Ed Ranks X-Men (TV series) Villains, Part 2

Remember when I ranked X-Men (TV show) villains three days ago? 

Well, this is Part 2, featuring the more memorable and better villains. Though honestly, some of them still sort of suck.

20. The Morlocks - Eyepatch girl Callisto (not to be confused with the MUCH BETTER Callisto at DC Comics) and her association of sewer freaks including Leech were pretty "meh" and boring villains in this show. It's sort of awesome that Storm comes up and basically kicks their asses and declares that she's the leader of them - only to never show up again for like 4 seasons when she's like "Oh yeah, I'm you're leader." If you want childhood cartoon nostalgia with mutants in the sewers, the Morlocks are not should be your first choice of who to turn to.

See how cool he looks here? Well, he didn't look like this in the show.

19. Silver Samurai - You'd think the awesome villain Silver Samurai would be used in a plot that was more than just "local biker gang shaking down rural Japanese laborers for small amounts of money," but that's all you get from this episode. Cool villain... but not in this show where he's bascially an A-Team episode villain. You didn't need to bring in a mutant with adamantium claws to defeat him. Mr. T and Howling Mad Murdock could have probably done it.

18. Arkon - Space He-Man who too-easily convinces Storm to marry him, and Storm is for some reason extremely stupid and unobservant about the fact that this idiot is evil and raids other planets for slaves. So stupid that it takes a two-part episode for the X-Men to help her realize that she's a strong, independent Black woman and she don't need no man.

17. Shadow King -  Shadow King appears twice in the show, most notably in the "Storm goes to Africa" episode (that's not the name of it, but there is clearly just one "Storm goes to Africa" episode, so if you remember this show, you know what I mean). He's depicted completely different in the show than he is in the comics, but I guess he's okay here. Just okay. Villain of the week who takes over Storm and uses her powers. Some backstory with Xavier banishing him. Cool beans.

16. Nimrod - Nimrod is not being ranked as part of the Sentinels (even though Master Mold is) because Nimrod is lame. Nimrod looks stupid. He looks like a bad, stiff 80's toy that had no flexibility or joints that could be moved. Nimrod is boring as hell. Sorry to the one Nimrod fan out there.

15. Omega Red - Another character sort of suddenly introduced, and then we don't get backstory until later, with Wolverine flashbacks fighting him back in the day. All his appearances in this show scream out early/mid 90's, from that vague era in history where all the villains were ex-Soviets who were sad that their empire died... but were always balanced with "good Russians" to show that they're not all bad. In the case of Omega Red, we almost always get Colossus in his episodes as a counterpoint. If I can be honest, let's just all admit that Omega Red is shitty in every iteration. Comics, cartoon, whatever.

14. Bolivar Trask - The famed Sentinel-creating villain whose robotic servants cause havoc on the X-Men. Oddly, he's featured less prominently in this show than his douchey assistant, Gyrich, is featured. Although he and the creation of the Sentinels is very important for the first few episodes of the show, Trask basically vanishes for the rest of the series (save for a few Season 4 appearances where he, again, features less than Gryich).

13. The Inner Circle - Because a Saturday morning children's cartoon was too afraid to use the term "Hellfire Club" with "hell" in it, they're called The Inner Circle, which is honestly a perfectly fine name for them too. They are  Sebastian Shaw, Jason Wyngarde, Emma Frost, Donald Pierce, and Harry Leland. And honestly, I couldn't really some of the boring white guy villains apart in this episode. Which one has the mind control? Which one is the pirate? Which one is Thomas Jefferson? After a while I stopped caring

Ah, becoming a robot FOR REVENGE!

12. Lady Deathstrike (and the Reavers) - The number of "villains from Wolverine's past" in this show are very high, and in this case, Lady Deathstrike is also an ex-girlfriend. Here, she joined the Reavers and became a cyborg in order to avenge the death of her father Professor Oyama who she believed was killed during Logan's rampage at the Weapon X headquarters. Of course, in the end it winds up that Logan was actually blameless or something like that. Well, I suppose that works out in the end!

11. Sauron - FUCK YEAH! Dinosaur villains are awesome. The Season 2 "Savage Land" story arc, which was basically a single episode that they cut into a bunch of pieces and then tacked on to other episodes, slow-rolled out the appearance of this villain witha name that is stolen from another much better villain with the same name. But whatever. DINOSAUR. In this version he's created by Mister Sinister's experiments. So that's something I guess.

10. The Juggernaut - Yes, we all know that the "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!" dub was a funny meme when we were all younger and were more easily amused by internet videos when there were only four of them. But I'm not ranking The Juggernaut because of the meme, I'm ranking how he appears in these episodes. Quite honestly, he's just okay and the whole "Professor X's brother" thing was never handled that well. But then again, the Juggernaut episodes were also some of the episodes that Disney+ ran completely out of order, so that might have hurt how effective the story of Juggernaut was in the show. I know there was an episode clearly set right after he's initially defeated, but it aired like 2 seasons after it was written.

