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| Are you feeling nostalgia yet? |
I started writing this one AGES ago and then got angry because I lost a bunch of it and didn’t want to rewrite it.
Anyway, long story short: a few months ago I got a year of “free” Disney+… “free” being a very relative term considering how much I’m paying Verizon a month in cable bills to get this “free” service for a year. WHATEVER besides the point.
Some people would use access to the vast catalogue of Disney+ to watch Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, classic Disney films, and all that other crap? Me. NOPE. Straight to the 1990s “X-Men” Cartoon.
Some TV shows, when watched decades later, don’t stand the test of time. This one ABSOLUTELY DID and is still so good.
Anyway, by my count there are 42ish “villains” (or “antagonists” really, as my list features some people who are good or neutral characters in other episodes that for some reason or another are antagonists or opposing the X-Men here). None of this reflects the continuity outside of the TV show or how cool the characters are in the comics or movies. This is 100% based on this awesome 90’s cartoon.
With 42 of them, you can bet your ass I’m going to break this into two parts.
So here are 42 through 21 – e.g. the suckier villains.
42. Mojo - Mojo fucking sucks. I couldn't watch these episodes at all. I started watching the first one and got through about 3 minutes of it before I skipped it. Then there wound up being a second episode. Skipped that shit too. 
Nobody likes you Morph, but at least you're not Mojo.
41. Morph - Morph was a lame character who I'm glad instantly died at the beginning of the show, and I am sad that they actually brought him back later (both as a villain, and as a man seeking redemption). There is no reason to have Morph villein episodes. Any Morph episode would have been better as a Mystique episode, who had the same shapeshifting power but wasn't a giggling, unlikable twat.
40. D'Ken - the Phoenix Saga had, like, 37 villains introduced in it. D'Ken was another one of those villains. I don’t care.
39. Trevor Fitzroy and Bantam - Turncoat mutants who work for Master Mold / The Sentinels and want to travel back in time and kill professor X. Honestly leads to an AWESOME two part episode with an alternate reality that included a married version of Wolverine and Storm. More time travel. More Bishop and Shard. More Magneto. Good episode. But Fitzroy and Bantam themselves? They were just sucky lackeys. 
Mediocrity!
38. Children of the Shadow - A mutants-only anti-human cult that operate out of a small western down out in the desert. Cyclops is looking for his missing friend and needs to investigate them. Whatever. They are like the bizzaro opposite version of the Friends of Humanity. A FOH vs COS fight would have been epic, but it never happened. Just this filler Cyclops episode.
37. High Evolutionary - If you think you remember High Evolutionary from this cartoon, you're probably just remembering the version of him that was on the Spider-Man series, not this one. On this show, he features in one episode that's barely memorable and the only memorable parts are the parts with Magneto. This might have been one of the episodes where Magneto had the wrong voice too. anyway, he's forgettable from a forgettable episode.
36. Bella Donna & X-Ternal - These two were used in a Gambit backstory episode where his former fiance tricks him to going back to bayou country because his brother is kidnapped and also because she wants to force him to marry her. There we learn all about strange fucking redneck bayou cults. Okay. I'm glad we only had to put up with these characters in one episode and then basically never mention them again.
35. Cameron Hodge - Ultra-forgettable Cameron Hodge first shows up as Beast's lawywer before becoming a villainous servant of the anti-mutant, pro-slavery government of Genosha. After that, he straight up vanishes for four seasons before reappearing after you forgot who he was. When he shows up again, he is basically a half-robot who has betrayed mankind to work for the Phalanx. It would have been more effective if there weren't four years of episodes between his appearances though, so I wasn't like "Dafuq is this guy again?"
34. Gladiator - I guess Gladiator counts as a sometimes villain (or at least "antagonist") in this show too, after initially being portrayed as a good guy.
33. Alpha Flight - One of another set of "Wolverine Backstory" villains, though technicaly a Canadian superhero team. But since this is an AMERICAN SHOW WITH BALD EAGLES AND FREEDOM, you just know that the Canadian heroes are therefore DEVIOUS VILLAINS. Or, you know, misguided or something. Anyway, Alpha Flight as villains totally suck, but at least these episodes are good in that they serve to help the viewer learn about Wolverine's past, Dr. Cornelius' adamantium injections, "Weapon X", and all that great shit.
