Category: Blog

People often focus on famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Opera House when talking about architecture, but some of the most interesting buildings are the ones that rarely make travel guides. Around the world, architects have experimented with everything from centuries-old craftsmanship to bold futuristic designs, creating spaces that are just as impressive as the cities around them. Some stand out because of their history, while others grab your attention with unusual shapes, creative materials, or clever engineering. Whether they’re homes, museums, libraries, or office buildings, each one offers something memorable to look at.

Here are 20 photos featuring some of the world’s coolest architecture.

The post 20 Photos Featuring Some of the World’s Coolest Architecture appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

One of the easiest ways to make people stop and do a double take is with a confusing sign. Whether it’s bad wording, contradictory directions, or unfortunate placement, some signs end up raising more questions than they answer. Most of them probably made perfect sense when they were designed, but once they’re out in the real world, they take on a life of their own. A missing comma, two conflicting instructions, or even a poorly placed sticker can completely change the message. The result is a collection of signs that leave everyone scratching their heads instead of pointing them in the right direction.

Here are 15 signs that only make going through the world more confusing.

The post 15 Signs That Only Make Going Through the World More Confusing appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

Looking scary is only part of being a memorable horror villain. The hard part is actually living up to that first impression. Plenty of creepy characters make a dramatic entrance, only to spend the rest of the movie watching their plans fall apart or getting outsmarted much more easily than anyone expected. Some become more famous because of their design than their actions, while others are simply too distracted, overconfident, or bizarre to feel like a real threat. They may still be entertaining, but they’re hardly the unstoppable nightmares they first appear to be.

Here are 15 horror villains who probably wouldn’t hurt a fly.

The post 15 Useless Horror Villains That Couldn’t Hurt a Fly appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

Comedy is probably the hardest thing to agree on. One person’s favorite Saturday Night Live cast member barely makes someone else’s top ten, and every generation has a completely different list of all-time greats. Still, a few names almost always come up when longtime fans start talking about the show’s history. Some built their reputation through unforgettable impressions. Others became famous for original characters that still get quoted decades later. Quite a few went on to have enormous movie careers, while others are remembered almost entirely for what they accomplished on live television.

Here are 15 SNL cast members that fans never seem to stop talking about.

The post 15 People Share Which SNL Cast Member is Their Favorite of All Time appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time. The very best animated villains linger in the mind long […]

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

This article contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 season 2, episode 6. The latest episode of X-Men ’97, “Danger.exe” opens with a satisfying action scene, in which the government-sponsored X-Factor takes on the Purifiers, an anti-mutant religious cult led by Reverend William Stryker. Satisfying as it is to see Polaris unleash on the hate-mongers, the real […]

The post X-Men ’97 Revisited One of the Worst Story Ideas in Marvel History appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

In the first line of Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, the poet beseeches the Muses, “Tell me about a complicated man.” That line, of course, refers to Odysseus, the crafty genius whose journey back home to Ithaca takes up most of The Odyssey. It could also refer to Christopher Nolan, who worked from Wilson’s […]

The post Elon Musk’s AI Odyssey Redo Should Kill AI Movie Talk Once and for All appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

While we’re all a little disappointed that Matt Reeves has pushed The Batman: Part II back to 2028, and we’re all annoyed that we still have no details on an official DCU Batman, that doesn’t mean we have to stay out of Gotham City. The upcoming film Clayface will bring the shapeshifting villain to the […]

The post Clayface Trailer Teases Other Batman Villains appeared first on Den of Geek.

Decades of animation have given us some truly great and memorable villains. Some of them unsettle viewers for personal reasons, others become iconic to audiences everywhere, while still more achieve real cult status, and we’re here to celebrate some of the greatest of all time.

The very best animated villains linger in the mind long after the TV or movie credits have rolled. Disney alone has produced more than its fair share of legendary antagonists, but we’ve deliberately kept their presence to a minimum here. Those villains deserve a spotlight all their own, and they have one right here.

