The Four Color Media Monitor

Radio Times spoke about WB's contrived gender-swap take on the Penguin, changing the short crimelord from man to woman, and the voice actress assigned to the role even goes so far as to justify it in the most tasteless ways possible:

Minnie Driver has opened up about taking on the role of a female incarnation of the Penguin in Batman: Caped Crusader.

It was announced back in July that Driver would be voicing Oswalda Cobblepot, a gender-flipped version of the character, in Prime Video’s new animated series, with some fans immediately taking issue with the reimagining.

But now Driver has spoken out about why she believes the female version of the beloved comic character hasn't been shoehorned into the new series – and that the Penguin has always been "genderless".

Right, because she says so. What makes her think her word or even that of the scriptwriters alone is going to instantly prove Bob Kane and Bill Finger created the crook along the lines she follows? Driver has effectively insulted the memory of Kane and Finger, much like quite a few other phony experts in modern times, and in this Games Radar interview, she compounds it even more when she says:

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.

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."

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!

I don't even want to know what the fate of the kids is. What I do know is that Driver sounds sympathetic to villains when she says Oswald Cobblepot was depicted more like a "creature", and calling him "beloved" is also very irritating. What makes the Penguin more beloved than Batman or even the Huntress? This is no better than claiming the Joker's beloved. No, an established villain is to be despised. This reeks of yet another example of calling villains something they shouldn't be considered as, while heroes and their civilian co-stars hardly ever get the same description provided today.

I think this is yet another example of a woke product that fans of the original comics would do well to avoid financing with their wallets, and it's disgusting how they risk talking about what awful acts the gender-swapped character may have visited upon her kids as though that were something to admire. There may have once been a lot more potential ideas in animation for DC/Marvel creations, but today's gatekeepers effectively threw that all away, and emphasizing villains is no improvement. This Batman cartoon is something that's been developed much too late.

Labels: animation, Batman, golden calf of villainy, history, msm propaganda, politics, violence