adam and Burt in costume and a decent enough text description of a setting, bang I had some eight second sequence (the max you can go) that floored me completely. I'm sharing the links for two of these scenes, one that shows Batman solo in a vine death trap while Ivy gloats and the other that shows Batman and Robin together in the same trap. They're too large for attachments here though I'm furnishing a couple screen caps of the AI scene for reference purposes.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/djkuej99 ... t13sh&dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/0pwrcx7i ... zuqnt&dl=0
I'm only sorry our much-missed friend High C never got to make use of this kind of newly emerging technology since he wrote his share of Siren fanfic stories and was hampered by the fact that there were only so many reference images to use of Joan Collins in costume so he would have to resort to other Joan Collins pix and "explain" why Siren was in civilian garb. Something like this would have solved the problem! And of course it's also possible to use this same capability for making other short scenes and maybe envisioning other fantasy guest cast possibilities in other roles too (and I'm sure others would want to know how other Ivy candidates might come out)
