Penguin (cartoon character)

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The penguin ( English penguin ) is a fictional character owned by the Time Warner Company. The character appears primarily in comics from the US publisher DC Comics , a subsidiary of Time Warner. In addition, she had appearances in novels, cartoons and films, in real series on television, in movies and in computer and console games. In addition, the figure found reception in countless merchandising products such as shampoo packaging, action figures, breakfast boxes, etc. and thus has an extraordinarily high level of public awareness for a fictional figure.

In DC comics and most spin-off media, the penguin is an antagonist to Batman , another character from DC publishing. The corpulent crook Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot is hidden behind Pinguin . He owes his nickname to his appearance. The penguin runs an illustrious Gotham City casino and runs a criminal organization. He was introduced into the Batman universe in Detective Comics # 58 in December 1941, making him one of the characters that Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger created themselves.

Appearance and character

The penguin (left) at the Supanova Pop Culture Expo , 2014

The penguin is a short , plump, plump man who wears a greasy black tuxedo suit (tuxedo) with a swallowtail and a top hat . He likes to portray himself as a “gentleman criminal” and mostly exhibits a culturally bourgeois-aristocratic pose as a well-educated “gentleman of the world”. He has a remarkably long, pointed nose and often wears a monocle or smokes cigarillos (or, depending on the artist, cigars or cigarettes from a cigarette holder ). According to the publisher, Cobblepot is 1.57 m tall and weighs 79 kg.

The penguin undoubtedly has some peculiar quirks that have accompanied the figure for decades: He has a weakness for birds and has an old Victorian birdhouse outside Gotham City in Gotham County near a cliff on the Atlantic coast . His second passion is his umbrellas, which often have a wide range of special functions. He owns umbrellas that contain firearms and those that contain blades or lasers, and in turn others that he can use to shoot gases or use as a flight aid by activating a propeller-like rotor in their strut. The penguin also habitually surrounds himself with beautiful women who serve him partly as lovers, partly as assistants and sometimes as henchmen and bodyguards. What differs from most other crazy criminals is that the penguin prefers to flee and rescue its prey rather than facing Batman and losing it. He also tries to keep his relationships with others professional at all times.

In the current comics, the dark knight grudgingly accepts the necessity of the weird bird, knowing that Cobblepot in his position of power also has the good of the city in mind. He put an end to the era of gang shootings and street fighting. In addition, the penguin is not too proud to accept Batman's help and also to give it to him in crisis situations - in exchange for something valuable.

Character biography

In today's stories, Oswald comes from one of the oldest and richest families in Gotham, including the Waynes. Oswald's great-grandfather, Theodor Cobblepot, was mayor of Gotham City in his day and helped make Gotham a metropolis.

In the older stories, Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot and a sister grew up as a half-orphan with his mother who ran a small pet shop in Gotham City. There, Cobblepot was particularly drawn to the birds, with whom he spent a large part of his free time. After the death of his father, who died of pneumonia after being caught in a heavy downpour, Cobblepot was forced by his overprotective and very dominant mother to always carry an umbrella with him in order to be prepared in the event of a storm . Due to his grotesque stature - even as a child, Cobblepot was unusually short and fat -, his waddling gait caused by a hip disorder and his beak-like nose, he was mocked by other children as a "penguin".

After exposing a teenage thug named Sharky by beating him up in front of an assembled crowd, Sharky retaliated by breaking into the Cobblepots pet store at night and killing all the birds. After his mother died of an illness, Oswald and his sister were forced to sell the bird shop. Cobblepot devoted himself to the study of ornithology . After years of humiliation and harassment, the adult cobblepot became a gambler and salon criminal.

Early in his career as a professional criminal, he was a delinquent activist. Equipped with his special umbrellas and with exotic birds as accomplices, he committed all sorts of crimes - often around the topic of birds or umbrellas. Accomplices in these acts were u. a. the Joker or Mortimer carcass, which he shot and almost killed after an argument. After numerous setbacks, Cobblepot decided to take a back seat and to “commit” crimes from the safety of the planner and client. He left the actual execution to his henchmen - including men like Actuary, Zeiss or the mute Harold Allnut, who later switched sides and took on Batman's service.

The casino "The Iceberg Lounge" (a reference to the phrase "Great Thundering Iceberg", which Burgess Meredith kept in her mouth as a trademark in the Batman series of the 1960s), a nightclub with an arctic - glacial ambience, is the heart of Cobblepots criminal small empire and trading center for the Gotham high society as well as for criminals of all stripes. Batman tolerates his continued existence primarily because the Iceberg Lounge offers him an inexpensive way of obtaining information. Cobblepot's other activities include stealing stolen goods and organizing outbreaks of wealthy criminals. For example, he has already helped the ventriloquist to escape early from Blackgate prison.