Instead, this list celebrates some of the greatest animated villains from across the wider world of animation, proving that evil comes in many forms, no matter who brings it to life.

The Joker – Batman: The Animated Series

Standing out as a chaotic streak of color against the noir and art deco-style design of Batman: The Animated Series, this Joker became one for the ages. Voiced with a playful menace by Mark Hamill, the show’s version of the Joker was never overused, which made his appearances all the more unsettling. Still, The Animated Series had a lot of fun with its take on DC villain, having been given the opportunity to twist his red grin into a menacing scowl in an instant and giving a whole new generation of comic book kids a reason to fear and love the Clown Prince of Crime more than a decade ahead of Heath Ledger’s scene-stealing live action performance in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

Megatron – The Transformers: The Movie

“Megatron must be stopped, no matter the cost,” says Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, and he means it, because in a film that features a literal planet-sized Transformer, Megatron remains the number one villain of the piece. Having already slain a number of Autobots along with his Decepticon crew, he finally battles Optimus Prime and both are mortally wounded. But ol’ Megs isn’t gone for long, because he’s soon remade into Galvatron and re-ignites his mission to become the biggest animated metal bastard of all time. And we wouldn’t have it any other way! Y’see, although The Transformers: The Movie initially annoyed the crap out of some fans by notching up a slasher movie-level number of Transformer kills, it’s now considered a classic, and absolute peak Megatron.

Omni-Man – Invincible

Invincible‘s Nolan Grayson may be the most powerful superhero on Earth, but he is also an alien and initially works as an agent of the Viltrum Empire, sent here to weaken our planet and prepare it for an invasion. The way he goes about this mission is explored in an absolutely horrifying string of incidents during season 1 of Prime Video’s animated series, from ripping apart Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Guardians of the Globe, to a devastating rageathon through Chicago that kills thousands of innocent people. But what makes Omni-Man such a great villain is that it’s clear that he has been deeply affected by the love of his family and friends on Earth, yet he still moves forward with his deadly plans. Later, he begins a real redemption arc, but season 1 Omni-Man is as dark as they come.

Aku – Samurai Jack

Aku isn’t just a rote villain plopped into Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack story to be a bit of an opp to our hero. He’s already won by sending Jack into a future where his rule has seeped into every crack, so Jack’s main mission can’t ever be to simply stop him. He has to travel back in time and get home first! Indeed, this proves to be a much harder mission, and this way, even when Aku’s dishing out grandiose monologues, having childish outbursts, or not even in the episode at all, he remains a menacing, credible danger, whether by trying to break Jack’s spirit through a string of hopeless situations or forcing him to question whether his mission is even possible. The late Mako Iwamatsu also gave such a rich, theatrical performance as Aku; it helped Samurai Jack (and his villain) become so beloved.

King Haggard – The Last Unicorn

1982’s The Last Unicorn remains a massively underrated animated movie. Peter S. Beagle wrote the script for it based on his terrific fantasy novel following a unicorn who sets out to discover what happened to all the rest of her kind when she realizes she’s the last one left. The late and great Sir Christopher Lee voices the villainous King Haggard, leader of the depressing Hagsgate, in the adaptation, and hoo boy does he sell this cursed man well, because when we find out that the only thing that makes the king happy is looking at unicorns, we also find out that he’s found a way to keep them around forever by chasing them into the sea outside his castle. It allows him to watch them come in and out with the tides. Frightened in their captivity, the unicorns are eventually freed and, along with his castle, Haggard falls to his death in the very sea that kept them prisoner. Good riddance.

Azula – Avatar: The Last Airbender

It’s harder than you’d think to craft an emotionally complex animated villain, but they knocked it out of the park with Azula, who tends to rely on strategy over strength to defeat her opponents in The Last Airbender. A notably skilled firebender, her ruthless nature has nonetheless been tragically shaped by her upbringing and her obsession with perfection. As a consequence, her fear of failure and inability to trust others cause her to unravel. Azula’s eventual downfall is accidentally driven by her own flaws, but that’s just one of the many reasons why she remains one of the most compelling animated villains ever.

