No, Captain Amazing was much worse, the big sellout. And a big, dumb bully to boot. At least Casanova was honest about his intentions!
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King’s It yet. Pretty evil character, there.
(If you did mention it, and I missed it, my apologies.)
Video Game characters here:
SHODAN. She’s the most intelligent sentient being in history, and she is everywhere. She knows every move you make, and your intentions are painfully obvious to her.
“What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existance? When the history of my glory is written, your species will only be a footnote to my magnificence.”
I’ll second Kefka. He was a real evil guy.
Kerrigan, from Starcraft. She’s just so manipulative. By the end of the full story, she has ascended as the sole controller of the most powerful force in the sector by turning her enemies against each other. She kills for spite, and leaves other characters alive because they will suffer more alive. Listen to what she tells Zeratul after he is forced to kill the Matriarch to free her from Kerrigan’s mental dominance.
Oh, please. Whiplash doesn’t even begin to compare to Hedley Lamar.
And while Casanova Frankenstein may be only an average comic-book villain, he does have an excellent cast of supporting bad guys. In addition to the Disco Boys, the original script for the movie also featured two thugs called The Elvis Brothers.
I’m a Pinhead kind of guy, personally.
Perhaps my heart belongs way too much to DS9, but can we really leave off Gul Dukat? a baddie as ruthless as him that believes he is righteous in what he’s doing? Perhaps Marc Alaimo’s portrayal made him better than the actual character on paper, but at times the guy gave me chills. what can I say? Go Spoonheads!
Dammit, Jabba, but I had three thoughts on reading the OP. Iago, Judge Holden, and Count Olaf, and you stole them ALL! We must be tuned to the same weird frequency or something. Well, I thought of a couple more just to save face…
Desire, from Sandman, has to be considered the true villain of the piece, even though he/she relents when it becomes clear that she/he’s going to achieve his/her goals. I mean, it’s gotta be either Desire or The Corinthian, and his appearances were too few and far between.
Also, much as I loved Glory from Buffy Season Five, Angelus has to be one of the greatest villains of all TeeVeeLand. David Boreanaz played it so well, and Angelus was written to take such glee in mayhem.
I’m afraid I’m gonna have to go with Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons”. He wanted to make a vest out of puppies! He releases the hounds on every charity, including “Release The Hounds”. And he keeps a robotic Richard Simmons on his property. You can’t get much more evil than that.
wizard song: That is pretty freaky isn’t it? If it’s any consolation, I’ve never even heard of your replacements.
<b>General Woundwort</b> was one I always liked. Yeah, he’s a rabbit. But HE doesn’t know it, and he’d kill you if he could and had to.
Oooh, Woundwort’s a nasty piece of work! Can’t believe I forgot about him.
And Kerrigan’s pretty bad, too. Hers is my fave story from any computer game.
Daniel
What villain is the most outright evil? General Ino from the Doc Savage novel Resurrection Day. He is so evil that he kidnaps a baby from a rich family, obtains the ransom, and then kills the kid with acid; arranges for the death of numerous henchmen; double-crosses nearly everyone in the book; commits several other heinous murders; tries to steal a vast treasure trove; and is so slick that he outwits Doc early in the book. What a badass.
The most adversarial? Aychayraych from Poul Anderson’s Dominic Flandry series (“Honorable Enemies,” “Hunters of the Sky Cave,” “The Day of Their Return,” and “A Knight of Ghost and Shadows.”
Which has the most makes-you-want-to-reach-into-their-world-and-strangle-them-ness? The cowardly bastard who sold out Magwitch in Dickens’ “Great Expectations”
when i think of villain, i think of cobra commander.
he never really got the chance to really kill anyone, duke and his boys would bust his ass before he ever got the chance. gi joe, being a kids show, never really had him doing anything too perverse or evil. but you could tell he had it in him.
he was a coward, he was selfish, he was ruthless. plus he had an evil-sounding voice. i wanted to be cobra commander for halloween when everyone else wanted to be duke or one of those boring good guys.
i usually root for the bad guy anyway, it’s so rare that he wins, especially in cartoons, that i feel sorry for him most of the time. how does cobra commander keep his international crime ring afloat when he can’t even get away with one little scheme? i was worried about him, destro, and the rest of the crew.
In a rebuttal to the poster who treated Wolfram & Hart as a single sinister villain, I humbly disagree. I choose Holland Manners, the smooth, malevolent law firm manager. He was so unctuous, so snotty, so evil, that I wanted to leap through the television set and bitch slap him. I was afraid that I would knock over my wine glass, however, so I controlled myself.
I’ve always found Frank Booth from Blue Velvet to be particlarly evil, and far from stereotypical “I’m just so evil” evil, too.
…Now it’s dark…