Here's my Top 6 Disney Villains: (with the highly important missing category Mizal forgot to include)
6. Obligatory inclusion of Gaston.
Evilness: 3/8
Gaston is an interesting case. Most of what he does isn't really evil in itself, he's just not very smart and wrapped up in himself. He gives the impression of a dude who just doesn't comprehend what he's doing, he just does it because that's how he thinks it should be.
Coolness: 6/8
He's simply magnificent. A genius, a hero, truly the ideal man. I think you'll find that nobody is quite like him. The dude can fire 3 shots in quick succession from a flintlock blunderbuss.
Complexity: 5/8
Through no fault of his own, Gaston is pretty interesting. In any other story, particularly any story told by a 17th century frenchman like Gaston's contemporaries, he would be the hero. There's not a lot to him, but because he's rewarded for being simply who he is, he never really had to develop himself to become anything else. His actions aren't born out of malice, he just expects the world to be literally and objectively how he sees it, because he's the product of a chauvinistic society. That's pretty deep for a children's film.
Minions: 5/8
Aside from leading one of the funnest disney villain songs, there's nothing particularly interesting about Le Fou. And the harem of identical blonde ladies swooning over him are pretty one-note, too. But that's sort of the thing, they are very good at what they do. And that's selling Gaston as being the biggest fucking deal in all of Early Modern France. You even sort of see this in how he barely has to sing his own villain song, everyone around him does it for him because they think he's just so great. In a way, his minions are the entire town. Which provides children with an interesting and pretty valuable message about not being afraid to deviate from the things that are expected from them.
Of course, the live action remake had to remove this message by pushing their gay lefou fanfiction, where society actually barely did anything wrong and Gaston is just a selfish douche of his own volition rather than someone unaware of his privileged chad existence and confounded by someone who simply isn't like everyone else. The rewriters bought into the late 2016 meme from people who actually understood the source material, of taking the piss out of of Gaston. Except they undermine this message by doing it unironically within the narrative, and Le Fou has to actively convince other people to give a fuck about Gaston just to inflate his crush's ego. But I digress, that's far from the only thing horribly wrong with the remakes.
Defeat: 1/8
If it weren't for the rhyme (No one's Vain like Gaston, is a pain like Gaston, no one falls to his death in the rain like Gaston!) I don't think I'd even remember what happened to him.
Musical Number: 8/8
Gaston's song is the only one of these (aside from #1) that I remember most of the words to.
5. Scar, from The Lion King.
Evilness: 8/8
I mean, he was willing to turn on and kill his brother and his kid in order to secure his tyrannical rule. There's even a deleted scene where he tries to make Nala his queen, except non-consensually, which is when she ran away and found Simba. The mere fact that he's ruling over the land fucks up the balance of the world so bad that it turns the grassy Savannah into a flaming hellscape. There has never been a more evil lion. Though, I could name a few housecats.
Coolness: 6/8
He's literally a lion that commits murder, that would be pretty cool for a villain already. But the fact that he's Jeremy Irons being so deadpan and smug takes it a level above.
Complexity: 7/8
Aside from being most childrens' introduction to the drama of medieval courtly politics, the fact that he's able to contain his villainy until the great betrayal, and his skill in manipulating the others, really makes him pretty interesting and complex for a disney villain. He's like an opera character, but for kids.
Minions: 7/8
The hyenas are just a lot of fun. I dunno what else I can say. For a lot of my early life I was remembering "lions are UUUUGLY!" and my family and other kids would quote it with me. If it weren't for the fact that this list contains 2 notable exceptions, I'd say he has the most fun minions out of all Disney villains. But hey, top 3 is absolutely nothing to sneeze at. They also eat him alive at the end, so that's pretty cool.
Defeat: 2/8
He falls off a cliff, like most of them. But it gets 1 point for irony, and another for the fight scene.
Musical Number: 7/8
Aside from being appropriately dramatic and excellently ominous, it features fascist goose-stepping hyenas during a volcanic earthquake that punctuates Scar's villainous monologue. I'd post a link, but I'm not sure you're PREPARED.
4. The Horned King, from the Black Cauldron.
Evilness: 10/8
He's the only villain in the vague glob of disney canon I know who's made actual, serious attempts to kill a child. His minions do that, too. Plus, he actually succeeds inadvertantly in killing the little mustache creature. Jeffrey Katzenwhatzen cut his movie to shreds because he was so infuriated that the Black Cauldron caused frightened children to run out of the theatre during screenings. I doubt there's anybody else in the roster who have performed an exercise in villainy so pure that it even scares the target audience in real life.
Coolness: 6/8
He earns major points for John Hurt's voice, and generally being presented as the scariest motherfucker to walk the earth in a children's film. However he loses some points for spending the majority of the movie chasing after some goofy pink-colored Don Bluth pokemon for the majority of the movie, when he would have just been able to steal the cauldron from the kid anyway without the need to perform waterboard interrogation on a fucking pig... Oh right, did I mention that? Yeah he's probably the most evil disney villain.
Complexity: 2-4/8
At face value, his motivations are pretty simple. He's just a real scary dude with aspirations of world dominating power like many big bad villains, but there's a lot about him that goes unexplored in the movie. He's not the only king to preside over this land, and it's implied that he's not the first, either, as there was at least a guy before him who made The Black Cauldron, and then another one who was buried with the sword that the kid used. It makes you wonder, was The Horned King ever just a man like any other? Did he have a more complicated motivation before the years of witchcraft and conquest turned him into something different? Why does water burn him?