9. Dark Phoenix - Jean Gray comes back alive and turns evil as Dark Phoenix. One of the most iconic plots ever, right? I guess in the comics, but every single adaption had trouble pulling it off. In the cartoon they certainly did it better than the movies, but still... the "Inner Circle" story here left me unsatisfied. Dark Phoenix adaptions are doomed for failure.

I mean a tad flamboyant.

8.  Mister Sinister - Another villain who I remember being GREAT in childhood, but when I watched him again it was sort of a big "meh" and didn’t live up to the memory of him being as super cool as I thought he was. Oddly enough, the only Mister Sinister episode that I really liked and stuck with me was the 19th century flashback / origin episode with Xavier's beardy great granddad or whatever. That was a good episode. The rest though? Didn't do much for me on the re-watch.

7. Henry Peter Gyrich - A douchebag who works with/for the "Mutant Control Agency" (at first) and is generally just an anti-mutant douchenozzle after that. Honestly, I had forgotten that he and Graydon Creed were different characters... because they basically play the same role in this show. He should have played second fiddle to more important anti-mutant characters like Bolivar Trask, but for some reason he was actually featured more prominently in this cartoon than his boss, Trask, was. Gryich, who is typically totally unmemorable in comics and film, actually has his moment in the spotlight during this show.

6. Graydon Creed / Friends of Humanity - Guy who hates Mutants and leads the Friends of Humanity, which is a protesting hate group that stands around, usually holding signs and hating minorities. So basically they're Republicans. HA! SUCK IT! This counts as social commentary. Seriously, re-watching this show following the 2020 election and in the wake of Trump idiots storming the Capitol was oddly scary and made me go, "yeah, these villains actually exist." As I note when talking about Gyrich, my memory from childhood actually conflated Creed and Gyrich as the same character/villain and only through re-watching did I remember that they were different bland white guys who hated mutants. Of the two, Creed is more interesting in the end beause the eventual "Creed hates mutants because he IS a mutant" plot twist where he is the son of Sabretooth and Mystique. Mystique is everyone's mom on this show.

5. Mystique - Remember how awesome Mystique was in this show? Well, that memory is MOSTLY NOSTALGIA because she's in this show a lot less than you’d think. She's introduced suddenly and without much explanation at first, then we go huge chunks of time without seeing her again before we're presented with some "she's Rogue's mommy" stories that don't make much sense in context of what's shown on the screen. Really, you have to know about and have already read the comics to really understand what's going on with her in this show. Then skip a few more seasons ahead to late in the series and she becomes super annoyingly Christian Nightcrawler's mom too. Oh, and Graydon Creed's mom. By the end of the show, I think she was everyone's mom. She's okay, but under-utilized. Other than for random mommy issue twists.

4. Sabretooth - Yeah, Sabretooth is pretty good in this show, and frequently shows up as Wolverine's arch enemy. He might even show up more than Magneto. As was somewhat common with this show, Sabretooth is introduced cold without any origin story and we're just supposed to pretend like we know all about him and his history. Fortunately, as the show goes on, we learn more and more stuff about him which provides depth to his character. He even becomes somewhat relatable-to at times.

Just trying to make Sentinel babies from his toilet

3. The Sentinels (including Master Mold) - The Sentinels are great villains and a great way to start off the show as the first villains. This show didn't kid around with filler episodes much in the beginning, and dove straight into amazing comic plotlines like Days of Future Past early in its run. I could hypothetically break out Master Mold (the Sentinel Mommy that pops out Sentinels from its Robo-Vagina) from other Sentinels and rank him by himself... but why bother? He's more like "Boss Sentinel" anyway, when he turns on Trask and others. Sentinels are great. Yay Sentinels.

2. Magneto - Look, Magneto was straight up badass amazing on this show. The voice actor who did his lines, the late great David Hemblen, was freaking AMAZING. He did such a great job that most of my memories of this show were of the awesome Magneto episodes. Re-watching it again, there were far less Magneto episodes than I remembered. In fact, there are tons of stretches of time where there is no Magneto at all. While some other characters were oddly over-featured in the show, Magneto was definitely under-featured for essentially being THE X-Men villain. There are also a few episodes late in the show where Magneto is clearly voiced by a different voice actor and it's totally fucking weird to watch those episodes with the wrong voice. Pretty much every episode Magneto is in, he plays at least a somewhat sympathetic role where he's not outright villainous and simply has a different and more aggressive way of countering human racism than Professor X does.

1. Apocalypse

Time to purge the world of the corrupt and weak. LORD LIVE THE ETERNAL ONE!

Apocalypse was GREAT in this show, and this is clearly the most iconic version of Apocalypse that ever existed. Like with the amazing voice actor who played Magneto, much of Apocalypse's awesomeness was just the amazing voice skills of John Fucking Colicos (Count Baltar in Battlestar Galactica, Kor in DS9, Mikkos Cassadine in General Hospital, etc). His episodes were great, all his time travel stuff was great. And you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and rank him ahead of Magneto. And this has nothing to do with Oscar Isaac playing him later, which I figured I'd just mention because Oscar Isaac. The series also was supposed to originally end with an "Apocalypse being finally defeated" episode, until they decided to add on another season. That just further shows that he was THE villain of the show. Right?