According to showrunner Bruce Timm, The Penguin was gender-swapped for Batman: Caped Crusader because both he and series executive producer James Tucker felt that The Dark Knight lacked “good villains”.
Timm, whose other additional DC animated credits include co-creating Batman: The Animated Series and helping oversee the subsequent DCAU that followed, provided this insight into his creative process while speaking to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences – otherwise known colloquially as the Television Academy – regarding Batman’s latest television adventure.
Asked by The Academy’s Christine Champagne as to why he made the choice to turn The Penguin into a woman, Timm recalled, “James 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. 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, ‘We never really could figure out exactly what to do with The Penguin, what the gimmick for The Penguin would be. What if we gender-flip The Penguin?'”
Interjecting with his own recollection, the aforementioned Tucker further noted, “When he said ‘Maybe we can gender-flip Penguin,’ I just got this flood of ideas. I was thinking of Marlene Dietrich in her tuxedo and Cabaret the musical and the art form of cabaret, and I just started drawing. I instantly got a flood of ideas. Also, I was thinking a little bit of Harvey Fierstein and Hairspray and Divine. It just was like I knew instantly what it could be.”
“That was the mission statement for the show in general,” the series EP added. “To do something that harkened back to the original, but flip it. We’ve seen live-action and animated versions of Batman on TV.”
RELATED: First Look Reveals Asian Harley Quinn In Amazon’s ‘Batman: Caped Crusader’
Taking his statement at face value, one can only wonder, if this is truly Timm’s personal sentiment towards The Dark Knight’s rogue’s galley, whether or not he’s ever truly paid attention to the very property he’s worked on.
From Bane, to The Riddler, to The Joker, to even Timm’s own personal creation of Harley Quinn, Batman’s foes are some of the most recognizable and compelling throughout not just comic book canon, but the entirety of worldwide pop-culture.
However, in the interest of fairness, given Timm’s history with the DCAU and the fact that he only cited Catwoman, Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn as examples of quality Batman villains, it’s possible that the showrunner misspoke and actually meant to claim that the hero suffers from a lack of good female villains – an assertion which, while still factually absurd given the existence of such other Gotham-based villainesses like Talia al Ghul, Lady Shiva, and even the Timm-created B:TAS original villain The Phantasm, makes slightly more sense than his presented blanket statement.
The first season of Batman: Caped Crusader is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
At current, word remains out on whether or not the series will be renewed for any further outings.