page_title: The Wild Wild West
section_title: Villains
hierarchical_section_title: The Wild Wild West / Characters / Villains
caption_attribution_description: Photo of Michael Dunn as Dr. Loveless and Richard Kiel as Voltaire from the television program The Wild Wild West.
context_page_description: The Wild Wild West is an American Western espionage and science fiction television series that ran on the CBS television network for four seasons from September 17, 1965 to April 11, 1969. Two satirical comedy television films were made with the original cast in 1979 and 1980, and the series was adapted for a theatrical film in 1999.
  Developed at a time when the television western was losing ground to the spy genre, this show was conceived by its creator, Michael Garrison, as "James Bond on horseback." Set during the administration of President Ulysses Grant, the series followed Secret Service agents James West and Artemus Gordon as they solved crimes, protected the President, and foiled the plans of megalomaniacal villains to take over part or all of the United States. The show featured a number of fantasy elements, such as the technologically advanced devices used by the agents and their adversaries. The combination of the Victorian era time-frame and the use of Verne-esque technology have led several Steampunk web sites to cite the show as a pioneering influence on the genre. This aspect was accentuated even more in the 1999 film adaptation.
context_section_description: The show's most memorable recurring arch-villain was Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless, a brilliant but petulant and megalomaniacal dwarf portrayed by Michael Dunn. Initially he had two companions: the huge Voltaire, played by Richard Kiel; and the beautiful Antoinette, played by Dunn's real-life singing partner, Phoebe Dorin. Voltaire disappeared without explanation after his third episode, and Antoinette after her sixth. (Richard Kiel returned in a different role in "The Night of the Simian Terror".) According to the TV movie The Wild Wild West Revisited, Loveless eventually dies in 1880 from ulcers, brought on by the frustration of having his plans consistently foiled by West and Gordon. (His son, played by Paul Williams, in the TV movies, subsequently seeks revenge on the agents.)
  Though several actors appeared in different villainous roles, only one other character had a second encounter with West and Gordon: Count Manzeppi, played flamboyantly by Victor Buono. (Buono played a different villain in the pilot episode.) Manzeppi was a diabolical genius of "black magic" and crime, who—like Dr. Loveless—had an escape plan at the end. (Buono also returned in More Wild Wild West as "Dr. Henry Messenger", a parody of Henry Kissinger.)
  Agnes Moorehead won an Emmy for her role as Emma Valentine in "The Night of The Vicious Valentine". Other villains were portrayed by Leslie Nielsen, Sam Wanamaker, 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 often started with the nefarious, stylized and sometimes anachronistic 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.
caption: Doctor Loveless and Voltaire.
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