Fine Feathered Finks / The Penquin’s a Jinx

Batman season 1 – Fine Feathered Finks / The Penquin’s a Jinx

Fine Feathered Finks – Burgess Meredith’s first appearance as The Penguin. Where he plans to con the Batman into plotting his crimes for him!

Fine Feathered Finks – January 19, 1966

The Penguin plots to manipulate Batman into inadvertently devising capers for him. Burgess Meredith’s first appearance as the tuxedoed, waddling, Penguin. Walter Burke and Lewis Charles as his henchmen.

Commissioner Gordon: That pompous waddling master of foul play. That criminal maestro of a thousand ubiquitous umbrellas.

The Penguin: Oh, great heavenly sunshades. I have it! It’s a fantastical scheme. It’s hatched, full blown. U-Day. U for Umbrella day. What a dazzling plot!

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The Penquin’s a Jinx – January 19 1966

Bruce Wayne escapes the Penguin’s deathtrap and returns to the Batcave. What he doesn’t know is that one of the Penguin’s clues, an umbrella, has a listening device.

With Leslie Parrish (Li’l Abner) as Dawn Robbins. She returns the next season as Mr. Freeze’s henchperson, Glacia Glaze.

Dawn Robbins: [posing for Funboy magazine] Oh, what a drag it is being a famous movie star and so rich. Why doesn’t anything exciting ever happen to me?

Editor’s note: be careful what you wish for …

Cast of characters

• Adam West (The Outlaws is Coming) … Batman
• Burt Ward (Batman the Movie) … Robin
• Alan Napier (The Mole People, House of Horrors) … Alfred
• Neil Hamilton (Tarzan the Ape Man, What Price Hollywood) … Commissioner Gordon
• Stafford Repp … Chief O’Hara
• Madge Blake … Mrs. Cooper
• Burgess Meredith (Clash of the Titans) … The Penguin
• David Lewis (The Apartment) … Warden Crichton
• Walter Burke (The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze) … Sparrow
• Lewis Charles … Hawkeye
• Alexander D’Arcy (Horrors of Spider Island, Man on a Tightrope) … Shop Owner
• Robert Phillips (The Dirty Dozen) … Cellmate
• Johnny Jacobs … Asst. Shop Owner

Trivia

• The story for this adventure is taken from Ed Herron’s Penguin story in Batman 169 (Feb 1965), “Partners in Plunder“. The only addition by the show’s producers was the sub-plot involving Hollywood star Dawn Robbins (Leslie Parrish).
• When Penguin realizes that he is being videotaped secretly, he addresses the camera as “Big Brother”, a reference to the dystopian novel 1984.
• Penguin’s hench birds are named Swallow, Swoop and Hawkeye, all bird-related monikers.