Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Obviously Evil / Western Animation

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/aku_obviously_evil.png
He is definitely not a good guy, believe me.

Obviously Evil in Western Animation.

  • In Adventure Time "The Lich" (Formally The Lich King before fear of being sued by Blizzard) there is nothing subtle at all with his appearance. (Dark hood, horns, skeletal body with flesh still hanging off) even the creator's pre-production notes state in large letters "THE LICH KING ISN'T FUNNY!"
  • Amphibia: Oh yes The Core is. This being has a color scheme of mainly black, red, and orange; multiple red-orange eyes with Hellish Pupils; mind-control capabilites; and can even summon its assimilees as avatars with Facial Horror. Plus, it painfully subjects poor Marcy to mind-control procedures and gleefully abuses Andrias to do whatever it wants to, even if it goes against his will.
  • Played with in Avatar: The Last Airbender in regards to Zuko. He starts out as the heroes' first antagonist who's bald, scarred, and clothed in the red and black colors of the Fire Nation. However, it becomes clear after several episodes that he's actually a rather sympathetic antagonist with an incredibly sad backstory of how he got scarred and he eventually does a Heel–Face Turn.
    • Tellingly, he appears "bald" (actually all his hair is done in a restricting top knot), in the first season, but as his more sympathetic qualities pile up, he gets a Significant Haircut that gives him a more Troubled, but Cute look.
  • In a flashback in the direct-to-DVD movie Barbie & The Diamond Castle, three muses are shown. One is dressed in a simple blue tunic◊, another in a royal purple tunic◊, and the third has an elaborate costume in muted shades of purple and red, with dark eyeshadow◊. Yeah, guess which one turns evil.
  • Ben 10:
    • Oh, how surprising. The towering, tentacled alien warlord Vilgax - who looks like Darth Vader's and Cthulhu's lovechild, with his glowing red eyes, menacing black-reddish armour, beard of tentacles and high-pitched, raspy voice (provided by Steve Blum, who's often typecast as villains) - isn't a paragon of goodness? *Gasp in shock!*
    • And let's not forget Ghostfreak because a chilling ghost-like alien with razor-sharp claws and rotting purple skin wasn't terrifying enough. No, let's add in some black-and-white tentacles for good measure. And his charming head is a lovely upside-down human skull complete with crooked fangs. He talks in a voice that sounds like it's been smoking for decades (thanks again to the ever-versatile Steve Blum). But don't worry. If you somehow miss all these subtle details, Omniverse kindly gave him a makeover to really drive home the Grim Reaper vibe. Oh, did we mention his real name is Zs'Skayr? Remember that while you're hiding under your bed covers after seeing him on screen.
  • Completely lampshaded in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, when Buzz's best friend and closest teammate, Warp Darkmatter, is revealed to have been working for Emperor Zurg all along. When Buzz expresses shock at this, Warp says "My name's 'Darkmatter'. Who's surprised here?"
  • The basis of Captain Planet. The producers obviously believed that kids wouldn't be able to tell Exxon apart from Ecover, so they portrayed villain like this. Hoggish Greedly had a pig-face, Verminous Skumm looked like some kind of human/rat hybrid, Sly Sludge was short, fat, greasy, and overall unattractive, and Duke Nukem was made of some kind of glowing yellow bricks. Subverted by Dr. Blight, who other than the scarred half of her face, is a rather attractive woman. Zarm is a less-obvious example.
  • The Casagrandes:
  • Danny Phantom: Vlad Masters. Fittingly, his ghost form looks like Dracula.
  • Ziard, the inventor of Dark Magic in The Dragon Prince, has long, unkempt black and white hair, and wears dark robes decorated with skulls and black feathers. Subverted, as it turns out he was actually reasonably well-intentioned.
  • Family Guy once had a cigarette company taking over Peter's factory. They were pictured very true to the trope. South Park had some fun and reversed the standard roles, so the cigarette factory workers were a friendly bunch with no negative ambitions, while Rob Reiner's anti-tobacco activist group was Obviously Evil behind closed doors.
  • Final Space: Subverted with a demonic otherworldly being named Phil in one episode. He looks like this, he sounds like the type of guy who'd be caught approaching children and offering them candy, and his offer to let Gary take the map from his creepy-looking pocket feels entirely like a lure, plus the fact he dwells in a dimension with pools of wailing phantoms doesn't help. As it turns out, he's actually entirely trustworthy.
  • Flowers and Trees: While the other characters are beautiful, colorful flora and fauna, the evil tree is rotten and gray, has a lizard in his mouth that acts like his tongue, lives in an area with dead trees and a skull, and is introduced with vultures perched on him and bats flying out of his mouth. You'd better be-leaf he's evil.
