Kowalski

The tallest of the penguins, Kowalski is second-in-command, forms plans for the group and usually takes notes for Skipper. When Skipper is absent, he takes charge and his rank is First Lieutenant. He has blue eyes and tends to over-analyze situations.
Often formulating plans for the group, Kowalski is a loyal supporter of his leader, Skipper. Kowalski had escaped the zoo with the other penguins, but was promptly captured and put into a crate for transfer with his comrades. The crates were all placed on a ship bound for Africa, where all the creatures from the zoo would be kept in a wildlife preserve. While in the crate, Kowalski confessed that he could not read (he said the words on the side of the box were an "older code", in slight reference to Return of the Jedi) and asked another transferee, a chimpanzee named Phil, to read the words on the crate. As soon as this was done, the four penguins headed to the ship's bridge, knocked out the crew and captain, bound them up, and Kowalski plotted the ship's course to Antarctica.
He is the technician of the group and always has his notepad (and an abacus in the animated series). While being able to formulate plans and invent things (such as a rocket ship out of a trashcan and fireworks, a futuristic rotary saw blade made of energy and multiple random objects, or an intelligence sucking machine from just a cardboard box, a magnet, and a vacuum) he is shown to have a bit of difficulty deducing simpler machines. At the end of "Needle Point", it is revealed that he has an irrational fear of dentists, which is peculiar in that, as even Private soon states after Kowalski runs off, penguins do not have teeth. He seems to also spout nearly or completely nonsensical words, such as, "The moo cow may have a chocolate marshmallow", or "I'll be a bicycle cream cone", whenever either hit incredibly hard (as he did when body checked by a giant rat during a hockey game) or when shocked severely (as by Officer X's stun gun). He screamed "Galileo Galilei" when he got his injection during "Needle Point". He also loves candy.
In the series he is shown to be intelligent but it is not as apparent in the films (e.g. in Madagascar he does not know how to read, in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa he states that the paper plane would help them fly back to New York and he does not understand that the fuel indicator was indicating that fuel is finished, and in Penguins of Madagascar he wrongly calculated that they arrived in Dublin, Ireland, when in reality they arrived in Shanghai). He does most of his calculations on an abacus, although he was briefly in possession of a calculator that was destroyed. He is in love with a dolphin called Doris and recorded a poem for her on DVD which highlighted her apparent non-interest in him in the "Hot Ice" episode. (She was first mentioned in "Gone in a Flash" with a photo being shown.)
It has been noted that his inventions have a habit of horribly backfiring regardless of his best intentions. Some of his most significant blunders include: a time machine (or 'Chronotron') that triggered a temporal rift that nearly destroyed reality and resulted in three of Kowalski appearing in one place (noticeably, the first Kowalski from the future wanted to stop the ray and the second one wanted it to keep working); a ray designed to return spoiled food to its fresher state that turned Skipper into a chick; a mind-switching machine (which backfired in its first use because he forgot to take the warm-blooded/cold-blooded conflict into account when switching Rico with Roger); a device called the "Chronocurbulator" that stops time that left time seemingly permanently frozen when it broke down; a helmet that granted the user the power of telekinesis; an invisibility ray (or 'Transparent Matter-Maker', called 'Transmatterer' for short due to copyright issues) that turned itself invisible before being set to randomly fire; a mind-reading machine that quickly burnt out due to lack of processing power; a cloning machine that relied on the Higgs Boson particle for power; nanites that could reprogram other machines (these were programmed to not harm a penguin, but this backfired when they locked the penguins in their habitat to 'protect' them); and the artificially engineered life-form 'Jiggles', who consumed the zoo's fruit and nearly destroyed the zoo when it grew to monstrous size. In Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted, an invention of his called a "nucular" reactor (sic) is used.
As a result of his inventions, he comes off as unhinged, especially when he becomes overly defensive about what he does. Outright called a mad scientist by Skipper, Kowalski often creates things in order to "show them" and has, on few occasions, hidden his devices. In "I Know Why The Caged Bird Goes Insane", he becomes increasingly derailed as the episode goes on after being temporarily bound to a wheelchair, mostly because the nursery he was being held in was right next door to the Science Expo, and he makes a few attempts to break out.
Kowalski can play a banjo and sing as seen in the episode "Concrete Jungle Survival".
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