20 Things You Somehow Missed In Batman Returns
17. Michael Murphy's New Mayor
In Batman, Lee Wallace’s Mayor Borg was almost as prominent as Pat Hingle’s Commissioner Gordon and Billy Dee Williams’s Harvey Dent. In Batman Returns, Michael Murphy assumed the role of Gotham City’s Mayor (whose name in Craig Shaw Gardner’s novelisation is Mayor Jenkins), whom Shreck describes as “standing-in-the-way-of-progress”.
During the film, the Mayor is therefore subjected to a power-play during the film, much of which ended up on the cutting room floor, despite his matinee idol good looks. Compared to Wallace, Murphy becomes almost invisible, his control very rapidly being wrested away from him by Shreck and The Penguin.
A sequence was meant to have featured towards the end of the film in which The Mayor asks Commissioner Gordon if Batman will ever forgive Gotham for trying to hunt him down after the murder of The Ice Princess, but either was lost during the pre-production stage or also ended up on the floor of the editing room.
Either way, by the time Batman Forever rolled into cinemas, Gotham City had yet another new mayor.