Producer of the recently released Batman animated series Batman: The Caped Crusader The male villain in The Penguin was changed to a female Penguin because there weren’t enough good female villains in the Batman series.
The show, produced by Warner Bros. Discovery, was released this month on Amazon Prime Video rather than on Warner Bros.’ streaming service Max. In this version of Batman, the Penguin, voiced by actress Minnie Driver, is a flamboyant, high-flying cabaret owner with a side job as a crime boss.
The series kept the Penguin’s gender swap a secret in the first trailer, showing the longtime Batman foe only in silhouette. However, one new character is Strong women A detective (Michelle C. Bonilla) leads a special task force within the Gotham City Police Department that arrests and prosecutes the Dark Knight as a criminal vigilante.
The series will be helmed by creator Bruce Timm and executive produced by Matt Reeves and JJ Abrams, and Timm said the decision to swap out Pengy came about due to a lack of female villains in the Batman universe.
“James [co-producter James Tucker] “When Tim was talking about the outline of the show, he said, ‘One of the problems with Batman is that there aren’t enough good villains,'” Tim said. Interview With the Television Academy.
“We have Catwoman, we have Poison Ivy, we have Harley Quinn, but I thought it would be really cool to have more female villains. So I immediately thought, ‘What if I reversed the gender of the Penguin?'” he recalled.
“When he said, ‘Maybe we could reverse the gender of the penguins,’ the ideas just started flowing,” Tucker explained.
Tucker said this idea prompted him to begin re-imagining the Penguin as a female character, à la Marlene Dietrich, rather than a man.
Actress Driver praised the re-enactment of the male villain as a prime example of woke “representation.”
“Today, we’re often trying to rebalance representation, but sometimes things feel forced. It’s more performative than organic, which is surprising,” Driver argued.
“It’s natural. It’s believable that this weird, unusual, larger-than-life character has no gender, because that’s the essence of The Penguin,” she continued, justifying herself. “What we’re 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’re exploring now.”
Yet, despite the claims that there are too few female foes for Batman to battle, the truth is that comics are filled with bad girls.
Of course, there are familiar characters like Harley Quinn, Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Talia Al Ghul, but there are also plenty of lesser known female villains, such as the outlaw Ma Parker from the 1966 TV classic, and in the comics we have Vengeance, White Rabbit, Lynx, Cheetah, Cheshire, Lady Arkham, Killer Frost, Lady Shiva, Nocturne, and more recently Punchline. And there are so many more.
Timms did not explain why none of these were included in the new series.
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