Inflated Villains

Cafe Society
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No, I don’t mean like Kananga in the movie version of Live and Let Die, or Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka. I mean “inflated” in that their role and importance was increased by later writers and contributors to a character’s adventures by people other than the creator. Evidently the folks responsible for churning out a series of books or movies or comics feel that the hero should have one significant adversary people can easily identify. So they end up being inserted into stories where they didn’t originally appear, and the show up more frequently in pastiches.

Professor Moriarty – Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, who was responsible for Holmes’ death (and his own) in the short story The Final Problem. After Doyle was virtually forced to revive Holmes, Moriarty showed up again in the novel The Valley of Fear, but I can’t reconcile the two. He’s mentioned in a few other stories, but Doyle never re-used him. William Gillette made him the main villain in his stage play sherlock Holmes, but that’s understandable and perfectly kosher – he was adapting few Holmes stories, including The Final Problem. But universal made him the villain in their second Holmes movie, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. And Dennis la Rosa had him as the power behind the robberies in his stage adaptation of The Sign of Four. John Hawkesworth made him the power behind John Clay in the Granada/PBS version of The Red Headed League. And he’s in the TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York. John Gardner and Anthony Horowitz have written entire novels centered on him. He’s in Alan Moore’s original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And in Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven per cent Solution. And tons of other pastiches.

Ernst Stavro Blofeld – James Bond, in Fleming’s novels, is really fighting against the Soviet Union in most of his novels, but he created the international criminal syndicate S.P.E.C.T.R.E. for Thunderball (in collaboration with Jack Whittingham, Kevin McClory, and others. I suspect they’re responsible for swaying Fleming away from Russian Bad Guys. Heck, even Goldfinger, in the novel, was a Russian paymaster, not an independent as in the movie), and that organization needed a leader. This, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who only appears in three Fleming novels – Thunderball, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and You Only Live Twice.)

But he’s the Bad Guy in eight of the Eon films, as well as in Never say Never Again. But he also appears in video games and comic book original stories. Curiously, he’s not in any Bond novels written by people other than Fleming. Maybe they wanted to avoid the legal complications that held up his use in other films (He’s not named in the opening sequence of For Your Eyes Only, although it’s clearly him. And the villain in the film The Spy Who Loved Me was supposed to be Blofeld, only there were legal disputes over use of the name.)

Thoth-Amon – Conan the Barbarian didn’t need a recurring villain. The Stygian wizard Thoth-Amon is mentioned in only three Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard, and the two never meet in his works. But editor L. Sprague deCamp wanted an adversary for Conan, so he added him in the story The Black Stranger that Howard wrote (and which deCamp changed the title of, to The Treasure of Tranicos) and added him to the pastiches he and Lin Carter wrote. Robert Jordan and others used him, too. When Marvel comics started adapting Conan, Roy Thomas followed deCamp’s lead and added Thoth-Amon as a significant opponent in the comics. Dark Horse comics did this, too.

Any other cases out there?

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Oh, one other one.

Bluto – The Popeye/Thimble Theater comic strip created and drawn by. Elzie C. Segar differed significantly from the cartoons that became more famous, although there’s a significant amount of overlap. (Popeye didn’t get his strength from eating spinach in the Segar strip, for instance). Segar created Bluto as an adversary for Popeye, but only used him once, in 1932. The next year Fleischer studios started making the cartoons, and used Bluto as a prime adversary from the beginning. They even used him as Sinbad the Sailor in the first color two-reeler. Bluto achieved an importance in the cartoons he didn’t have in the comic strips. Later on the people who continued the strip, like Bud Sagendorf, put him back in as a recurring character – they practically had to, since more people knew him from the cartoons. And successive versions of the cartoons by different companies retained him. (although in the early 1960s he was renamed “Brutus” because they didn’t realize that the rights to the name went with the character. Apparently the comic strip decided that Bluto and Brutus were different characters – brothers, in fact, with two other similar-looking brothers, too).

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Also, SPECTRE is a much larger organization in the movies than in the book. In the book, it was about the size of a mafia family, perhaps a dozen core members, each of whom employed a handful of henchmen. It was not the globe-spanning giant of the movies.

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As much as I am fond of Elementary, the Jaime Moriarity there is far too much of a super(natural) villain. She can do anything. Worse, she commands such power over people that they will bash their own heads in if she orders them to. They will follow her orders after she is in FBI custody because she’s that powerful. Even if it goes against the other members of her organizations’s best interests.

