Tuesday, May 3, 2016

On Villains...

 

We love to hate 'em.

I watch the show Grimm.  In the first season, Adalind Schade made my skin crawl.  By the end of season two, I was cheering every time she was on screen.  Sure she was evil, but she was also really cool and funny!  I realized that I loved to hate her.  And I loved loving to hate her.  She's one of my favorite characters now.

I've been doing lots of research on the great villains of classic British crime novels.  Ian Fleming's Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu, and Sapper's Carl and Irma Peterson of James Bond, Fu Manchu, and Bulldog Drummond fame.

My fascination with villains makes sense when you think about it.  I read comics, and great Superheroes need to have great villains.  Captain America has The Red Skull, Daredevil has both Kingpin and Bullseye, and of course Batman has Joker.

But my fascination with the arch nemesis goes back further than my reading of comic books.  Here are two of the first villains I loved hating.


First we have Lord Sinister.


Created by the Lego company in 1998, Lord Sinister was the primary antagonist for Johnny Thunder, Pippin Reed and Dr. Killroy of 'The Adventurers' toys and online comics.  Lord Sinister was know by different names over the years, and also depending on the country the stories were published in (All of the characters went through name changes.  In some countries, Pippin Reed and Dr. Killroy were know  as Gail Storm and Dr. Lightning).  Lord Sinister's aliases include Baron von Barron, and Mr. Hates.  I came onboard rather late in the series, with 2003's 'Orient Expedition,' So He'll always be 'Lord Sinister' to me.

Johnny Thunder is a thrill seeking Adventurer and Treasure Hunter from Australia.  He, Dr. Killroy, and Miss Pippin Reed, a photographer for World Magazine, travel to exotic locals in search of treasure to 'Put in a museum, where everyone can see it!'  While searching for treasure they usually found ways to protect the downtrodden and right wrongs and all that good stuff.  But you can bet that Lord Sinister will be close behind, allowing our heroes to do all the hard work, just to steal the treasure out from under their noses and put in his private collection.  Or at least he'll try.  Usually he'll end up triggering some kind of booby-trap, allowing our heroes to nab the treasure.




So, Lord Sinister isn't the most evil villain in the world.  He's a Snidely Whiplash type who wouldn't be out of place in a silent melodrama.  But he was a lot of fun and will always have a special place in my heart.



The other is Murdoc, Played by Michael Des Barres, in the hit 80's TV show MacGyver.  I was pretty much MacGyver's biggest fan, ever since I was first introduced to the show somewhere between the ages of 9 and 12 all the way through my teen years.  Murdoc was introduced as a master-of-disguise assassin, working for the organization-of-evil H.I.T. who has a vendetta against Mac and his buddy Peter Thornton.  He 'dies' at the end of every episode he's in, but is always back for the next season.  He's been blown up, fallen off cliffs, submerged in underground lakes of boiling oil, and fallen into snake pits.  Usually his last words are "MAC-GYYYY-VAAAAAAAA---!" shouted at the top of his lungs.





Murdoc's character evolves quite a bit over the course of the show.  He goes from from maniac-with-a-flame-thrower in Season 3, to a tormented Phantom of the Opera type character in the Season 4 episode 'Cleo Rocks'.  He and MacGyver even call a truce and team up in Season 5's 'Halloween Knights'.

You don't want Murdoc to win and kill MacGyver, per say, but you really don't want MacGyver to ever CATCH Murdoc either.  You like that their never ending chess-match is a stalemate.  And really, that's the way it should be.


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