Warner Bros. is tired of some elements of the classic Penguin from DC Comics, with some calling him “the Monopoly man”

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Fictional characters change over time. The James Bond of Ian Fleming’s original novels isn’t the Bond you know from the movies, and the same goes for characters like Batman and Iron Man – due, in part, to time but also in part to different tastes. Much in the same way Marvel Comics’ Iron Man changed to the dramatically different approach the MCU Iron Man had in Robert Downey Jr. (and the success that came with it), the same seems to be beginning to happen with DC’s The Penguin.

The Penguin’s first live-action solo project debuts in the form of a HBO original series starring Colin Farrell, fresh off his debut as the character in The Batman movie. In the series, producers have made changes – his name, shortened even from the movie – while maintaining an overall change in the character across media that drops his once-trademark monocle and the proclivity for umbrellas (and real-life penguins). It’s not just happening in the HBO series, either; you can also see the elasticity DC and Warner Bros. are permitting (and possibly encouraging) with Minnie Driver’s portrayal of Oswalda ‘The Penguin’ Cobblepot in the Batman: Caped Crusader animated series on Prime Video.

Recently, The Penguin’s primary director (and executive producer) Craig Zobel has talked about this change and has a perspective that perfectly frames what they all seem to be uncomfortable with in the Penguin as he is best known from comics (and previous movie & TV adaptations). 

“I think that was why I wanted to do it,” says The Penguin executive producer (and primary director) Craig Zobel in an interview with Discussing Film. “I could see how [showrunner Lauren LeFranc] had designed this to be the opposite of the Penguin we’ve all seen before. We’ve always known the Penguin to be an aristocrat; I think he was originally based on the Monopoly Man.”

Mr. Monopoly debuted in a 1936 edition of Monopoly as drawn by Daniel Fox. The Penguin debuted in 1941′ s Detective Comics #58. As far as we can tell, Bill Finger and Bob Kane didn’t base it on the Monopoly Man – but perhaps they did?

“To take that and invert that was cool. It’s cool to tell a story of someone who isn’t a supervillain who is twisting their mustache and kind of planning everything, but a guy who is instinctive and does work backed into a corner. Maybe he is brash, and maybe part of his brain has him do things that put him into a corner by accident.”

Make no mistake, this article isn’t a critique of this approach, but instead simply noticing a trend developing with the genderbending of the Penguin earlier this year in Batman: Caped Crusader, and also the delightfully crooked performance of Oswald Cobblepot by Robin Lord Taylor in Fox’s Gotham some years back. It also is echoing into the comics, as can be seen in the recent Tom King-written series The Penguin, which reimagines the villain’s approach to crime in Gotham City, as well as his relationship with Batman himself.

In HBO’s The Penguin, the reimagining has even taken it a step further, adjusting the Penguin’s real name Oswald Cobblepot to simply Oswald Cobb – with his nickname being ‘Oz.’ Showrunner Lauren LeFranc told USA Today that the Cobblepot name “means something” and with the Penguin they wanted to take it away so that the character would be “so desperate to achieve something if he started from a place of being without something.”

In another interview Zobel said the name change decision was done in collaboration with The Batman co-writer/director Matt Reeves (who is a producer on this spinoff show), adding that the change came because the Cobblepot name sounds implausible.

“I can’t 100% answer that because I don’t know everything in Matt Reeves’ mind, but largely, we all kinda felt like Cobblepot wasn’t a real person’s name,” Zobel told the Hollywood Handle. “The goal was to just find a real, rooted, more grounded name.”

If you recall, Reeves did the same in The Batman with the Riddler; his real name in that isn’t Edward Nygma, but instead the more plausible Edward Nashton, although that latter change did have a comic book source.

The Cobblepot name doesn’t actually come from comic books – it wasn’t introduced until years into the Penguin’s publication life, as his real name as revealed in the long-running Batman comic strip. According to a search of the US census circa 1950 (the most recent data publicly available, and conveniently close to the Penguin being named Oswald Cobblepot) finds not a single person in the United States with the last name ‘Cobblepot.’

The Penguin season 1 is airing now on HBO, and available streaming on Max.

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