So Turner Classic was showing Batman Returns this afternoon. I know, what's up with that? Then again, American Movie Classics has been showing Happy Gilmore, so maybe the definition of "classic" has shifted a bit.
Anyway, we've reached the point in the film where Penguin's brilliant "abduct the first-born sons and drown them in the sewer" scheme has fallen apart, and he's sending his radio-controlled, missile-equipped penguins into the city (that's a nice phrase). There's the lady in the control room doing a countdown and all that, and she says 'Estimated casualties - 100,000'. Now I'm sure I've heard that before, having watched the movie on TV several times, and in the theaters (It's been a tradition of my father and I to see the Batman movies in the theaters. Man, did I question the wisdom of traditions after Batman and Robin). I guess it had just never resonated before today, but I thought to myself "Damn, that's an awful lot of people. Seems a little extreme for Pengy."
Granted, Movie Penguin is a far cry from Burgess Meredith, or night club owner/illegal goods merchant (that is his side business, right?) Oswald Cobblepot, or even the bird-themed thief of the animated series. Still, killing a hundred thousand people seems so much more of a Joker move.
Maybe I'm wrong about that. Did Penguin ever exhibit that kind of bloodlust, or was it a consequence of Burton going for more of a "deformed, shunned by society" Penguin?
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If memory serves, Penguin's final solution was a consequence of Burton's "Deformed, shunned by society" take.
Then again, I missed a lot of Batman comics in the '90s so maybe it happened there too.
fortress keeper: I guess Burton felt audiences wouldn't buy a guy that walks and acts like a Penguin robbing banks and such, at least not without some sort of horrible scarring childhood incident.
I wonder if the number just means more these days because of all the huge casualty events we've had in the past few years. It was one thing to throw around "100,000 dead Americans" as a quick shortcut to build "villain cred" in the 90s, but after everything that's happened in New York, New Orleans, and Baghdad, it's a little harder to swallow.
If memory serves, the whole "Penguin as a night-club owner/crime lord" thing didn't come about until No Man's Land. I do know they tried using a similar penguin in the Animated Series initially, but it just didn't work so they went back to the old Pengy.
I think the whole deformed-social-outcast thing was Burton's. It certainly sounds like one of his ideas.
On the subject of Bats Returns, the only action figure I bought from that movie were the armed penguins, those were awesome.
If memory serves, the whole "Penguin as a night-club owner/crime lord" thing didn't come about until No Man's Land. I do know they tried using a similar penguin in the Animated Series initially, but it just didn't work so they went back to the old Pengy.
Didn't they stick with it in the second Batman series, Gotham Knights, though?
-M
nothing stops the blob: I kind of think it might have been me. back then I would have been a kid that didn't have any concept of "100,00 casualities" beyond, "wow, that's cool!" Now I'm older, and a (little) more aware, and as you noted, the world's a different place.
jason: Penguin as a businessman, Bats without the yellow chest symbol, No Man's Land had quite an effect on the Bat world. That's when harley made her DC Comics debut as well, right?
matt: The animated series where Bats would team with Supes sometimes? You're right, he did have a night club, with sea lions in the middle.
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