After the severe earthquake in 1998 and during the no man's land period, Cobblepot briefly relocated its activities to the Davenport Center, a fallen skyscraper in the center of Gotham City. There, Cobblepot operated a flourishing commodity market with goods of all kinds (from material goods to weapons and food) and organized gladiatorial shows.

In the current Batman magazines, the penguin has disappeared from Gotham City. Nothing is known about his whereabouts. His henchmen - Orca, KGBeast, and Magpie - were murdered by Harvey Dent .

The penguin in other media

In the 1992 Batman film Batman Returns, directed by Tim Burton , the penguin Oswald Cobblepot was played by Danny DeVito . Burton used the penguin not as an elegant bonhomme, but as a deformed and sometimes tragic psychopath. As such, instead of hands, he has fins-like structures made up of the thumb, forefinger and the other three fingers as something that has grown together. Because of these abnormalities, the penguin was abandoned as a toddler by its wealthy parents and raised in the sewer system of penguins, which contradicts the otherwise propagated vita of the figure. As a penguin, DeVito wore a darkly Gothic outfit, smoked cigarillos and had an abnormally large, pointed nose. In an accident while filming, DeVito nearly died in a pool of water, which contributed significantly to the film's PR.

In the film, the villain tries for the office of mayor of Gotham, but fails with his ambitions when his criminal machinations are exposed by Batman. His attempt to devastate the city with explosive charges and to murder the firstborn of all better families also fails. At the end of the film, the penguin dies in a showdown with Batman in the Kingfisher House of Gotham Zoo and sinks into the water of the penguin pool.

The penguin was embodied by Burgess Meredith in the Batman live-action series of the 1960s and the accompanying film Batman Keeps the World in Suspense . The penguin was a former actor turned criminal. The most striking feature of his portrayal was the penguin's “vulturing” laugh, a croaking drool that was modeled on the screaming of a bird and which has established itself in American collective memory as a cliché when portraying villainous figures. For example, US Vice President Dick Cheney is often caricatured with this laugh by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show .

In the cartoon series Super Friends , he appeared in an episode of the last season (dubbed by Frank Welker ). Also seen he was in the two-part Scooby-Doo Meets Batman - Cartoon .

In the 1992 Batman animated series Batman: The Animated Series , he was dubbed by Paul Williams . In this incarnation, the penguin was closely based on the penguin of the Tim Burton film, although some of the external features were omitted.

As a personality he acted like in the comics as a sophisticated "criminal of the world" with tailcoat, monocle and cigarillos and the well-known Talmi elegance. In 1997 in the series The New Batman Adventures the "freak" look was completely dispensed with: the penguin again had five fingers instead of one fin. As in the comics of the time, he was portrayed as a supposedly "respectable businessman" who is involved in dubious deals in the dark little room. The Iceberg Lounge as the center of its activities was also integrated into the series. In the cartoon Batman. He was dubbed Mystery of the Batwoman by David Ogden Stiers .

In The Batman he was dubbed by Tom Kenny and presented again in a deformed look: He again had a long nose, fin hands and fangs. In this series, the penguin strives above all to make a name for itself in society and to regain wealth and fame. His henchmen here are two masked concubines, the Kabuki Twins. Unlike in the comics, the penguin has mastered the martial art of Kung Fu in the basics and has personal enmity with Bruce Wayne. The cobblepots are portrayed here as a disgusting nobility whose ancestors bullied Alfred's grandfather.

Robin Lord Taylor plays Penguin in the TV series Gotham

The television series Gotham , which has been broadcast by Fox since 2014 and which takes place before Batman was created, shows Penguin less visually disfigured in his youth. There Robin Lord Taylor embodies the character who intrigues to try to ascend in Gotham's underworld. Apart from a walking disability and a pointed nose, the penguin does not initially show any special physical characteristics. Pinguin's passion for umbrellas goes back to his previous job as a valet for the criminal Fish Mooney. In rainy Gotham City, it was his job to keep her umbrella protectively over her head. Both the shaping of the role by the authors and the portrayal by the actor earned praise from the critics. Later in the series he befriends Edward Nygma, the Riddler . This friendship is portrayed as extremely ambivalent, as both villains repeatedly betray each other for selfish motives. The penguin comes into conflict several times with James Gordon and Harvey Bullock, but also with other later Batman villains, including Professor Pyg , Bane and the Ventriloquist . The final two episodes of the series explain how the penguin got his monocle: During a firefight, the splinters of an exploding hand grenade seriously injured his right eye, which led to his eyesight being impaired. In the series finale, he not only wears a monocle, but also his famous top hat from the comics. The last episode of Gotham describes Pinguin's first encounter with Batman, who arrests Cobblepot and the Riddler after a brief argument and turns them over to the police. During the transport to the city prison, however, the two villains manage to escape again.

