The Batman: Pics, Videos, and Other Awesomeness

That's the wife I need, but is it the wife I deserve?

 

Cats make it look easy.

 

So I heard on the radio and confirmed on the Internet that Colin Ferrell is going to play the Penguin in the new Batman movie (the one where the Robert Patinson is playing Batman )

My first thought was, "I like Coling Ferrell, he should do well."
My second thought was "Why are you making a Batman movie with THE PENGUIN in it!"


Is the penguin anyone's favorite Batman villain?
crickets chirping
That's what I thought.


Then I thought about it. The next Batman movie almost has to have the Penguin in it.

-The Joker is right out. In the current meta, any Joker performance that is not done by Heath Ledger or Jaoqin Phoenix is going to be under an unflattering microcscope.

-Catwoman, if included, needs to be a third wheel. The whole will they/won't they love story between Catwoman and Batman relies on having a clearly more dangerous villain to contrast her with putting her thematically between that villain and Batman. She cannot carry a movie by herself, but Halle Berry already knew that.

-Mr. Freeze was masterfully protrayed on Batman the Animated Series. He was crappily protrayed in movie form by Jared Shumacher. He was adequately protrayed on The Batman. Joker (2019) and the Christopher Nolan trilogy success (and Suicide Squad's flop) show that the movie going public wants gritty and realistic Batman movies. Mr. Freeze is too scifi to fit this mold.

-Any use of Two-Face will draw comparisons to The Dark Knight. Similar problem to using the Joker as a villain. It is difficult to have to follow up The Dark Knight.

-Pretty much any other Batman villain used is a C-lister.


Thinking back to Batman the Animated Series, probably the best Batman series on TV. Penguin episodes tended to be mediocre. There was a bunch of episodes where multiple villains are used in one episode. In nearly every episode that fits this bill, the Penguin is part of the crowd of villains.

There were four Batman TAS episodes where Penguin was the solo villain. In three of these, the Batman was fighting with a handicap. In one he had a concussion, in another he was blind, in another the Penguin hacked the Batmobile. I would argue that the only good Penguin episode was "Birds of a Feather," an episode where Batman barely was involved. It was a character piece mostly.


The one on the left is the Penguin in Batman TAS seasons 1-4. The one on the right is the last season where every character got a major art revamp. They also redefined Penguin from a midlevel criminal schemere who went to jail a lot to a fence and middleman who is very good at using lawyers and plausible deniability to stay out of jail. That was probably a good change (one of the few good changes) but the show didn't last long after the new direction.

The Batman, while not as a good as Batman TAS, was a good show and I will take you on in the comment section if you say it wasn't a good show !

I did think the Penguin was overused on The Batman. He had almost as many appearances as the Joker. They made him an implausibly skilled martial artist, but that's sort of par for the course for the show. Batman TAS, Batman is a detective that can punch people when the situation calls for it. In The Batman, Batman is a pugilist that can do detective work when the situation cals for it.



There is one thing I did like with The Batman that I hope they include for the movie. In The Batman, the Penguin, Oswald Cobblepott was not really Batman's nemesis, he was Bruce Wayne's nemesis. He really resented that despite coming from an old and impressive old money family that had lost both it's money and it's reputation. Bruce Wayne had both money and respectability. And Cobblepott was very jealous that Bruce Wayne was tall and handsome and had women fawning over him while Oswald Cobblepot...did not.

What I didn't like about this protrayal of the Penguin is that in Batman the Animated Series, the Penguin went to jail and not Arkham when he was caught. In The Batman, the Penguin was part of the Arkham Asylum crew. That kind of bugged me. Penguin was weird and creepy but he wasn't really insane.