  • If you can't tell that Van Kleiss◊ from Generator Rex isn't a nice man just by looking at him, his voice (courtesy of Troy Baker) should do the job.
  • He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) Skeletor: The man has a Skull for a Head, people, the color scheme and creepy HQ are flat out redundant.
    • Subverted in the 2002 show with the Speleans, a species of evil looking bat people that are actually quite friendly.
  • Jiminy Cricket pokes fun at this in a House of Mouse sketch parodying "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)":
    Avoid anyone who has a fiendish cackle, a sinister smile, or a diabolical glare — not necessarily in that order.
  • Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget. Never has a villain fit this trope without ever showing his face. His deep, sinister voice was enough to show viewers he was bad news.
  • Ivanhoe: The King's Knight features one of its Norman villains Philip de Malvoisin as a pale-skinned, black-haired man. There is no one else, Norman or otherwise, with such a look and he looks genuinely sinister.
  • Jimmy Two-Shoes gives us Lucius Heinous VII, who is red with horns, has a first name similar to "Lucifer" and a last name that is literally synonymous with "evil", and runs a city called Miseryville. Heloise wears a blood red dress and has a scar on her forehead.
  • Most Jonny Quest villains are really unsubtle in their constant dog kicking, their blatantly selfish, malevolent motives, and their choices of wardrobe and lighting. For instance, Dr. Ashida in "The Dragons of Ashida" is such an arrogantly megalomaniacal cackling Yellow Peril Mad Scientist that he makes the series' Big Bad, Dr. Zin, seem Affably Evil and restrained by comparison.
  • Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters seems to have a liking for playing with this trope. The Choten is a blonde, long-haired guy dressed costume, specialized in Water Creatures, with a rather Affably Evil attitude, while his Dragon, Alakshmi, is a dark-skinned, white-haired woman with a strong tendencies to Psychotic Smirks and trained in using Darkness Creatures, her favourite being Razorkinder Puppet. As the show goes on, it's made quite clear that the real Monster is the Choten, while Alakshmi (though not exactly nice herself) is a more sympathetic Anti-Villain.
  • Legend of Korra has Unalaq, Korra's uncle and the Big Bad(sort of) of Book 2. How Korra fails to immediately realize he's up to no good when just about everyone else does is completely baffling.
  • The short lived and relatively obscure late '80s cartoon Little Clowns of Happytown has the villain Awful B. Bad. He's a Dastardly Whiplash in a purple suit and bowler hat, and has a fiery temper despite being vertically challenged. You can't get much more obviously evil than that.
  • Monsuno has the Eklipse organisation; it's led by Dr Emmanuel Klipse, a Mad Scientist dressed in red and black with a Beard of Evil, a Faux Affably Evil attitude, and the Monsunos he produces and sells are red. He is so obviously evil that even when he shows up and offers a deal to the protagonists, they are immediately aware they shouldn't trust him.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Over the Garden Wall:
  • The Pirates of Dark Water features the evil pirate Bloth, who is evil. He is fat, balding and sports fangs, in addition to some type of Mad Max apparel. Even still, in their first meeting, Wren doesn't judge him by his appearance, being willing to work with him until he eventually shows his true colors.
  • Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw had Marvin McNasty. A cackling, purple suited, sharp toothed man who looks like the lovechild of Renfield and the Penguin? Nah, nothing suspicious about him!
  • The Powerpuff Girls: Most villains are easily identifiable as such due to their demeanors or appearances—especially since most of them aren't human—even if they have good publicity.
    • Invoked in the season five episode "Substitute Creature" with the titular character, Mr. Green, stepping in when Miss Keane is sick. The guy is green-skinned with an eyepatch, demonic horns, and villainous gray suit complete with a cape that looks like fire, but he spends the whole episode seemingly being just a good teacher, despite the girls' skepticism. In the end, the trope truly is subverted: Mr. Green is a monster, yes, but he's a genuinely good person and teacher.
  • Councilor Zottornick from Princess Sissi has a pale scrawny face, is bald and has a deep sounding voice. With him looking like that, one should really wonder why Empress Sophia trusts him so blindly. He really looks like a trustworthy person, don't you think?
  • ReBoot manages to play this straight, subvert, invert, and lampshade this trope with the strange tolerance Mainframe and its guardian Bob gives towards viruses. In the world of computers, viruses can't help but obey their evil programming, which is why Bob doesn't like killing them, but wishes to reprogram them. But the two viral strains in Mainframe are far too powerful for Bob to ever capture or control, and he won't call for help, so the city endures two years of chaos before it goes too far (and THAT'S before the series starts).
