Burgess Meredith was the first actor to play The Penguin in live action, and the first performer to utilize the villain’s signature quack. Before the Adam West “Batman” TV series, the Penguin wasn’t depicted as a big quacker; after all, penguins don’t quack – they squawk and chirp
Because the DC Comics TV show – broadcast on ABC from 1966 to 1968 — only loosely adapted Batman and Robin’s (Burt Ward) adventures from the comics, Meredith had room to add his own ideas to the character.
“During the middle ’60s I had already given up smoking for 20 to 25 years, but I had to smoke all the time as the Penguin,” he explained in “The Official Batman Batbook.” “The smoke would get caught in my throat. Since I didn’t want to constantly ruin takes by coughing out loud — which the smoke forced me to do — I developed the Penguin’s ‘quack, quack’ to cover it.”
The Batman cast apparently ad-libbed a lot
Burgess Meredith’s quaking idea was also helpful for “Batman” writers. “The quack got so famous, though, that whenever the writers couldn’t think of anything funny to put in their scripts, they’d write a ‘quack, quack’ for me,” he added.
Meredith also revealed that the entire cast did an “awful lot of ad-libbing.” His approach to improvising some of his lines was simple: “Mine usually came when the Penguin would insult Batman by calling him ‘Batboob’ or ‘Bat-this’ or ‘Bat-that.'”
The 1966 villain was very different to Colin Farrell’s recent gritty take on the gangster in 2022’s “The Batman.” Farrell starred in his own critically acclaimed spin-off series, and there’s already talk of “The Penguin” Season 2 on HBO Max.
Leave a Reply