Producers of the recently released animated Batman series Batman: Caped Crusader have swapped out its male Penguin villain for a female Penguin because they claim there aren’t enough good female villains in the Batman oeuvre.
The show, developed by Warner Bros. Discovery, was not released on WB’s streaming service Max but instead dumped on Amazon Prime Video this month. With this version of Batman, The Penguin, voiced by actress Minnie Driver, is a showy, over-the-top cabaret owner who moonlights as the head of a criminal organization.
The series kept its gender swapping of the Penguin under wraps with its first trailer, which only showed the long-time Batman foe in a silhouette. But it did showcase that one of the new characters would be a strong female police detective (Michelle C. Bonilla) who leads a Gotham City Police task force to capture and prosecute the Dark Knight as a criminal vigilante.
The series is spearheaded by creator Bruce Timm and executive produced by Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams. According to Timm, the Pengie switcheroo was made because there aren’t enough female baddies in the Batman universe.
“James [co-producter James Tucker] and I were talking about the overview of the show, and we said, ‘One of the problems with Batman, as he is, is there’s a lack of good villains.'” Timm said in an interview with the Television Academy.
“You’ve got Catwoman, you’ve got Poison Ivy, you’ve got Harley Quinn. But it would be really good to have more female villains. And off the top of my head, I said… ‘What if we gender-flip The Penguin?'” he recalled.
“When he said, ‘Maybe we can gender-flip Penguin,’ I just got this flood of ideas,” Tucker explained.
Tucker said that the idea sent him to begin to reimagine Penguin as a Marlene Dietrich-like female character instead of a man.
Actress Driver celebrated the recreation of the male villain as the best example of woke “representation.”
“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,” Driver insisted.
“This is organic. It’s believable that this bizarre, strange, larger than life character is genderless because it’s the essence of The Penguin,” she continued with her justification. “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.”
Still, despite the claim that there are too few female enemies for Batman to fight, the truth is that the comics are filled with bad girls.
There are the old standbys of Harley Quinn, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Talia al Ghul, of course. But there is also many lesser-seen female villains such as outlaw Ma Parker from the 1966 TV classic, and in the comics there is Vengeance, White Rabbit, Lynx, Cheetah, Cheshire, Lady Arkham, Killer Frost, Lady Shiva, Nocturna, and even the more recently created Punchline. There are several more than these, besides.
Why any of these could not be brought on to the new series, Timms did not explain.
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