    • Played Straight: Megabyte and Hexadecimal are destructive and look the part. Megs is in all secondary colors (and looks suspiciously like Apocalypse), Hex is red and black and both are riddled with Spikes of Villainy, talons and sharp teeth. Bob really hopes to convert these two... Somehow... Both manage Affably Evil moments, but Megabyte's are just moments where there wasn't anything evil to do and Hexadecimal seems to get the excuse that she is mentally unstable and her Heel–Face Turn was more Bob really, really wanting to convert her than her deciding to do good.
    • Inverted: The series biggest Big Bad was a French-accented, brightly colored ingenue supervirus who's based off Joan of Arc.
    • Lampshaded: "Maybe it's a benign virus..." The virus is ten feet tall, clawed and red-and-secondary-colored. "Oh, yeah! You can tell by looking at it!"
    • Subverted: When Megabyte's brainwashed mooks go from secondary colors to normal, this is usually the cue that they are no longer evil. Not so, at all.
  • Rick and Morty: Downplayed. Evil Morty puts up a facade when he needs to, but his villainy is apparent even before his confrontation with Rick C-137 in the season 5 finale. As Rick points out, good guys don't have mutant Mortys crawling out of the sewers warning of doomday weapons, which earns a simple "Touché" from Evil Morty.
  • Samurai Jack's enemy Aku, the Shapeshifting Master of Darkness, is about as obviously evil as they come. He's got natural spikes on his shoulders and elbows, an Evil Laugh, he's as hammy as they come, and to top it all off, his eyebrows are made of fire! Well he is Made of Evil. It's a bit hard to come off as benevolent when you're an Eldritch Abomination. His name is literally the Japanese word for 'evil'.
  • Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated
    • Played for Laughs in the episode "The Gathering Gloom", where Velma immediately identifies the creepy gravedigger, Count Evallo Von Meanskrieg, as the Graveyard Ghoul that's been terrorizing people, but no one believes her because it seems too obvious. This is a guy whose aptitude test actually shows he's pure evil, and is prone to muttering, "''(mumble mumble) evil and what-not."
    Velma: Guys? Guys! You see that? He's growling at me! Actually growling.
    • George Avocados was a suspect in multiple episodes for various reasons, but only became a villain after Mystery Inc. inadvertently destroyed his livelihood by ruining his chances for mayor and blowing up his avocado farm. And in the episode where he finally turns, he's pretty much the only suspect.
    George: And I suppose you're wondering, after so many prior misdirects, why now.
    Daphne: Actually, no. Not really. We kinda always knew you were evil.
  • She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: The plot of the first couple of episodes has Adora realize that she was lied to all her life and the Horde are actually the bad guys, but it has to be said that the Horde didn't do much to sell the deception. They field armies of Faceless Goons, their symbol is a set of batlike wings, Adora was personally raised by an Evil Sorceress in a creepy mask who uses dark magic, and their HQ is in a place called the Fright Zone. Hordak, the founder of the Horde, is a seven-foot-tall man with fangs, glowing red eyes and a skull-like facial structure who wears black and red armor. In fact, Adora seems to be the only one who was actually fooled, as trying to tell her best friend and fellow solider Catra about her realization gets an Everybody Knew Already response.
  • The Simpsons gives an example of this concerning Mr. Burns's bid to buy Santa Little Helper's brood.
    Lisa: [whispering] Mom, don't give the puppies to him, he'll be mean to them.
    Marge: Hmm... she's right, Homer. There's something about his face I don't trust.
    [Burns stifles an evil chuckle while looking really malevolent]
    • Or when Homer wants to sell Bart's elephant (It's a Long Story), Lisa again points out that the prospective buyer is not to be trusted:
      Lisa: I'm pretty sure this guy is an ivory dealer. His hat is ivory, his boots are ivory, and I'm pretty sure that check is ivory!
      Mr Blackheart: Little girl, I've been many things: Whale hunter, seal clubber, President of the Fox Network... and like most people, yeah, I've dealt a little ivory.
    • There was also the time Reverend Lovejoy preached that "The Devil walks among us!" in one of his sermons. Bart leaps on a guy sitting in front of him who bears a resemblance to several traditional depictions of Satan proclaiming "I got him!"
  • Subverted by Tombstone of The Spectacular Spider-Man. He's an albino Scary Black Man with teeth he's apparently filed to fangs... and he's still a Villain with Good Publicity. If someone did say anything, he could just say the accuser was discriminating against him because of his looks. Overt prejudice isn't really the issue — the creepy factor is. Tombstone is freaky-looking and is every so often outright accused of being the Big Man, but he's invested enough effort into his Villain with Good Publicity campaign that he's still accepted as a beloved pillar of the community, so much so that the police take his word over Spidey's on at least one occasion.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks:
    • Invoked In-Universe by Ensign Boimler when he and Ensign Mariner encounter a very suspicious-looking Ferengi.