Venger – Dungeons & Dragons

As the main antagonist of the 80s cartoon series Dungeons & Dragons series, Venger was such a menacing sorcerer that even his massive and arguably cumbersome gray skirt couldn’t dampen the threat of his arrival. Forcing children to fend off his sorcery and help poor villagers escape his terrorism, Venger traumatized 80s kids everywhere with his single red horn and vampiric teeth, riding in on his black horse to put so many spanners in the works that the young crew never found their way back home. In that respect, he became a kind of nightmare villain; the kind you can’t get away from in your dreams no matter how hard you try.

A script for the unproduced finale confirmed that Venger was set to be revealed as the Dungeon Master’s estranged son, but although that knowledge certainly would have added a tragic footnote to his story, it wouldn’t have helped the countless heroes whom he eliminated before the show’s new gang arrived to thwart his evil plans.

Lord Shen – Kung Fu Panda 2

While Kung Fu Panda‘s Lord Shen (Gary Oldman) is much more of a moustache-twirling villain than some others on this list, he’s definitely earned his place on it. He’s also probably the dumbest smart villain here, because his intelligent manoeuvres are regularly countered by his inability to escape a prophecy he himself is helping come to pass. After his role in the destruction of Po’s village and the loss of his family, Shen makes a series of increasingly cruel decisions to turn fate in his favour, refusing to accept responsibility for his past and ultimately falling to Po, who has made peace with his. Shen is one of those tragic villains who might have eventually found some kind of redemption if he’d just found a way to let go of his fear.

Cruella de Vil – One Hundred and One Dalmatians

What could be more upsetting to animal lovers than a vain, greedy person who wants nothing more than to kidnap puppies and skin them for fashion? Disney’s animated version of Dodie Smith’s “cruel devil,” voiced by Betty Lou Gerson, was the walking, talking epitome of evil in One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and although she’s been portrayed by many other actresses since, the animated Cruella de Vil’s wild, twisted red mouth and pale complexion have always been truly upsetting to witness. Unlike other villains on this list, she doesn’t want power or revenge. She isn’t a supernatural monster. Cruella is a regular human being, and she just wants to kill puppies. Awful woman.

The Lich – Adventure Time

Revenge? Power? Good, old-fashioned greed? Pah! A true villain doesn’t truck with such pathetic motivations. The Lich is more than happy to simply exterminate all life. Giving off “death is inevitable and life is meaningless” vibes, when The Lich appeared, you know the situation just got very real in the normally whimsical land of Adventure Time. His quiet, philosophical demeanor and cosmic nature make his power feel beyond the control of our heroes, possibly infinite, and the nihilism he brings to the show smothers it in ancient and unstoppable evil. Great guy. Good times.

Hexxus – FernGully: The Last Rainforest

Voiced by the always sensational Tim Curry, Hexxus is a malevolent entity that feeds on the byproducts of human-caused environmental destruction in 1982’s Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, delighting in corruption and growing stronger every time he encounters sludge, toxic waste, or pollution. By the end of the movie, he’s become a smoky, skeletal monster filled with horrors, embodying industrial devastation and putting the fear of god into kids who finish the movie and realize that there are human forces that will stop at nothing to turn a profit, even if it means destroying the world we live in. Oh, and he also has a fun song, “Toxic Love,” if you need a breather from thinking about everything he represents.

Scar – The Lion King

Scar is such a good emotional manipulator, and although he’s a literal lion, he doesn’t resort to physical force to reach the top. Why would he, when his psychological tactics work so well? No, Scar plots and plans until he finally gets the opportunity to murder his brother and steal the throne in The Lion King, convincing little Simba that he’s to blame, then letting his land rot as he basks in his own majesty. Jeremy Irons’ sharp, theatrical line-readings add an extra layer of threat to Scar’s inevitable rule, and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids (and hyenas).

