Not the Veteran’s Administration. The title was getting long, or I would have written voice actress, as in Minnie Driver. Driver voices the gender-swapped version of the character in Batman: Caped Crusader, the show that Warner Brothers themselves tossed out and Amazon Prime grabbed like a dog with table scraps. I don’t even hate the show. I don’t even hate Driver’s portrayal. When I reviewed it a couple of days ago, I praised her singing voice. She did a good job voicing Oswalda Cobblepot.
She’s just not the Penguin.
First appearing in Detective Comics #58, Oswald Cobblepot is a mob boss named for his deformity and penchant for tuxedos, both of which combined given them the appearance of the namesake arctic fowl. The Penguin has appeared in every continuity I’m aware of outside of Elseworld one-shots, and he’s even been in some of them. There might be some games he was out of. I don’t know EVERY bat-continuity out there, but he’s made an appearance in the ones I know of. Done right, he would have made a good introduction to this new timeline, since we’re doing another “early Batman” story and that means fighting mobsters rather than supervillains.
I’m not going to slam Driver, who probably never read a comic book or watched a cartoon in her life, for not knowing who the Penguin is, or enjoying her version enough to attempt to defend it since she couldn’t care less about the source material. The fault of the bad adaptation is on Bruce Timm, JJ Abrams, Matt Reeves, and the episode writers, which is Timm and Jase Ricci according to IMDB. On the other hand, saying something stupid that proves you don’t know what your talking about and thinking you’ve owned people who knew who Penguin was while you was playing with Barbie (wow, Driver’s a few years older than me so I had to adjust that, and she’s still pretty hot) is something I’m going to get on your case on. There’s a difference between defending your version and acting like that’s how it always was. To wit, this interview with GamesRadar where she calls Oswald a “genderless creature”. Prepare to lose a brain cell.
Following in the footsteps of Batman: The Animated Series is no easy task, but Prime Video’s new series Batman: Caped Crusader has pulled it off with style, already earning rave reviews (including from our own critic) and a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes.
I’ll bet it has, too. Rotten Tomatoes lost credibility when review bomb and shadowbanning allegations started flooding in. It’s about as reliable as Wikipedia at this point. In other words, not credible and people only use it for lack of another resource and being used to using it. I stopped using it as a source years ago.
Something that has drawn much acclaim is the show’s rogues’ gallery, as several iconic Batman villains appear as you have never seen them before. Easily one of the stand-out baddies is actor Minnie Driver’s gender-flipped Penguin, a.k.a. Oswalda Cobblepot, the star of opening episode ‘In Treacherous Waters’.
Although a female version of The Penguin is something new for audiences, Driver feels that “the essence” of the beloved comics character has always been “genderless” due to the fact that the villain has typically been depicted as more like a creature than perhaps a person on the page.
What page were you looking at, Minnie?
Speaking to GamesRadar+ and other press at a roundtable during SDCC 2024, Driver explained: “She’s a very new character that so fits into the Batman oeuvre – it’s a great reimagining. It’s amazing as a lot of times today we are trying to redress the balance of representation and you sometimes feel that things have been shoehorned in – it’s more performative than organic. This is organic – it’s believable that this bizarre, strange, larger than life character is genderless because it’s the essence of The Penguin. What we are looking at is the essence of the original comics and animation. When you look at her she’s weirdly genderless, she’s a creature, and I love that that’s what we are exploring now.”
Oh, and Minnie? That movie is based on a comic from a different continuity. Apparently all you know about comics is “they exist” or you would know that nothing in that statement is true. Except for “great reimagining”, which is your opinion and thus factual only in that this is what you believe. The rest? No.
I wonder how many of you sat through the whole thing, looking for the genderless Penguin. Find him/her/it? No? That’s because it never happened! Oswald Cobblepot has been an obvious male since his creation. Seriously, here’s his first appearance in the comics.
from the splash page intro in Detective Comics #58
Here’s one from a few decades later, in the Super Powers minicomics.
He gained some weight, but he didn’t become a “creature” until Tim Burton came along and I have never liked when someone went to that version. The only reason I liked the character the last time Timm brought him in was Paul Williams’ performance in Batman: The Animated Series, and it was the only improved design when they moved to Kids WB to tie in with Superman’s show and form the DCAU. Otherwise, making him a creature was a mistake and poorly written character because someone really liked Burton’s messed up reality.
Even under Burton and those going for his depiction, Cobblepot was still Oswald, not Oswalda, and I still can’t believe that’s an actual name. I looked it up for the show review, and it is. It just sounds like a made-up name, doesn’t it? He was never a woman, or genderless, or anything else you want to use to own people with something you clearly no nothing about. We’re talking about superhero geeks here. They’re less forgiving than Congress when it comes to that nonsense.
Continuing, Driver added that it is interesting seeing The Penguin “as a mother” – and she’s right that Oswalda’s actions towards her own children are suitably “dark and twisted” enough for the world of Batman. Seriously – you don’t want to mess with Oswalda after seeing the fate of her kids!
Given that The Penguin in Caped Crusader is a mother, Driver admits that this is where she looked to for inspiration when it came to unlocking the character. In fact, the main source was her own mother-in-law as the actor revealed: “She has this iconic voice, it’s sort of like a vintage American, New York, I feel like her voice is from the ’30s and ’40s. It’s very clipped, it’s big, it’s deep, it has this kind of resonance and I’ve always loved the way that she sounds.
Reminder: Oswalda kills her two sons under the belief that they betrayed her, and she clearly favored one over the other. You can do dark and twisted without making us glad they were at least her adult kids. That’s not exactly praising your mother-in-law when you claim that you based your performance on her. The voice? Maybe, and it could be the writer’s fault for how she put it together, but it does sound like you thought the mother of your husband (I checked because it’s modern Hollywood–but that was Wikipedia so who knows?) was a crazed mommy. She also used a missile launcher to take out her “business” rival and the police station. She’s not exactly stable, is she?
“I’m like a magpie, I use everything that I come across. It’s definitely a homage to her but that was just the kicking off point. The Penguin is really evil and it was fun to have this kind of blousy way of speaking – that helps underpin how deeply terrible and psychopathic she is.” Maybe let’s not get on the wrong side of Driver’s mother-in-law too then!
That’s the real takeaway, and we’ve seen it time and again. You enjoyed playing that version and you’re mad nobody liked it for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Even the Titans cast admitted they liked the characters they played without insisting, sight clearly unseen, that those were how the characters were always depicted. They at least owned up more or less to not caring about how the characters were depicted before their version. Pretending “they were always like this” is the new way writers, directors, producers, and performers try to fool people into loving their work indisputably. The problem is you’re going against people who know this character better than you, and no cries of “media literacy” from people who used a wiki…badly, as I demonstrated with the Silver Surfer gender-swap coming to the MCU…to find the one piece of evidence they can find to praise themselves is going to make your version accurate to anyone. You are literally the first female Penguin in the DC multiverse.
It’s amazing how people who know nothing about these characters think they can educate people who grew up with them. That’s why their stories are failing and their adaptations suck.
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