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.