    Boimler: He could not be any more Ferengi — the big ears, the beady eyes, the greedy thing they do with their hands.
    Ferengi: (performs greedy hands gesture) Hyoo-mon. Myah.
    Boimler: Ferengi are the most untrustworthy race in the galaxy. He probably just wants to lure us over there so he can mug us.
    • A later episode portrays a rehabilitation program for wayward and megalomaniacal AI, including a computer with the moniker Tyranakillucus.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Chancellor Palpatine secretly being Evil All Along was never that much of a surprise to begin with, but in the film series, he at least kept up the appearance of being a kindly old man when not in his Darth Sidious persona. Here, he's given a much more openly villainous design, with large, dark shadows around his eyes and a tendency to Clasp Your Hands If You Deceive. He frequently plays an Obstructive Bureaucrat and has a fondness for Kicking Dogs even when there is no real benefit to doing so.
  • King Koopa and the Koopa Pack in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, due to its pastiche nature, offered most genres' worth of Obviously Evil design. Because it's a comedic show, though, the lowest mooks are occasionally given Affably Evil moments when they think nobody is looking.
  • Trigon the Terrible from Teen Titans (2003). Not that he can help it, though, as he's a red, four-eyed demon the size of a skyscraper who doesn't care about labels pitiful mortals might give him. The Brotherhood of Evil, on the other hand, has no excuse. At least the Brotherhood of Evil didn't get weird like they do in the comics.
  • A Thousand and One... Americas: Early on during the seventh episode, while Chris helps a friendly Mayan priest find out who stole the Pakal mask, they meet a rude temple guardian called Balam who dismisses their contributions to the case of the mask's theft, and at a later point Chris is told by the priest that Balam is a Hot-Blooded fan of war and would likely use the aforementioned theft as a good excuse to scapegoat the neighboring nations for it and cause a war. Unsurprisingly, it is him who plotted the mask's steal, and the priest also discovers that it was Balam who attempted to trap him and Chris inside a temple chamber forever.
  • From ThunderCats:
    • The ghastly wizened mummified warlock Mumm-Ra. Quite scary transformation, also.
    • In Chile, the saliva strings attached to an open mouth are often called "The Mumm-Ra".
    • There is an episode that is dedicated to deconstruct this trope. Two warring alien beings arrive on the Third Earth, one is a sleek looking golden robot/cyborg and the other is vicious looking monster. Lion-O immediately assumes the monster must be evil and takes the side of his alien foe, and assumption that by the end of the episode is proven VERY wrong.
  • This is something of a tradition among the Decepticons of Transformers. More often than not, they even design their ships to be unnecessarily spiky and menacing. Examine their Transformers: Prime designs, for example. Megatron is a huge grey behemoth with Shoulders of Doom, Red Eyes, Take Warning and prominent razor-sharp fangs. Starscream is similarly red-eyed, but with a perpetual hunch and a diabolical smirk seemingly spot-welded on his face. They don't get more benevolent-looking from there.
  • The Predacons of Beast Wars inherited a lot of the Decepticon blatancy and then combined it with a selection of traits taken from bugs and dinosaurs for additional unpleasantness; it's hard to imagine who would look at, say, Tarantulas, a spider-bot with a mouthful of razor-sharp fangs, and conclude that he's in any way a positive addition to the team. Even the Predacons who were created from repurposed Maximal shells still end up broadcasting their villainy; Inferno, for example, is a giant pyromaniac fire ant with a Slasher Smile and glowing red eyes. When the Fusors debut, it's not hard to guess which of them will stay with the Predacons and which will join the Maximals given that one of them combines the traits of stereotypically noble wolves and eagles, and the other is a scorpion with a snake for a tail and turns into a sort of teal Darth Vader thing.
  • Who Killed Who?: As a gag, when the detective pushes a button marked 'RING BELL FOR SUSPECTS', the butler, maid, and chauffeur come in, and they all look rather sinister. It then turns out that they're actually pretty cheerful.
  • Lord Darkar, the Big Bad of the second season of Winx Club, is what he says about himself: "Fists of iron, eyes of fire, and wit as sharp as a sword." His armor is based off of a skeletal phoenix and his name suits him well as he is a being of darkness, making it a Name to Run Away From Really Fast. He's got Spikes of Villainy, an Evil Laugh, Black Eyes of Evil, Villainous Cheekbones, and dark magic. He has quite a scary transformation, too. His profile even suggests that his helmet can pull up to reveal his terrible face.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top