My favorite version of the Penguin remains the one that scared me when I was seven years old. He had webbed hands, spewed black bile from between his teeth, and had a penchant for biting off the noses of insufficiently servile yes men. He was, of course, Danny DeVito’s Penguin in Tim Burton’s still bafflingly original Batman Returns, and he had absolutely nothing to do with his comic book counterpart other than a name, a monocle, and a penchant for fancy cigarette filters.

I’m reminded of my initial revulsion—and disappointment that he had nothing to do with the character I saw first on Batman: The Animated Series and as played by Burgess Meredith in the 1960s’ Batman camp classic before that—while predictably seeing the initial online criticism of the news that Minnie Driver has been cast as Oswalda Cobbeplot in a revisionist interpretation of the...