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My favorite version of the Penguin remains the one that scared me when I was seven years old. He had webbed hands, spewed black bile from between his teeth, and had a penchant for biting off the noses of insufficiently servile yes men. He was, of course, Danny DeVito’s Penguin in Tim Burton’s still bafflingly original Batman Returns, and he had absolutely nothing to do with his comic book counterpart other than a name, a monocle, and a penchant for fancy cigarette filters.
I’m reminded of my initial revulsion—and disappointment that he had nothing to do with the character I saw first on Batman: The Animated Series and as played by Burgess Meredith in the 1960s’ Batman camp classic before that—while predictably seeing the initial online criticism of the news that Minnie Driver has been cast as Oswalda Cobbeplot in a revisionist interpretation of the Penguin in the upcoming Batman: Caped Crusader.
The reveal came out of San Diego Comic-Con late Saturday evening and follows on the heels of a new clip from the animated Batman show, which you can view above. In the teaser footage, Hamish Linklater (the secret MVP of Midnight Mass) is doing a dead ringer riff on Kevin Conroy’s iconic Dark Knight gravel. While the vocal inflections might be faintly familiar, the whole point of the new animated series is its surprises. Developed by Bruce Timm, one of the creators and masterminds behind the definitive Batman cartoon, Batman: The Animated Series, Caped Crusader intentionally echoes that series’ art deco Never Never Land. Like the Burton movies that influenced TAS’ visual direction, too, that cartoon was set in a strange amalgamation of every era in 20th century American city-planning, albeit in its often most frightful and hellish state.
Batman: Caped Crusader, however, is not TAS. Rather than combining, say, the fashions of the 1930s with the automobiles of the 1940s, and the mass communication of the ‘50s, Caped Crusader actually appears to be set during the early-mid 20th century and acts as a chance to have some fun by genuinely reimagining the things we take for granted about Batman mythos. Comic book readers might call it an “elseworlds” tale.
Just as eagerly as fans accepted a Joker movie that has a whole lot more to do with emulating 1970s and ‘80s Martin Scorsese dramas than it does with any comic book, Batman: Caped Crusader is a chance to turn the Dark Knight mythology on its head. And one immediately intriguing idea is gender-flipping the Penguin.
To be honest, a major reason folks came around to adoring Danny DeVito’s turn in the 1992 Batman flick is because the character never had a lot going for him on the traditional, post-Crisis page. He’s a wannabe patrician and blue blood, who tries to buy his way into veritable American aristocracy by the way of his misdeeds. There’s a reason every significant adaptation of the character outside TAS since the 1990s has reimagined him in subtle ways—making him cockney in the Batman: Arkham games—or major ones (Colin Farrell’s delightful middle management mobster take on the character in Matt Reeves’ The Batman).
The idea of a woman attempting to strong-arm her way into Gotham’s elite circles, particularly during an earlier era of an even more domineering patriarchy, presents a new and dramatically rich way to interpret the character. Also casting the fairly underrated Minnie Driver, who makes every project she’s in better, from Grosse Pointe Blank to The Phantom of the Opera, immediately grabs the attention. Could Oswalda be as big a diva as La Carlotta?
It is obviously too early to say since all we have is a photo of the character. But if we can all enjoy a Penguin who rides a giant rubber ducky when he isn’t telling an army of flightless birds to go Old Testament on Gotham’s firstborn, then there is certainly plenty of room for Oswalda.
Batman: Caped Crusader debuts on Aug. 1 on Amazon Prime Video.
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