Speaking of inflated, every Superman seems to require Lex. I know the comics have other worthy villains, but you couldn’t tell from the films. (Especially in the current Superman film, Luthor is so over-powered I found myself checking out during parts of the film.) Can we put a moratorium of using him as the big bad?

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Much like every Batman reboot needs the Joker. Sometimes a superhero has the one villain in their rogues’ gallery who is nearly as iconic as the hero themselves.

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I was actually surprised, back in the day, that the Michael Keaton Batman film had the Joker dying. I was impressed. “Wow, since they don’t make as many films as they do comics, there’s no reason to keep one villain around.” Smart.

Then the other three films sucked. Lesson: don’t kill your one good bad.

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Kingpin.

Or Bouncing Boy, if he was eeeevvviilll.:rofl:

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I mean, Bobba Fett is barely in the original movies, but the extended universe made him pretty important.

So important, they had to resurrect him and make new stories. In the TV world, he eventually became a good guy.

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Not a villain, but a hero – Abraham van Helsing as the nemesis to Dracula. Originally a somewhat off-the-wall heavily-accented Dutch older scientist in the novel, the character has usually ben played more refined (although Anthony Hopkins really threw himself inti the crazy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula), but in many versions the van Helsing character has been much younger and more athletic (especially Hgh Jackman in – what else – Van Helsing, although he is not unique – loom at Richard Benjamin in Love at First Bite) and even played as a female character several times. Van Helsing had a pretty large role to begin with, as mentor to The Fearless Vampire Killers, but more recent works have significantly increased his/her role.

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The Joker, who has no super powers is a perfect example of an “Inflated Villain”. Bats has plenty of other foes, some with real powers.

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Dracula. There are, after all, many other vampires out there.

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But Dracula was the big bad in the original source material in which he first appeared. He wasn’t a character who became inflated in other adaptations that followed.

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Right. As I pointed out above, Van Helsing is the example of the Inflated Adversary in the Dracula books/films/comics/etc. A character whose role got bigger and who showed up in items beyond the original novel.

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I’m pretty clueless on modern entertainment.

With that caveat, has anybody seriously considered spinning The Joker out into his own series where he’s the recurring anti-hero who keeps defeating the various do-gooders on his way to ever more outrageous feats of criminal dastardy?

In the current era I predict a lot of entertainment where the bad guys not only win, but keep winning.

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From the Star Wars movies: Emperor Palpatine.

In the original film, he’s never even mentioned by name, other than a couple of brief mentions of “the Emperor”; in the novelization of that film, this passage appears, describing him as less the BBEG, and more of someone being controlled by others:

George Lucas was writing the original story for Star Wars during the end of the Nixon Administration, and had apparently envisioned the decline of the Republic into the Empire as “how a democracy turns itself over to a dictator—not how a dictator takes over a democracy.”

But, by The Empire Strikes Back, it’s revealed that the Emperor is Vader’s master, and that he himself is a powerful Force user; by Return of the Jedi, he’s absolutely the big bad, even worse than Vader.

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Burton 100% planned the movie to be a one off, which explains both your first point and the second.

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Intriguing topic. I need to think about this.

But one thing did come to mind: Hades. The original myths didn’t really have a “recurring villain” or “main villain.” Many characters (such as Zeus) did rather awful things to humans, but that wasn’t seen as being villainy. It was just an explanation of the way reality works (to their minds).

But modern expectations of story require a bad guy…so the guy who rules over the Underworld, and is thereby associated with Death, must perforce be…A Villain.

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Gotta love Percy Jackson for subverting this expectation.

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I don’t know the books very well, but are all the characters in the movie Wizard of Oz the same importance?

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Very good point, and one that’s bothered me more than once. Hades appears as the villain in both Disney’s Hercules and in the remake of Clash of the Titans and its sequel. Yet there is no such sense of one-on-one antagonism between Hades and Zeus in the Greek myths (and Zeus is incomparably more powerful than Hades. Or of all the other gods put together, as he boasts in Homer). But Western storytelling in general and modern movies virtually demand a powerful antagonist.

Another example is Loki. In Scandinavian myth he is not a villain. He’s a trickster, a troublemaker, and as often does good as harm. but Marvel comics turned him into a Bad Guy in their Mighty Thor series, and later in the MCU.