32. Iceman & X-Factor - Another "flashback"-ey episode where we learn that there was a guy called "Iceman" who was an "original" X-Man before he left because daddy issues with Xavier. He and the X-Factor team are introduced as antagonists, only for them to redeem themselves and not be evil after all. Which happened a million times on this show by the time this episode aired.
31. Erik the Red (and Black Tom Cassidy) - If Daredevil wore red S&M bondage gear with an exposed midriff, he would just be Erik the Red. Honestly, this crap Shi'ar villain who sort of introduces us to the space characters that we'll be meeting as part of the upcoming Phoenix Saga is mostly forgettable. His biggest claim to fame is, yes, being prominently featured in the infamous Juggernaut fan dub. I'll just include Black Tom Cassidy as a sub-villain here too, underserving of his own ranking, because he's just a dude hired by Erik.
30. Red Skull - Yep, there was a Wolverine flashback episode where he was with Captain America, fighting the Red Skull in WWII. Did you forget that? Because I did.
29. Zebediah Killgrave - The Purple Man shows up in another episode that was run completely out of order. It aired in Season 5, but is clearly set after Jean Grey dies at the end of the Phoenix Saga but before she returns to life. So when you watch that episode you're like "wait... did she die AGAIN?" No. They just can't run episodes in order. Anyway. Killgrave. Pretty not memorable. I just wanted him to be David Tenant and he wasn't.
28. Lilandra - Lilandra is mostly in the show to be an ally and Dr. X's space girlfriend, but also when Jean turns into Dark Phoenix, Lilandra thinks it's a pretty good idea to kill her (because it honestly is a pretty good idea to kill her), and thus she's temporarily an antagonist in the show too for, like, two episodes or something. Not a bad character, just a bad Antagonist because it’s not like we believed she was really going to kill Phoenix or anything.
27. The Starjammers – Like Lilandra, they're not "villains" in the show, per-se, but they are introduced in The Phoenix Saga, Part IV as antagonists, led by Corsair. After their initial appearance, they'll eventually show up again, but mainly just so Corsair can reveal that he's Scott Summers' daddy. This show wound up having a HUGE number of parent reveal episodes. It's like an episode of Maury.
26. The Colony - A version of the Brood from the comics that is changed up A LOT and here they want to make Rogue their queen. They appear once, and I barely remember the episode. Space insects. Whatever. After a while, every villain just started being from space. 
Totally stone Megatron, right?
25. Garokk - Garokk is a rock which looks vaguely like Megatron's face. He is an evil rock. Yep. Evil rock. We worked with the evil sorceress Zaladane (unranked here, so just consider her as a Garokk sub-villain) and Sauron. That's about all I have to say about rocky.
24. The Phalanx - In the comics there were actually two separate (but related) robo-alien species that went around trying to conquer/assimilate other species - the Phalanx and the Technarchy. The cartoon streamlined the two into just The Phalanx, which was a good call. Still, by the time they show up in season 5 with their ability to change shape to impersonate other people we've already had 400 other "shapeshifter" plotlines and 400 other alien invasion plotlines.
23. Cortez - When Magneto makes a space colony so that the mutants can live in peace in space, of course this douchebag Fabian Cortez messes things up so Magneto can't have nice things. I guess Cortez is an effective villain because I hate him a lot. But I also hate him a lot because he's a shitty and underdeveloped character who was a dickhole for no reason. Eventually he winds up as Apocolypse's bitch.
22. Avalanche, Pyro, and Blob - Look, these "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants" D-lister villains don't deserve separate entries, and basically they should all be lumped together. They're not even, like, real villains on their own. They're idiot henchmen basically.
21. Proteus - Professor X's earth girlfriend, Moira MacTaggert (not to be confused with his space girlfriend, Lilandra... this dude was a multi-girlfriend mac daddy) always had a "weird" relationship with X, and one of the reasons why was because she had a secret son, Proteus, who was a giant fuckup who was locked up on Muir Island for his whole life. He escapes to go try to find his father, who is also a giant fuckup and shitty Scottish "family values" politician who doesn't practice what he preaches because he abandoned his fuckup son. Professor X is able to eventually defeat him with his amazing power to calm down the angsty teenager children of his girlfriends. Yep, that is another Professor power.
Next time? THE TOP 20!
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