Judge Doom – Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The reveal of Judge Doom as not merely a villainous Dip enjoyer but a homicidal toon continues to traumatize many a child, with his bulging, animated eyes and screeching voice pretty hard to forget during the climax of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Actor Christopher Lloyd plays him with an enormous amount of menace in his live-action moments, but when Judge Doom toons out, he is terrifying on another level. The kindly Doc Brown of the Back to the Future films is immediately forgotten, replaced with a twisted amalgamation of surreal, hand-drawn intimidation, live-action, and a very real threat to kill all toons, which director Robert Zemeckis himself likened to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution. Chilling and unforgettable.

The post The Best Animated Villains Ever appeared first on Den of Geek.

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy.

This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that’s safe, how to convince your stakeholders that this work is necessary, and how to respond to the critique that what we actually need is more diversity. (Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech.)

The process for inclusive safety

When you are designing for safety, your goals are to:

• identify ways your product can be used for abuse,
• design ways to prevent the abuse, and
• provide support for vulnerable users to reclaim power and control.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals (Fig 5.1). It’s a methodology I created in 2018 to capture the various techniques I was using when designing products with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing feature, the Process can help you make your product safe and inclusive. The Process includes five general areas of action:

• Conducting research
• Creating archetypes
• Brainstorming problems
• Designing solutions
• Testing for safety

The Process is meant to be flexible—it won’t make sense for teams to implement every step in some situations. Use the parts that are relevant to your unique work and context; this is meant to be something you can insert into your existing design practice.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to provide context of how it helped your team, please get in touch with me. It’s a living document that I hope will continue to be a useful and realistic tool that technologists can use in their day-to-day work.

If you’re working on a product specifically for a vulnerable group or survivors of some form of trauma, such as an app for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or drug addiction, be sure to read Chapter 7, which covers that situation explicitly and should be handled a bit differently. The guidelines here are for prioritizing safety when designing a more general product that will have a wide user base (which, we already know from statistics, will include certain groups that should be protected from harm). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

Design research should include a broad analysis of how your tech might be weaponized for abuse as well as specific insights into the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of that type of abuse. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

Broad research

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product will involve AI, seek to understand the potentials for racism and other issues that have been reported in existing AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that’s been reported on in the news or written about by academics. Google Scholar is a useful tool for finding these studies.

Specific research: Survivors

When possible and appropriate, include direct research (surveys and interviews) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. Ideally, you’ll want to interview advocates working in the space of your research first so that you have a more solid understanding of the topic and are better equipped to not retraumatize survivors. If you’ve uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you’ll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

Especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma, it is important to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. An alternative to payment is to donate to an organization working against the type of violence that the interviewee experienced. We’ll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

Specific research: Abusers

It’s unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don’t make this a goal; rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Aim to understand how abusers or bad actors weaponize technology to use against others, how they cover their tracks, and how they explain or rationalize the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Once you’ve finished conducting your research, use your insights to create abuser and survivor archetypes. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they’re based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that’s inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research into what this group needs. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm (Fig 5.2). They may be trying to harm someone they don’t know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

The survivor archetype is someone who is being abused with the product. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype’s understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they’ve been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted (Fig 5.3)?

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may know that the abuse is happening but not be able to stop it, like when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices; or they know it’s happening but don’t know how, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out their location (Fig 5.4). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. You’ll use these later on when you design solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Instead of focusing on the demographic information we often see in personas, focus on their goals. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you’ve identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that’s being used for abuse. Later, you’ll brainstorm how to prevent the abuser’s goals and assist the survivor’s goals.

And while the “abuser/survivor” model fits most cases, it doesn’t fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child’s parents would get survivor archetype.

