Bruce Timm and long-time DC animated producer James Tucker explain the reasoning behind ‘Batman: Caped Crusader.’

bruce timm gender swap penguin batman lacks villains

So, according to Bruce Timm and James Tucker, instead of creating new characters, since Batman doesn’t have any good villains, the pair decided to gender-swap Penguin in the Batman: Caped Crusaders animated series, which also hails from Matt Reeves and J.J. Abrams.

The episode and the character are actually pretty decent, but after watching, I felt there was no need to change Penguin from Oswald to “Oswalda.”

It was actually a waste of a cool character. A character that should have been able to stand on her own and be her own character. And a character that should have been further developed.

Why not just make her a new character?

But of course, it’s all about the agenda, where it seems a lot of fans have turned their noses up at the series.

oswalda cobblepot batman caped crusader

What did Bruce Timm and James Tucker say?

Getting back to what Bruce Timm and James Tucker (long time WB DC animation producer) have to say about the Batman villains, they explained to The Emmy’s why they made the choice:

Timm: 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?”

Tucker: 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.

batman caped crusader harley quinn

Bruce Timm goes woke?

A rumor prior to the release of the series actually said Bruce Timm was going woke.

As we also saw, there was no need to race-bend Harley Quinn. She’s actually a cool Batman villain in the series, so why didn’t they just make her a new villain, too?

Worth a mention is the only romance in the series is also LGBTQ+ and it’s insinuated there might be some sort of threesome going on between Harley, Montoya, and Barbie. They also go out of their way to change the animation surrounding these characters to fit said agenda.

Batman: Caped Crusader streams on Prime Video. When it moved from Max to Prime Video, it came with a two season order, so Batman: Caped Crusader will at least be getting a Season 2.