What’s Black and White and in Movies All Over?

Whichever side of the evolution-versus-intelligent design debate you come down on, one thing proponents from both camps can agree on is that there are just certain animals whose look, demeanor and way of life prove that either the random forces of the universe sometimes goof, or the Creator has a sense of humor. Aardvarks, duck-billed platypuses (platypi?) and the moose all fall into this category on the mammalian side, and when it comes to birds there are the ostrich, the kiwi and the humble penguin. Like short, waddling little butlers on ice, penguins have been a steady source of amusement for humans for centuries, and–as in the new Jim Carrey film Mr. Popper’s Penguins, debuting this week–Hollywood has made ample use of their inherent comical and occasional dramatic abilities over the years. Don’t believe me? Just grab a tin of sardines, park yourself on a comfortable ice floe, and consider the following:

Penguin Pool Murder – You generally don’t think of penguins and homicide in the same breath, but the residents of the title aquarium exhibit are less than thrilled when a dead body gets in the way of their frolicking in this 1932 RKO mystery, the first in series of light-hearted whodunits starring venerable character actress Edna May Oliver as spinster schoolteacher/sleuth Miss Hildegarde Withers (more about Oliver here).

The Terror of Tiny Town – No one is sure why one waddles its way through the sawed-off sagebrush action in this 1938 oddity, a B-Western with an all-midget cast, but the presence of a penguin at the local tonsorial parlor may well be one of the less unusual sight in a frontier drama where the cast rides Shetland ponies and walks under saloon doors (see more about this very strange film here).

The Man Who Came to Dinner – Whatever else penguins have going for them, they don’t necessarily make the best Christmas presents. That doesn’t stop Admiral Byrd from sending a crate full of the little fellas direct from the South Pole to acerbic radio commentator Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley), recuperating at an small-town Ohio household, in 1942’s film version of  the Kaufman/Hart stage hit.

My Favorite Blonde – 1942 was, all things considered, a pretty good year for penguins in movie comedies. This Bob Hope outing featured the funnyman playing one-half of a vaudeville act alongside a performing penguin named Percy. A call from Hollywood (where Percy will make $500 a week to Hope’s $30) sends the duo out West, but an encounter with British secret agent Madeleine Carroll, on the run from Nazi spies, turns the excursion into a slapstick cross-country chase.  Old Ski-snoot would later have another black-and-white encounter, courtesy of a desert mirage, in his 1952 western spoof Son of Paleface.

The Three Caballeros –  One of the stories in the Walt Disney company’s 1944 animated anthology salute to Latin America was that of Pablo the Hot-Blooded Penguin, who set out from his frozen Antarctic home to fulfill his dream of living on a tropical island. Far be it from me to suggest that Pablo’s look and exploits inspired Walter Lantz’s studio to come up with its own cold-eschewing character, Chilly Willy (see below) several years later, but there are some striking similarities.

Frigid Hare/8-Ball Bunny – Sly humor may have been his forte, but few animators could match Warner’s Chuck Jones when it came to drawing adorable, big-eyed characters (just try sitting through Feed the Kitty without tearing up near the end).  One of Jones’ cutest creations was this little top-hatted, ice cube-cryin’ fella, later to be known as Playboy Penguin, who needed a vacationing Bugs Bunny’s help to avoid a hungry Eskimo hunter (Exactly how an Eskimo got to the South Pole was never discussed) in the 1949 Merry Melody Frigid Hare. PP would return, this time as an ice show performer whom Bugs tries to return to his homeland, the following year in the Looney Tune 8-Ball Bunny.

Chilly Willy – Speaking of animated penguins, let us not forget this star of nearly three dozen theatrical shorts from 1953 to 1972 from the Walter Lantz studio, creators of fellow cartoon bird Woody Woodpecker. As mentioned earlier, Willy was a penguin with an aversion to cold weather, and his constant quest for some place to stay warm got him in trouble, usually with a wisecracking dog named Smedley. Master of animated mayhem Tex Avery, who worked for Lantz at Universal in the ’50s, once said, “There was nothing to it, no personality, no nothing…you couldn’t do anything with a little fuzzy wuzzy penguin! But the cartoons weren’t bad. I worked hard on them.”  The best example of this–one where Willy essentially plays a supporting role–was 1955’s Oscar-nominated The Legend of Rockabye Point. (Sorry, Tennesse Tuxedo fans; This article is about movie penguins only.)

Mary Poppins – They’re already wearing tuxedos, so it’s only logical that a quartet of penguins would serve as waiters for magical nanny Julie Andrews and her chimney sweep beau Dick Van Dyke in the beloved 1964 Disney translation of LP. Traver’s books. The quartet of cartoon critters also gets to join Van Dyke in a marvelous dance routine that seamlessly blends live action and animation.

Quick Before It Melts – A research outpost in the Antarctic was the offbeat locale for this 1965  MGM romantic comedy that starred Robert Morse, George Maharis, Anjanette Comer and, in his only screen appearance, Milton Fox. Who is Milton Fox, you ask? Why, he was a penguin who is trained to deliver the mail to the station’s residents. Let’s face it, even getting bills in the mail would be a lot more fun if they came from a penguin.

Batman/Batman Returns – To some people, penguins are more than merely a source of humor. To them, the flightless fowl are a way of life. Among their number is one Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, the umbrella-wielding supervillain who chose Penguin as his nom du crime and would regularly plague Batman and Robin in comic books, TV and, of course, motion pictures. Burgess Meredith would reprise his small-screen performances as the waddling Master of Fowl Play alongside fellow rogues Frank Gorshin (Riddler), Lee Meriwether (Catwoman) and Cesar Romero (Joker)–yet without any of his feathered counterparts–in the 1966 Batman feature. On the other hand (flipper?), Danny DeVito had a flock of birds–real penguins as well as dwarf actors in penguin costumes–accompany him as he offered a darker and more sinister take on the character, battling Michael Keaton and threatening to blow up Gotham City with a flock of missile-carrying birds, in 1992’s Batman Returns.