Step 3: Brainstorm problems

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. “Novel” means things not found in your research; you’re trying to identify completely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How could your product be used for any kind of abuse, outside of what you’ve already identified in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, try doing a Black Mirror brainstorm. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. When I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms, participants usually end up having a good deal of fun (which I think is great—it’s okay to have fun when designing for safety!). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

After you’ve identified as many opportunities for abuse as possible, you may still not feel confident that you’ve uncovered every potential form of harm. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you’re doing this kind of work. It’s common for teams designing for safety to worry, “Have we really identified every possible harm? What if we’ve missed something?” If you’ve spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It’s impossible to guarantee you’ve thought of everything; instead of aiming for 100 percent assurance, recognize that you’ve taken this time and have done the best you can, and commit to continuing to prioritize safety in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed; aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

At this point, you should have a list of ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user goals. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This step is a good one to insert alongside existing parts of your design process where you’re proposing solutions for the various problems your research uncovered.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

• Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? If not, what roadblocks can you put up to prevent the harm from happening?
• How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
• How can you help the victim understand what they need to do to make the problem stop?
• Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

In some products, it’s possible to proactively recognize that harm is happening. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. This sort of proactiveness is not always possible, but it’s worth taking a half hour to discuss if any type of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse, and how your product could assist the user in receiving help in a safe manner.

That said, use caution: you don’t want to do anything that could put a user in harm’s way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. We’ll walk through a good example of this in the next chapter.

Step 5: Test for safety

The final step is to test your prototypes from the point of view of your archetypes: the person who wants to weaponize the product for harm and the victim of the harm who needs to regain control over the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you’ll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you’re at a company that doesn’t do usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to cleverly perform both; a user who goes through your design attempting to weaponize the product against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other elements of the design that don’t make sense to them.

You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released. There’s nothing wrong with testing an existing product that wasn’t designed with safety goals in mind from the onset—“retrofitting” it for safety is a good thing to do.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you’ll want to test from the perspective of each one.

As with other sorts of usability testing, you as the designer are most likely too close to the product and its design by this point to be a valuable tester; you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

Abuser testing

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Reference the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier, and use your product in an attempt to achieve them.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. With this goal in mind, you’d try everything possible to figure out the location of another user who has their privacy settings enabled. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location (which she has set to private), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you’ve managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Your next step is to go back to step 4 and figure out how to prevent this from happening. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Survivor testing

Survivor testing involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed from the survivor’s perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. For example, for a smart thermostat, a survivor archetype’s goals would be to understand who or what is making the temperature change when they aren’t doing it themselves. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times; if you couldn’t find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Your test would involve attempting to figure out how to do this: are there instructions that explain how to remove another user and change the password, and are they easy to find? This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors pointed out that personas typically center people who are having a good day—but real users are often anxious, stressed out, having a bad day, or even experiencing tragedy. These are called “stress cases,” and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. Design for Real Life has more details about what it looks like to incorporate stress cases into your design as well as many other great tactics for compassionate design.

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. 

But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes. 

This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when it was snatched away by Australian runner John Landy. Then a year later, three runners all beat the four-minute barrier together in the same race. Since then, over 1,400 runners have officially run a mile in under four minutes; the current record is 3:43.13, held by Moroccan athlete Hicham El Guerrouj.

We achieve far more when we believe that something is possible, and we will believe it’s possible only when we see someone else has already done it—and as with human running speed, so it is with what we believe are the hard limits for how a website needs to perform.

Establishing standards for a sustainable web

In most major industries, the key metrics of environmental performance are fairly well established, such as miles per gallon for cars or energy per square meter for homes. The tools and methods for calculating those metrics are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same page when doing environmental assessments. In the world of websites and apps, however, we aren’t held to any particular environmental standards, and only recently have gained the tools and methods we need to even make an environmental assessment.

The primary goal in sustainable web design is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s almost impossible to actually measure the amount of CO₂ produced by a web product. We can’t measure the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipes on our laptops. The emissions of our websites are far away, out of sight and out of mind, coming out of power stations burning coal and gas. We have no way to trace the electrons from a website or app back to the power station where the electricity is being generated and actually know the exact amount of greenhouse gas produced. So what do we do? 

If we can’t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to find what we can measure. The primary factors that could be used as indicators of carbon emissions are:

1. Data transfer 
2. Carbon intensity of electricity

Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to quantify the energy consumption, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the websites and web apps we create.

