In a lot of the stories he isn’t the bad guy. However he’s responsible for Baldur’s death. He kills Heimdall. His kids kill Odin and Thor. Given the end of the story, it’s not a big leap to make him the bad guy.
Yep. We experience ‘story’ differently, in some ways, when compared with people from earlier civilizations.
If somehow we could play the Marvel movies for people in early Scandinavian societies, they’d be mystified by the way Loki (much less the other characters) are depicted. (Of course they might be so freaked out by the moving images that they wouldn’t have time to notice.)
The Joker wasn’t that big a deal for Batman before the TV show. Prior to the “yellow circle” reboot (In 1964, they abandoned the cartoony Dick Sprang/Jerry Robinson approach in favor of Carmine Infantino’s more straightforward illustration style, marked by a yellow circle around the chest emblem), the Joker appeared on the cover of maybe a dozen issues of BATMAN, five of DETECTIVE, and he was featured in none of the serials.
Some pretty major Marvel super-villains are only a big deal because the script says they are. I’m not sure why Baron Mordo and Grim Reaper are considered Big Bads, as neither one has ever (to my knowledge) had a successful criminal experience. The writers were furiously promoting the Sphinx and Morgan MacNeil Hardy as major players, but the stories featuring them were pretty flat. Thanos is so overexposed that his Hostess Pies ad is his second most embarrassing appearance.
I’m not one who can quote from something 40 years ago. In the 80s there was a storyline where Thor was able to find out (through visions maybe?) that he wasn’t the first Thor. There is a cycle that ends in Ragnorak each time. The ones he saw in his vision were much closer to the original myth. Thor had red hair and a beard and no one wore Kirby clothes.
Perhaps Sauron fits this. In The Hobbit, he was a very minor figure, hardly more than a plot device to get Gandalf separated from the dwarves for a while so they could have adventures without a wizard along to get them out of scrapes. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron of course became an immensely powerful antagonist who dominated the whole plot.
It’s a little more complicated than that, because Sauron existed in unpublished writings before either book was written, and was indeed always a very powerful and malevolent figure. He just wasn’t presented that way in The Hobbit, which was the first time he appeared in print.
IIRC Gandalf talks about “The Necromancer” in The Hobbit but the name “Sauron” is not used. The White Council drives him out of Dol Goldur in southern Mirkwood, but he flees to Mordor and declares himself openly, setting the stage for LotR. ETA: and Gandalf does represent him as a Big Bad, giving him as the reason the dwarves cannot go around Mirkwood by the southern route and instead must use the forest road.
I don’t think there’s anything approaching that idea in early myth—anywhere in the world. (I don’t claim to be an expert. I’ve just never heard of such a thing.)
Our stories—including our appetite for Canonical Villains, which become such even if they weren’t like that in their original appearance—have changed radically. Our assumptions and our needs have evolved. (Off-topic, I know.)
Back on-topic: I’d venture to say that several treatments of Lewis Caroll’s Alice in recent decades have emphasized the villainy of the Red Queen and/or the Queen of Hearts, to an extent not really present in the original two books.
I especially liked Hades’ portrayal in KAOS on Netflix…downtrodden, overworked manger of the underworld….who gets abused by Zeus regularly.
I was going to say Boba Fett. The remarkable thing is that there’s really no reason anyone would even want him to be a super-smart super-cool bounty hunter. He’s a completely generic grunt in a suit, and the movies have no illusions about this. There’s nothing remotely comparable to the set-piece battle in Star Wars Trilogy Arcade…he barely gets a shot off!
Darth Maul, though definitely a lesser example, also qualifies. Very obviously intended as a mean-looking badass good for a couple of energetic fight scenes and merch sales, no more, no less.
He’s very clearly on the villain side at Ragnarök.
If you have never heard Peter Serafinowicz talk about recording the Darth Maul lines, it’s pretty entertaining. Basically, he went in to record, obviously nervous and expecting George Lucas to direct him and so forth.
He gets there. Lucas in indeed in the studio, so it is all getting very real. They give him a pretty long list of lines(most were cut!) and he asked George Lucas how he wanted the lines said.
“Ummm…evil. Sound evil.”
He then went and recorded everything a bunch of different ways(intonations, etc.) and naturally Lucas and the team just chose whatever lines from the recording they wanted.