20 Mustache-Twirling Villains (So Cartoonishly Evil We Kinda Want Them to Succeed)

The villain is one of the oldest tropes in the book. They can come in many shapes: lazy, lame, lamer, but also self-defeatingly dumb, awesome, misunderstood, and, well, kinda right. In fact, these are the ones that have really caught our Crackedtenttion. But at the same time, the unapologetic, flamboyant villain is a breed of its own. They flaunt their villainy and are openly proud of the suffering they bring into this world — yes, exactly like that real-life person you just know we’re thinking about and whose name would absolutely trigger you because its mention means we’ve gotten “political” and so we’re no longer funny. It’s a childish response, but yes, we do mean David Fincher circa Alien 3. We will never forgive what you did to Scott and Cameron’s babies, David.

In this Pictofact, we discuss villains so obvious that they cross the limit of just being bad villains, and instead become adorable. Like, whatever heroes – just let the poor guy or gal win, they have earned it out of sheer mustache-twirling, truly cartoonish evilness. Now, following the Cracked tradition, we have also added a few villains that were actually right. Yet our focus is on the over-the-top quality, on the transparent shticks that we just gotta respect. In fiction, that is. Not in real life, where blatant villains are shockingly misrecognized, as if the dojo of Saturday morning cartoons hadn't trained us for literal years to sniff them out from a mile away. Speaking of, did you notice we planted that Fincher red herring in order to hint at a later payoff instead of mentioning real-life cartoon villains like Trump, Musk, or Peterson? That was always our plan, Mr. Reader. Anyway, we’ve run out of space, cue the list!