Old School Evil - Animated Antagonists Through the Decades

It’s time to Rediscover Old School—Old School Evil, that is! Old School Evil is the series of novels I write, inspired by cartoon villains. While my wheelhouse is mostly in the 80s with the prevalence of over-the-top, colorful bad guys like Megatron and Skeletor, I’m a fan of all animation, going all the way back to Steamboat Willie and Rocky and Bullwinkle. I wanted to take the time to write about the evolution of celluloid suspects and key-frame criminals. I’m looking specifically at the villains that showed up on television and their precursors that appeared in theatrical shorts like Merrie Melodies.

Pete image courtesy of By Disney - Duckipedia, Fair use

One of the first recurring bad guys is one that still shows up plenty—Pete. This cat, who used to be a bear, attained infamy in 1928 opposite Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie. But he got his start before that, appearing first in Alice Solves the Puzzle in 1925 and facing off against Oswald the Lucky Rabbit before Mickey’s creation. Pete has the distinction of being the oldest Disney character still appearing in current cartoons.

Following Steamboat Willie came another nautical hero, Popeye, and his eternal nemesis, Bluto. Besides the similar seaside theme, Bluto, sometimes going as Brutus, had a look reminiscent of Pete, being a bigger and gruffer character than our smaller protagonists. Bluto made his premier appearance on the silver screen in 1933. 

Bluto image courtesy of By Segar

In the 1940s, a few other animated antagonists made their first showing, these in the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies camp. A character called Egghead played the protagonist in a number of cartoons and slowly evolved into Elmer Fudd (though some people state they were two distinct characters). A Bugs Bunny precursor shows up in one of Elmer’s first official appearances (Elmer’s Candid Camera), and subsequent shows starring both would switch the hero and villain to the pair we know today. Yosemite Sam appeared a few years later, and Wile E. Coyote and Marvin the Martian followed shortly after. 

Elmer Fudd/Yodemite Sam image courtesy of Daily Mail

In the 1950s, we got our first American animated show created specifically for television—Crusader Rabbit. Originally, Crusader had a different villain in every episode, but later, they started reappearing. His recurring antagonists were Dudley Nightshade and Whetstone Whiplash. Whetstone also went by Sternwheel Jackson sometimes, and as each of the characters had similar looks—tall, dressed in black, and variously styled mustaches perfect for twirling—it wasn’t a surprise when at the end of a later episode, Dudley called the others his aliases. When Crusader Rabbit’s creator, Jay Ward, produced The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, he brought along the bad guy, renaming him Snidely Whiplash as his protagonist, Dudley Do-Right, stole his first name (Rocky and Bullwinkle had their own villains in the Russian spies, Boris and Natasha). 

Snidely Whiplash Image courtesy of Jay Ward/Universal Studios

Hanna-Barbera Cartoons dominated the 1960s. Many of their early shows—Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw, and Flintstones to name a few - didn’t feature villains, outside of the lanky mustachioed villain Dirk Dastardly (modelled similarly to Snidely Whiplash), who even had his own villainous sidekick dog, Muttley, in the Wacky Racers cartoon, and the Dalton Brothers who faced off against Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw’s western lawmen persona’s. So few villains existed in this group of cartoons that when Laff-A-Lympics was created in 1977, the team of bad guys called the Really Rottens was almost entirely made up of characters created just for that show (Dirk and Muttley were supposed to appear, but similarly styled characters Dread Baron and Mumbly were used because of ownership issues, and three of the Dalton Brothers from Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw appeared as well but with substantial redesigns).

The Really Rottens image courtesy of Villains Wiki

Starting with Johnny Quest in 1964, the Hanna-Barbera cartoons became more action oriented. Gone were the days of the mustache twirling, goofy vaudeville villain. Instead, we got actual threats, bad guys that wanted to rule the world with crime syndicates or destroy our heroes with robots. While most of the villains in these cartoons only appeared one time, there were some that made multiple showings. Jonny’s most prominent recurring villain was criminal mastermind Dr. Zin. 

