On Villains... Part 2:

A while back I talked about some of the most influential love-to-hate-em villains of my childhood:  Murdoc from TVs MacGyver and Lord Sinister from Lego: Adventurers.

Today I'm going to cover a couple more bad guys from my formative years.  Let's take a look.

When I was a kid there were basically two kinds of people: Those who were reading Harry Potter and those who were reading A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Me and my siblings fell into the Series of Unfortunate Events camp.

In the first of thirteen books, the three Baudelaire children become the three Baudelaire orphans.  After discovering they are the heirs to an enormous fortune they are thrust into the clutches of their evil relative and legal guardian Count Olaf.

Count Olaf spends this and the next 12 books trying time and time again to steal the Baudelaire fortune through any means necessary.  Impersonation, Hypnotism, framing our heroes for murder, Sending them down a rocky mountain cliffside road in an out of control carnival wagon...

The list goes on and on.

I haven't seen much of the 1914 cliffhanger serial 'Perils of Pauline' but I imagine it's melodramatic formula had some influence on 'Series of Unfortunate Events'.  Plot synopsis?  Pauline is an heiress set to inherit a fortune.  However, she decides to travel the world before she settles down.  Mr. Koerner, who is in charge of handling all of Pauline's money, decides she should have an 'accident' while she's off adventuring.  Somehow Pauline escapes or is rescued from each trap he sets.

I wasn't really into serials yet when I was into 'Series of Unfortunate Events', but looking back on it, the cliffhanger serial was an obvious inspiration for the books as well as the 2004 movie.

Book 4, "The Miserable Mill" involves tying an individual to a sawmill, which is one of the things everyone thinks of when they think off serials an melodramas, although the only serial I can think of that uses this as a plot device is 'G-men vs the Black Dragon'.  As the book progressed, the stories began to end in cliffhangers, such as the aforementioned wagon ride from 'The Carnivorous Carnival'.

This made following the books as they were being published a lot of fun.  I remember waiting so impatiently for the next installment.

The movie adds a cliffhanger with a sequence where Count Olaf locks our heroes in a car parked on the railway tracks.  I only really started thinking about the books being patterned after 'Perils of Pauline' when I re-watched the movie awhile back.

Jim Carrey plays Count Olaf in the movie, and he has a knack for stealing the show making you cheer every time he's on screen, even though he's the bad guy.  He does the same thing as Riddler in 'Batman Forever'.  Count Olaf is an over-the-top humorous in the books, but Carrey's unusual mannerisms turn it up to eleven.

Our next villain for today is Professor Ratigan from the 1986 Disney movie 'The Great Mouse Detective'.  In this parody of Sherlock Holmes, Ratigan is less like the Moriarty of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories, and more like a cross between Snidely Whiplash and the classic Bond movie villain.  You know how in a James Bond movie the bad guy has pet Sharks, Piranhas, or Alligators?  Ratigan feeds people to a giant cat.

Ratigan has crafted an elaborate plot to usurp the mouse queen's rule over England.  But first he has to get his nemesis, the heroic Basil of Baker-street, out of the picture.  For this purpose he has crafted an elaborate Rue Goldberg machine that involves a phonograph record that triggers an elaborate deathtrap when as the song plays.  Oh, and did I mention that the song is 'Goodbye so Soon,' the best (in my humble opinion) villain song in Disney history?  Vincent Price does the voice Ratigan.  Everything is better with Vincent Price.


So, this is probably less of a 'Geekboy's Favorite Villains' post as it is a 'The Origin of Geekboy's obsession with Cliffhanger Serials' post.  Oh well.  Tell me about your favorite childhood villains in the comments.