The penguin as one of the most famous Batman villains also appeared in various Batman computer and video games. There he mostly acted as a "boss character" who appears at the end of a level and after defeating the level in question ends and a new one begins: So he appeared in Batman: The Caped Crusader , in the adaptation of Batman Returns for various Consoles, in Batman: The Animated Series and in The Adventures of Batman & Robin (Super NES).

In the game Batman: Arkham Asylum , the biography of the penguin is unlocked as an extra if you solve one of the riddles' puzzles. In the sequel Batman: Arkham City , the penguin is one of the main villains. However, he is more of a sadistic criminal there than a gentleman thief. In the Arkham universe, the Cobblepots were a wealthy family that was ruined by the Waynes. That's why the penguin wants revenge on Bruce Wayne. In addition, the penguin and the joker have a long hostility. In the Arkham Universe, the penguin eventually gets a facial injury from a broken glass / bottle bottom that is stuck over one eye like a monocle. No doctor, however good, dares to remove this splinter and at the same time guarantee that the penguin will keep his eyesight, otherwise the penguin would of course kill this doctor immediately. So the penguin in the Arkham Universe has to live with this injury. In the third part of the series, Batman Arkham Origins, a prequel to parts 1 and 2, the history of Solomon Wayne, Henry Cobblepot, Cyrus Pinkney and Armadeus Arkham is briefly touched upon when you complete the Cyrus Pinkney side mission. Accordingly, Cyrus Pinkney murdered Henry Cobblepot and not Solomon Wayne. In Arkham Origins, the penguin is the owner of a casino ship, so he doesn't have the Iceberg Lounge or the injury from Arkham City, and he still appears here without tails and top hats. The penguin actor Oliver Burgess Meredith is taken into account here: A small model near the theater gives the original name of Pinguin's ship "Final Offer" with "Olivia B. Meredith". In the Arkham universe, the penguin also has a very strong English accent, which is rather unusual for a person who grew up in Gotham City.

LEGO Batman The Video Game (2008)

The penguin breaks out of Arkham Asylum along with the Riddler and the Joker. Then he forms a group with Bane, Killer Croc, Man-Bat and Catwoman and they come up with an evil plan. They want to attack Gotham City with robot penguins. However, they are stopped by Batman and Robin and brought back to the Arkham Asylum.

LEGO Batman 2 DC Super Heroes (2012)

The penguin breaks out of Arkham Asylum with Poison Ivy, Two-Face, Riddler, Bane, Catwoman and their henchmen. However, he and the others are captured by Batman and Robin and brought back to the Arkham Asylum.

LEGO Batman 3 Beyond Gotham (2014)

The penguin has escaped again and is hiding in a Gotham swamp. However, this time it is only included in a side mission and does not contribute to the main story.

LEGO Dimensions (2015-2017)

During the dimensional crisis caused by Lord Vortech, the penguin cannot be found, but his arctic world in mini format including robot penguins.

LEGO DC Super Villains (2018)

The penguin has returned and now owns a nightclub called "the Iceberg Lounge" for its criminal business. When Catwoman and other villains arrive with a diamond, Penguin wants to get inside himself, but is stopped by Catwoman, whereupon he wants to betray them all to the GCPD. The penguin and other villains are arrested by Commissioner Gordon, Harvey Bullock and the other police officers. Catwoman escapes, but has to give her stolen diamond to Owlman. Afterwards the penguin and the other villains escape from the Arkham Asylum and want to stop the evil Crime Syndicate. That's why they talk to their leader Lex Luthor in the Hall of Secrets. They later team up with Batman and the rest of the Justice League to stop the Crime Syndicate, Darkseid and his army of parademons and the rest of Apokolip's creatures. In the end, Penguin and the other villains can escape and must now be recaptured by Batman and the Justice League.

Pop Culture

In 2007, a video posted by the Republican Party on the online platform Youtube sparked a scandal in which the democratic politician and former presidential candidate Al Gore was portrayed as a penguin in order to polemicize his documentary An Inconvenient Truth . On the comedy show The Daily Show , the former US Vice President Dick Cheney was often corrupted by the presenter Jon Stewart as a penguin with the typical sounds and gestures of Meredith's interpretation of the character in the 1960s series.

Individual evidence

  1. Sims, David: Gotham Should Just Be Renamed The Penguin Show . In: The Atlantic , November 4, 2014. Retrieved February 24, 2015.