From left to right: Zorak, Creature King, Metallus,
Moltar, Brak, and Black Widow/Spider-Woman.
Image courtesy of Spaceghost Wiki

Space Ghost had Zorak, Brak, Creature King, Black Widow/Spider-Woman, Moltar, and Metallus, who all made repeat appearances in the final two episodes, creating the Council of Doom under Black Widow’s leadership as she appeared the most. Other characters who made cameos in those final episodes received their new cartoons with their own bad guys. The Herculoids, Shazzan, Moby Dick and Mighty Mightor had similar rogue galleries with a few recurring adversaries each. Birdman and the Galactic Trio premiered around the same time, and followed a similar pattern on onetime and recurring villains, but this time many of the bad guys were working for an organization called F.E.A.R.

One particular brand of bad guys ruled the animated airwaves of the 1970s. At the end of the previous decade, we met the costumed crooks of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! As the bad guys in these shows were ordinary people donning sometimes scary, sometimes silly outfits, we lost the huge threats like Moltar and his molten men wanting to take over the universe. Instead of being thwarted by superheroes with laser gauntlets, these losers got unmasked by teenagers and a talking dog before being carted off to jail by local sheriffs. While there was never a repeat appearance by a thief, the person under the mask was never as important as the costume itself. 

Scooby-Doo villains image courtesy of Reddit

With the success of Scooby Doo, similar shows flooded the 1970s, with more disguised ne’er-do-wells being investigated by groups of teens and an anthropomorphic animal or vehicle. The egregious copies included Clue Club, with two talking dogs; Goober and the Ghost Chasers, with a talking dog that can turn invisible; Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels; and the Funky Phantom. It’s no surprise, among the multiple rip-offs and imitators all created by the same animation studio, that we saw similar costumes crop up all the time, but never were they exactly the same. As Hanna-Barbera made more shows, sometimes the villains would be elevated to mad scientists using high-tech devices or genetic monsters, like in Josie and the Pussycats and Jabberjaw, but they weren’t treated as serious threats like in Space Ghost or the Herculoids.

Once we hit the 80s, villains had changed again, with every cartoon having its own dedicated bad guys. Transformers had Megatron and the Decepticons, He-Man had Skeletor, GI Joe had Cobra and its Commander. It’s easy to see why these cartoons had adversaries that made appearances in every episode. After the FCC abolished the rule that cartoons could not be used to advertise for toys, it opened the floodgates for animated commercials and their requisite action figures.

80s Cartoon Villains from my Bad Guy Beatdown series

With so many cartoons, there’s no real dominant format or style. They fit all categories from the ones that came before. Some villains, like Dr. Claw, came across the same way Snidely Whiplash did decades before him—we never saw his face, but it’s easy to picture him with the same giant mustache. Many villains held similar traits to the bad guys that fought against Space Ghost and Birdman—colorful designs and armies of robotic goons. About the only thing they all had in common in the 1980s was their repertoire of alliterative insults (i.e., bumbling boob) that they slew at their enemies and minions alike.

After this era, villains evolved to fit any category you could think of. Since many of the cartoons in the 1990s were based on comic books like X-Men and Batman, the villains ranged from sadistic to sympathetic. Some kept the maniacal qualities of the 80s, the ones that wanted to rule the world with no real motivation, but many were given deeper desires based on expanded backstories. Even villains that appeared in the 80s and returned for reboots and sequels were given further development. Megatron, the Predacon leader in Beast Wars, while not the same Megatron that appeared in the original Transformers series, received more complex motivations than his predecessor. Video courtesy of MRWIGLEY's YouTube.

As the years rolled on, villains haven’t really changed much from the wide range that existed in the 1990s. At this point, there were just so many bad guys about that they eclipsed everything that came before them. Still, many of those original bad guys have a charm that can’t be replicated today, and others have been resurrected over and over again with fancier looks and tweaked origins.

One of the mottos I used when coming up with villains in Old School Evil was “New bad guys, same bad plans.” It seems to be the way with cartoons that you can’t keep a good bad guy down. If you're interested in checking out my Old School Evil novels based on the villains of the 1980s, the third book of my Old School Evil trilogy, Our Darkest Hour, is available to pre-order on Kindle for $.99 and will be released on October 29. Pick it and the first two books, Old School Evil, and Old School Evil: The Rejects on Amazon. Welcome Home, a prequel story, can be downloaded for free from my website.