Villains
At about the 41st minute of this Con panel Jeff Davis, creator of Teen Wolf, observes that:
We like to create bad guys who are fully dimensional; bad guys who actually believe that they are the heroes of their own story.
Villains are crucial to the success of tv and film dramas, especially the superhero-based ones, whether derived from comics or modern mythologies (such as Buffy). Buffy had great villains (the Mayor being my favourite). The villains in Teen Wolf work too.
Part of the fun is having an ambiguous reaction to the villain. Heath Ledger's Joker was splendidly creepy and chilling in The Dark Knight. Sir Ian McKellen's Magneto provided an insidious classy gravitas to the X-Men movies. Tom Hiddleston's Loki was good charismatic wicked fun in Thor and The Avengers. Which is no doubt why he is returning in Thor: the Dark World.
The Joker in The Dark Knight was a psychopath pretending to have reasons apart from joy in destruction. But you got where Magneto was coming from in the X-Men movies and, as for Loki in Thor, he had a point about Thor (as Odin dramatically conceded) and then had to cope with one damned thing after another. Part of what I liked about Snow White and the Huntsman is that you so got where Charlize Theron's Evil Queen was coming from. The commitment of Bruce Wayne's mentor "Ducard" (played by Liam Neeson) in Batman Begins to a notion of the good that had no connection to actual people is a form of villainy that has a particular resonance to the evils of our time. But fits in very well with Jeff Davis's notion about the villain being a hero in their own story.
Part of why I enjoyed the Fantastic Four TV series as a youngster is that I thought Doctor Doom was rather cool, in an evil sort of way. He was uber-cool, in an evil sort of way, when played by Julian McMahon in The Fantastic Four and The Fantastic 4: the Rise of the Silver Surfer.
In 2009, celebrating 75 years of comics, IGN published a list of the 100 top comic villains. It's top 10 villain list is:
(1) Magneto
(2) Joker
(3) Doctor Doom
(4) Lex Luthor
(5) Galactus
(6) Darkseid
(7) Ra's Al Ghul
(8) Loki
(9) Dark Phoenix
(10) Kingpin.
All of whom have had major role in film block-busters and/or long-running TV series. Though my vote for creepiest villains are both in books (in The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold and the Ukiah Oregon books by Wen Spencer).
So, who is your favourite villain, super or otherwise?
We like to create bad guys who are fully dimensional; bad guys who actually believe that they are the heroes of their own story.
Villains are crucial to the success of tv and film dramas, especially the superhero-based ones, whether derived from comics or modern mythologies (such as Buffy). Buffy had great villains (the Mayor being my favourite). The villains in Teen Wolf work too.
Part of the fun is having an ambiguous reaction to the villain. Heath Ledger's Joker was splendidly creepy and chilling in The Dark Knight. Sir Ian McKellen's Magneto provided an insidious classy gravitas to the X-Men movies. Tom Hiddleston's Loki was good charismatic wicked fun in Thor and The Avengers. Which is no doubt why he is returning in Thor: the Dark World.
The Joker in The Dark Knight was a psychopath pretending to have reasons apart from joy in destruction. But you got where Magneto was coming from in the X-Men movies and, as for Loki in Thor, he had a point about Thor (as Odin dramatically conceded) and then had to cope with one damned thing after another. Part of what I liked about Snow White and the Huntsman is that you so got where Charlize Theron's Evil Queen was coming from. The commitment of Bruce Wayne's mentor "Ducard" (played by Liam Neeson) in Batman Begins to a notion of the good that had no connection to actual people is a form of villainy that has a particular resonance to the evils of our time. But fits in very well with Jeff Davis's notion about the villain being a hero in their own story.
Part of why I enjoyed the Fantastic Four TV series as a youngster is that I thought Doctor Doom was rather cool, in an evil sort of way. He was uber-cool, in an evil sort of way, when played by Julian McMahon in The Fantastic Four and The Fantastic 4: the Rise of the Silver Surfer.
In 2009, celebrating 75 years of comics, IGN published a list of the 100 top comic villains. It's top 10 villain list is:
(1) Magneto
(2) Joker
(3) Doctor Doom
(4) Lex Luthor
(5) Galactus
(6) Darkseid
(7) Ra's Al Ghul
(8) Loki
(9) Dark Phoenix
(10) Kingpin.
All of whom have had major role in film block-busters and/or long-running TV series. Though my vote for creepiest villains are both in books (in The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold and the Ukiah Oregon books by Wen Spencer).
So, who is your favourite villain, super or otherwise?