Cry of the Penguins – Based on the novel Forbush and the Penguins by Sleuth playwright Anthony Shaffer, this 1971 British drama starred John Hurt as a womanizing biology student who, to impress a waitress (Hayley Mills) he’s attracted to, signs on for a one-man scientific expedition to Antarctica, where he’s to spend six months studying penguins in their native habitat. At first unhappy with his assignment and his research subjects (“The wretched birds have been scattered over this benighted landscape like bits of black pepper”), Hurt comes to sympathize with the penguins’ struggle for survival, and eventually takes it upon himself to defend their nests and offspring from predatory skua gulls before he comes to terms with the “circle of life,” learning valuable lessons for his own existence.

Five Corners – What is a pair of penguins doing in the Bronx, circa 1964? Well, in Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley’s script for this 1988 seriocomedy, they’re Bronx Zoo residents who are stolen by unstable ex-con John Turturro and presented to pet shop worker Jodie Foster, who he tried to rape (the crime that sent him to prison) two years earlier,  as an apologetic gift. When Foster declines, the manic Turturro kills one of the kidnapped critters. Don’t worry, animal lovers: in the closing credits we read, “Many thanks to the Penguins in this film. They were treated most respectfully and no harm ever came to them in their work.”

Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers – The flesh-and-feather penguins that Batman fought may have been dangerous, but they weren’t necessarily criminals. The same cannot be said for Feathers McGraw, the baleful bird who worked his way into Wallace and Gromit’s house and–with the help of a pair of remote-controlled Techno Trousers–makes Wallace his unwitting accomplice in a daring diamond robbery in Nick Park’s 1993 clay animation comedy.

The Pebble and the Penguin– Did you know that male adélie penguins construct nests out of rocks, pebbles and other antarctic debris in order to attract a mate? Well, you did if you saw this 1995 animated feature, the precursor to the flock of penguin-heavy toons that followed over the next decade or so (see below), from the Don Bluth studio. An adélie named Hubie (voiced by Martin Short) sets out to win the she-bird of his dreams, but the actions of a jealous rival send poor Hubie into a fishing trawler’s nets and onto a wild oceanic odyssey where he meets another type of penguin, a rockhopper named Rocko (jim Belushi) who dreams of someday flying. All this, and songs by Barry Manilow, too.

Fight Club – “Slide!” So says insomniac narrator Edward Norton’s ice cave-dwelling “power animal” during an blink-and-you-miss-it early scene in this two-fisted 1999 tale, a precursor of sorts to the mind-boggling surrealism that follows.

50 First Dates – If moviegoers bought Drew Barrymore’s short-term memory loss gimmick in this 2004 romcom, then I guess it’s no surprise they also bought Adam Sandler as a womanizing marine biologist living in Hawaii. Among Sandler’s animal friends at the aquatic theme park where he works is a penguin named Willie, whom he dresses up in a miniature Hawaiian shirt and poses in an effort to impress the ever-forgetful Barrymore, with less-than-successful (and down right dangerous) results. Could Willie have been Sandler’s attempts to make nice with the birds after having one of them serve as his hallucinatory nemesis in Billy Madison?

March of the Penguins – Sure, there are plenty of shots of cute-to-the-nth-degree baby birds to be had. But I pity the poor parents who took their young children to French filmmaker Luc Jacquet’s Oscar-winning 2005 documentary expecting to see a warm and fuzzy nature romp, only to find this alternately beautiful, harrowing and touching chronicle of a colony of Antarctic emperor penguins and their fight for life–including the perilous annual title trek–in one of the world’s most hostile environments. Still, it could have been worse for moviegoing families: they could have shown the kids the risqué 2007 parody Farce of the Penguins, written and directed by co-star Bob Saget.

Madagascar/Happy Feet/Surf’s Up – While The Pebble and the Penguin didn’t make much of a splash (sorry) when it played theaters in the mid-’90s, the 2000s have seen a black-and-white bonanza of animated fowl joke, sing, dance and surf their way onto the big screen. Mechanically-minded miscreants Skipper, Rico, Private and Kowalski joined a bunch of their fellow Central Park Zoo residents in a transcontinental break-out plan in 2005’s Madagascar and its follow-up, Madagacar: Escape 2 Africa, three years later, eventually gaining their own Nickelodeon TV spin-off, The Penguins of Madagascar. 2006 saw a tap-happy little fella named Mumble use his terpsichorean skills to find true love and send an environmental message to mankind in director George Miller’s Academy Award-winner Happy Feet, which featured the voices of Elijah Wood, Robin Williams, Hugh Jackman and Brittany Murphy (look for a sequel to come out later this year).  And while it’s common knowledge that penguins are expert swimmers, their waveriding skills reached new heights–with the help of some bird-sized boards, in the Surf’s Up. Shia LeBeouf, Jeff Bridges, Zooey Deschanel and Jon Heder lent their voices to this 2007 toon effort.

And, of course, let us not forget to give a special “two flippers up” shout-out to one of the cinema’s most unusual penguin-related scenes: the sports arena kitchen battle-to-the-death between stadium fire marshal Jean Claude Van Damme, out to stop crooks who have taken the Vice President hostage, and a hit woman dressed in the costume of the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot in 1995’s hockey-themed actioner Sudden Death.