[This comes from a conversation I had with Ajax about Spike's redemption on Buffy. For the record, I am not against bad guys staying bad. All I said was that there is room in the world for story for pure evil bad guys and bad guys who seek redemption. True to his all-or-nothing fashion, Ajax put his money where his mouth is and made a list to mock me. However, he did the list in the right order and he supplied his own pictures, so at this point I'm ready to have his love child.]The Evil That (Some) Men Do: Ajax’s Top Ten Favorite Villains (who stayed evil) and (cough cough snicker snicker) Reformed Villains (who did not)
First, the Pure Evil:
10. The Big Bad Wolf: In the version I grew up with, BBW didn’t just settle for the basket of Grandma’s goodies. The woodsman cut both Red Riding Hood and Grandma from the stomach of the wolf. That’s hardcore.
9. Snidely Whiplash: I swear it’s all in the name. Dudley Do-Right is a hero, and Snidely was meant to tie women to railroad tracks.
8. Iago: Othello’s sidekick, not the parrot. Though Gilbert Gottfried is pretty evil… But seriously, Iago was the trusty sidekick who betrayed and misled the Moor and his wife, Desdemona, leading to their destruction, and ultimately to his as well.
7. Mr. Burns: Stealing puppies to make a suit, the sun-blocker, a teddy-bear named Bobo. The man’s evil knows no limits.
6. Gollum: It takes a special kind of concentrated animosity and malevolence to cross Mordor twice, just to bite off someone’s finger and get his precious back.
5. Dr. Moriarty: Holmes’ foe, not the guy from Law and Order. Holmes, the Victorian Crimefighting Deus Ex Machina, needed a villain capable enough to defeat him, and Conan-Doyle made Moriarty one.
4. Invader Zim: I have never seen anyone undertake the subjugation of the primitive peoples of earth with such utter and complete joy.
3. The Bad/Angel Eyes: The Lee Van Cleef character from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Not everyone has prison-band musical accompaniment when they’re torturing someone.
2. The Black Knight: From Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail. Violent, imposing, and not the sort to let the amputation of the odd limb get in the way of doing evilness.
1. The Devil: From the most loved right hand man of ‘the man’, to the personification of all evil. He wrecked the whole Garden of Eden program with the humans. Wagered over poor old Lot. And had the nerve, the moxy, the pure-d stones to offer J.C. the whole world in exchange for a little kneeling. You think, over the big cosmic chessboard, they ever talk about the old days, patching things up, bygones being bygones, that sort of thing? Naah.
And the Wishy-Washy:
10. The Beast: He had a pretty good thing going, big house, singing and dancing servants/housewares. Then Beauty had to come along and put bows in his hair and stuff.
9. The Grinch: One little Who-girl, and we go from a heart two sizes too small to Father Grinchmas.
8. Ebenezer Scrooge: Three ghosts, and the greatest miser of all time is terrified into a profound positive life change.
7. The Operative/Shepard Book: Anyone who doesn’t think these two are the before and after pictures of the same person hasn’t bothered to watch Firefly, or Serenity.
6. Leon: From The Professional. A perfect, silent assassin starts doing John Wayne impressions for a 12 year old girl, who does Maddonna impressions back.
5. Viscount Valmont: French Aristocrat Super-Playa goes all soft and mooshy after his conquest of a proper, married woman. Loses in a duel to Keanu Reeves (back in the Bill-and-Ted days, eons before he became Matrix-Boy), and dispenses helpful advice while bleeding to death.
4. King Kong: A blonde actress brings a big strong monkey down to lemur size.
3. Spike/Angel: A blonde slayer brings two big strong monkeys down to lemur size. Angel was bad, but got all depressed when he got his soul back; It wasn’t until he fell in love with Buffy that he actually started being a white-hat. And Spike… well… I guess it just goes to say that if you’re around the same irritating someone long enough, chemistry develops whether you like it or not.
2. Hannibal Lector: Handcuffed to Clarice Starling, Lector opts to cut off his own hand, rather than hers in order to make his escape. Hey, for a guy who’ll eat your liver with beans and wine, that’s love, baby.
1. Darth Vader: The man who gave us the term ‘come to the dark side’, Darth was about the coolest villain ever. Then he had to go sacrifice himself and save his whiny son from being electro-fried. Sigh.
Enjoy,