Minions: 7/8
I absolutely adore Creeper, his Goblin Minion. His scrappy stupid hyperactivity is just the sort of thing that led to my goblin obsession later in life, though Overlord probably played a bigger part in that. Creeper props this score up almost entirely on his own. The Horned King's Skeleton Army is also brilliantly macabre and genuinely ominous for all of the 2 minutes they appear on screen. The rest are some pretty typical greasy fantasy henchmen types, but they earn points for genuinely trying to kill the protagonist at some points, rather than treating him with the literal kid gloves that a normal Disney thing might've.
Death: 6/8
Dude gets sucked into a Hell Portal brought about by an ancient necromantic artifact being destroyed by human sacrifice. Sure, the death boils down to "fell off/into something" like most of them, but it's never had such METAL implications. He also fuckin' melts at the end.
Musical Number: 1/8
He doesn't really have one. Cool atmospheric music suite, though.
2.Rasputin, from Anastasia. Wait, OH FUCK! Hades, from Hercules.
Evilness: 8/8
You don't usually notice it, but usually the villain's goal is not actively trying to kill the protagonist. His motivation is similar to Scar, at least in the sense that he's trying to get back at Zeus for inheriting the role that he wanted, except you generally get the sense that he's gone a little batty about this after stewing over this shit for hundreds, if not thousands of years. He's also one of the few disney villains where killing the protagonist is one of his actual goals. Most of the time, when a conflict has to get violent it's sort of because the heroes are in the way of what the villain wants, but in this case, no. Hercules dying is actively part of his plan to get back at Zeus. Plus, he also kills main characters, at least as much as the Horned King does.
Coolness: 8/8
This should sort of speak for itself. Aside from his lair and his minions being really cool. Explaining why someone is charismatic not only usually fails words, but pretty much will make you sound really autistic every time, so I'm not really gonna get into it.
Complexity: 6/8
While not as complicated of a character as Scar, he has a similar motivation. Coupled with his skeeviness and the fact that outside of his most mustache-twirling moments, he manages to never really feel evil through sheer force of conniving, it makes him pretty fun to watch. He's basically the reason to see the movie.
Minions: 7.5/8
The little imps were sort of just annoying and not very memorable to me. But the Hydra, the Cyclops, the Titans, and Cerberus were so unbelievably badass that it feels sort of like cheating to include them. There's not a lot on this list that can compete with the pure, epic scale of his underlings.
Defeat: 7/8
One of the most bombastic "deaths" on this list. He gets launched fistward into the fucking River Styx and dragged into the abyss by the souls of the damned.
Musical Number: 0/8
He doesn't have one. But does he even really need one?
1. Long John Silver, from The Muppets' Treasure Island.
Evilness: 4-8/8
I mean, he's a pirate, but he's more of a smooth con man making a heist than an explicit murderer. He's not after blood or glory, he just wants the dirty money he believes he and his crew of bandits are entitled to. And while he's not pure, rotten, bastardly evil in the scheme of villains, that's part of what makes his evil so great. The fact that he's so charismatic and you get attached to him despite the fact that he's a fatally flawed person who's done terrible things, makes him a great bad guy.
Coolness: 8/8
Tim Curry is having the time of his life being a scheming one-legged pirate captain whose pet is a talking lobster. There's nothing about this performance not to love.
Complexity: 6-8/8
To an adult watching the movie, it's obvious from the ominous musical cues and the fact that you know the plot of Treasure Island that John is the bad guy. But to a kid, there's a certain level of ambiguity, and John and his "parrot" seem perfectly jovial and nice! Hell, Jim Hawkins certainly seems convinced! The movie itself feels sort of short and incomplete on an overall level, and perhaps they didn't leave in some scenes (or didn't have time to film them) that might've established Jim and John as closer friends, but 5 year old me understood it, and honestly the conflict between Long John Silver being a bad guy without necessarily being a terrible person was the first time I'd ever seen something like that.
Minions: 11/8
It's a crew of muppet pirates. I mean, it's really hard to argue with that. There's a lot of faces you might recognize in Cap'n Flint's crew, and a few of the more rarely used muppets/fraggle rock characters who really shine as pirates! 2 characters were even made specifically for this movie! They're the right mix of genuinely hilarious yet also intimidating enough for a kid to take seriously, they're everything a disney villain's entourage should be, and more.
Defeat: 8/8
There's a great swashbuckling slapstick pirate battle where Long John is ultimately defeated, but the end for Silver is ultimately much more poetic. His final confrontation with Jim is, I daresay, poignant for a kid's movie, and as he escapes the brig with Flint's gold after being let go by Jim, it embodies the very thing that makes an otherwise friendly sailor into a villainous pirate. He was after the gold, at all costs, even the cost of his friendship with Jim. While it's funny that we learn later on the boat starts sinking, there's a certain irony to Long John bailing out his sinking rowboat full of extremely heavy gold and jewels that reminds me of the deliberately ironic and kind of depressing imagery at the end of Roman Polanski's Pirates movie.
Musical Number: 8/8
This should speak for itself. I know I always wanted to be a professional pirate!
