Rogue's Gallery by Hanna-Barbera

I've been watching a lot of the classic Hanna-Barbera adventure shows from the late 60's lately with my kids. My 3 year old son really likes Gloop and Gleep from the Herculoids, although we are at logger-heads over which is which (I take the mainstream view that Gleep is the little one, while he firmly supports the contrarian position that Gloop is the little one. But he's 3, so what does he know. Punk).

My son also heartily supports Bird-Man, largely because that hero believes in shouting out his own name at every opportunity.

My 6 year old daughter, meanwhile, lifts a very critical brow towards Space Ghost. She notes that Jan and Jayce are totally useless and always get captured; that Space Ghost will, at some point in the episode, bemoan his lack of Power Bands, without which he is just some loser in tights; and that Blip is consistently the most effective member of the team (she's such a smart-ass and I love it).

Finally, my wife notes that the plots of these shows are rather thin. She's missing the point: the point of these shows is not the narrative; it's ROBOTS and ALIENS and, preferably, ALIEN ROBOTS fighting ROBOT ALIENS. The designs of the Rube Goldberg weapons and vehicles are awesome. Awesome.

The other night, for example, we saw Mekkano the Machine Master. Mekkano has a remote control space ship that breaks him out of space jail by using a super hi-tech mace. With spikes. But it's an electro-spashers so that's cool.

Anyway, the point is that there are some fantastic-looking science fantasy villains just waiting to be used here. Indeed, in writing the post, I discovered that someone actually statted up Mekkano for Ye Auld Game. The Mekko-Trackers seem a bit tougher than I woudl have statted them, but still.

I'm thinking about making a HB science-fantasy villains recurring feature here.

Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to type "Electro-Smasher".