Filming a show like Batman was such a delight; even the nastiest of villains had a great time behind the scenes. Burgess Meredith had established himself as a skillful and accomplished actor. He had previously appeared in films like Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Story of G.I. Joe (1945).

But away from the silver screen, Meredith gained a new reputation on television. With his top hat and monocle, Meredith was the fowl (pun intended) villain, The Penguin, in the 1960s television adaptation of Batman. “It was a riotous experience,” said Meredith, according to The Official Batman Batbook, by Joel Eisner. “Everyone had a good time working together.”

There was one aspect of filming the series that fell short of Meredith’s expectations. His character was a heavy smoker, though the actor had given up the habit years earlier. Smoking on screen was no easy task, as Meredith explained. Luckily, he came up with an entertaining way of covering his tracks.

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“During the middle sixties, I had already given up smoking for twenty to twenty-five years, but I had to smoke all the time as the Penguin,” said Meredith. “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 ‘quck, quack’ to cover it. Actually, it was a pretty unlikely noise for the Penguin to make. I sounded more like a duck! 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.”