Data transfer

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This provides a great reference point for energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

For web pages, data transfer for a single visit can be most easily estimated by measuring the page weight, meaning the transfer size of the page in kilobytes the first time someone visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Often your web hosting account will include statistics for the total data transfer of any web application (Fig 2.1).

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes. 

Reducing page weight requires a large scope. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile,” with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period (Fig 2.2). Roughly half of this data transfer is image files, making images the single biggest source of carbon emissions on the average website. 

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While most technologies become ever more energy efficient, including the underlying technology of the web such as data centers and transmission networks, websites themselves are a technology that becomes less efficient as time goes on.

You might be familiar with the concept of performance budgeting as a way of focusing a project team on creating faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Much like speed limits while driving, performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, so the goal should always be to come in under budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Web performance is often more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the true efficiency of the underlying system, whereas page weight and transfer size are more objective measures and more reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design. 

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also benchmark page weight against competitors or the old version of the website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class. 

If we want to take it to the next level, then we could also start looking at the transfer size of our web pages for repeat visitors. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For example, visitors who load the same page multiple times will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, meaning they don’t need to transfer all of the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Measuring transfer size at this next level of detail can help us learn even more about how we can optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages, and enable us to set page weight budgets for additional scenarios beyond the first visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually tell us carbon emission and energy consumption analytics directly, they give us a clear indication of efficiency relative to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. But as we’ll see next, since all web products demand some power, it’s important to consider the source of that electricity, too.

Carbon intensity of electricity

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. Carbon intensity is a term used to define the grams of CO₂ produced for every kilowatt-hour of electricity (gCO₂/kWh). This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO₂/kWh (even when factoring in their construction); whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately 200–400 gCO₂/kWh. 

Most electricity comes from national or state grids, where energy from a variety of different sources is mixed together with varying levels of carbon intensity. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously; a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

We don’t have control over the full energy supply of web services, but we do have some control over where we host our projects. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps this user-contributed data, and a glance at their map shows how, for example, choosing a data center in France will have significantly lower carbon emissions than a data center in the Netherlands (Fig 2.3).

That said, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; it takes energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the further the data travels, the more energy is consumed. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles”—and we want it to be as small as possible.

Using the distance itself as a benchmark, we can use website analytics to identify the country, state, or even city where our core user group is located and measure the distance from that location to the data center used by our hosting company. This will be a somewhat fuzzy metric as we don’t know the precise center of mass of our users or the exact location of a data center, but we can at least get a rough idea. 

For example, if a website is hosted in London but the primary user base is on the West Coast of the USA, then we could look up the distance from London to San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see that hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly reduce the distance and thus the energy used to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Converting it back to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created does this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when loading a web page, calculating the amount of electricity associated, and then converting that into a figure for CO₂ (Fig 2.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

If you want to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the unique aspects of your project, the Energy and Emissions Worksheet accompanying this book shows you how.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually take a page weight budget one step further and set carbon budgets as well. CO₂ is not a metric commonly used in web projects; we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Translating that into carbon adds a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive—but carbon budgets do focus our minds on the primary thing we’re trying to reduce, and support the core objective of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Data transfer might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users’ devices. As front-end web technologies become more advanced, the computational load is increasingly moving from the data center to users’ devices, whether they be phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Furthermore, JavaScript libraries such as Angular and React allow us to create applications where the “thinking” work is done partly or entirely in the browser. 

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in the user’s web browser means more energy used by their devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a heavy processing load on the user’s device can inadvertently exclude users with older, slower devices and cause batteries on phones and laptops to drain faster. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This isn’t just bad for the environment, but it puts a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest in society.

In part because the tools are limited, and partly because there are so many different models of devices, it’s difficult to measure website energy consumption on end users’ devices. One tool we do currently have is the Energy Impact monitor inside the developer console of the Safari browser (Fig 2.5).

You know when you load a website and your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically you think it might actually take off? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring. 

It shows us the percentage of CPU used and the duration of CPU usage when loading the web page, and uses these figures to generate an energy impact rating. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.