Villains

The Saturday morning cartoon villains of my childhood did NOT prepare me for the villainous monsters of adulthood.

Okay, except for maybe Snidely Whiplash. He’s obsessed with tying young women to railroad tracks. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious compelling motivation for these murder attempts. Possibly – and, mind you, this is just conjecture, our boy Snidely is an incel. He’s socially incompetent and can’t get laid. Essentially, Mr. Whiplash is caught in an infinity loop. He’s awkward, tactless, oafish, rude, and unable to learn or self-correct his absence of civility. This leads to him being angry 24/7 which manifests in tying women to railroad tracks.

Metaphorically speaking, from what I see online and in the news, Snidely seems to be a spot on depiction of dangerous incel trolls (AKA villains).

Then there's Underdog’s Simon Bar Sinister. He's an evil scientist who wanted to take over the world (don’t they all). He’s power and money-mad which seems to be what most real life villains have in common. See Musk, Bezos, Trump (there’s just too many crimes to list here), etc.

In the episode "Go Snow," Bar Sinister screams out "I want money and power and money and power and money and power and money and power!!!."  

While Bezos and Musk aren’t actual scientists like Simon, they do like to playact with Space X and Blue Origin. Musk wants to colonize Mars. Why? I suspect he wants to make an entire planet just for white people. Also? He’s read too much Ray Bradbury, Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Bezo’s goal is to make space more accessible to his fellow Richie Rich assholes – space tourism.

Fearless Leader, from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, is a strict and ruthless dictator. Although his spies (Boris and Natasha) have ersatz Russian accents, he seems more of a World War II Nazi knockoff.

Fearless Leader’s farthest off from our current, homegrown US crop of villains. I mean, look at our crew. MAYBE Kegseth fits the bill. He’s neatly dressed but the man’s obvs sweating booze every time he’s seen on camera and the amount of hair product he’s sporting could cover all the contestants in a Miss Universe contest. He’s got zero discipline and NO stage presence. Fer fuck’s sake, the man was some kind of teevee presenter – you’d think he’d be able to stand behind a podium and not look and sound like a scared junior high school kid giving a book report. Oh wait…he’s from Fox Entertainment. Nevermind…that explains it. 

Then there’s Noodles Romanoff, of N.A.S.T.Y. (the National Association of Spies, Traitors, and Yahoos) from the Roger Ramjet cartoon. I’d forgotten all about this ‘toon until now. DAMN it was good – so tart, arch, and incisive.

Along with Romanoff and his gang, Roger also has to contend with some lanky alien robots, the Solenoids … and their repeated efforts to invade the planet in assorted ridiculous ways (in one episode, they begin kidnapping all the Miss America contestants, who “were disappearing faster than co-eds at a Dartmouth weekend”).  (source) 

Maybe there aren’t any bad guys like Noodles on today’s scene? Maybe that’s a good thing because it seems he’s the dude who put the wise in wise guy.