Next to classic literary monsters, towering kaiju, and slasher movie killers, Disney’s animated villains are some of the most popular evil characters of all time. Much like the studio’s pantheon of morally upright princesses, the deliciously malicious Disney villains have become recognizable icons in their own right beyond the films they originated from and are among Disney’s most beloved characters. They’ve spawned tons of merchandise, entire theme park events and even spun off into their own stories like 2014’s Maleficent and 2021’s Cruella. What draws us to the mouse house’s rogues’ gallery is how unapologetically evil they are, almost taking gleeful abandon in their devious undertakings and gambles for power. They can be fantastically bombastic like Ursula and Dr. Facilier or sinisterly two-faced like Mother Gother and Frollo. From wicked stepmothers to otherworldly demons, Disney villains are in a league of their own in the history of cinematic ne'er do wells.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the magic kingdom’s underground and highlight some of the most underrated Disney villains. While these villains may not have blockbuster solo films under their belt to tell their side of the story, they are just as delightfully cruel as the best of them.

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Hopper ('A Bug's Life')

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Image via Pixar

Pixar’s second feature film A Bug’s Life is an insectoid epic partly inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, pitting a vulnerable ant colony in need of a hero against a renegade swarm of grasshoppers. The film also bases itself on the fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper”, wherein the lazy grasshopper fails to save enough food for winter while the industrious ants live to see another season. In A Bug’s Life, the fable’s care-free grasshopper takes the form of Hopper (Kevin Spacey), who instead takes advantage of the colony’s productivity and forces them to collect food for him and his swarm. Hopper does very little of the evil work as an active villain himself, but getting his hands dirty that is not where his strengths lie. Much like a gang boss, he uses intimidation to get what he wants, shouting orders and dominating his will over others to keep the ant colony and his own swarm in line.

Alameda Slim ('Home on the Range')

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Image via Disney

If there is anything that should be remembered from Disney’s bovine-bolstered bomb Home on the Range, it is definitely Alameda Slim, easily one of Disney’s goofiest villains to date. Voiced by Randy Quaid, Slim is a sequin-studded cattle rustler who aims to own a controlling stake of the entire western territory’s farmland by stealing farmers’ livestock and buying their now worthless farmland in disguise. Where things get silly is the method in which he herds hundreds of cattle under cover of darkness. He does not prod, yell or even rope his ill-gotten steers. Much like a pied piper, he hypnotizes the cows under his control by way of country-style yodeling, resulting in a dizzying technicolor musical sequence set to an acapella medley of show tunes. Most Disney films feature their characters singing, but Alameda Slim prides himself on his musical gift more than any other Disney villain out there.

Ratigan ('The Great Mouse Detective')

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Image via Disney

Everybody needs a hobby, and Professor Ratigan’s is being delightfully nasty. The Great Mouse Detective’s Ratigan, voiced by the unmistakable Vincent Price, ultimately is vying for a seat on the throne of all mouse-kind, but does so simply because he can and has a great deal of fun doing it. He treats his career of being London’s greatest criminal mastermind as a game of “rat-and-mouse" against super sleuth Basil of Baker of Street (Barrie Ingham). He takes a childlike glee in every scheme and underhanded deed he commits to outwit Basil and prove he is more than just a sewer rat. Much like Peter Pan’s Captain Hook, Ratigan also fancies himself a gentleman first and foremost, carrying himself with an air of sophistication and elegance even when things don’t go his way, but by the end, his monstrous nature is revealed as he fully succumbs to his animal ferocity.

Maestro Forte ('Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas')

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Image via Disney

Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas is about as unnecessary as a straight-to-video Disney sequel can get. It tells the story of the Christmas the titular couple spent together in the castle during the time-jump in the original Beauty and the Beast. Along with being narratively redundant, it introduces a slew of new characters that were nowhere to be seen in the original feature, the best of which is the evil pipe organ Maestro Forte (Tim Curry). Along with being the film’s saving grace thanks to Curry’s unique brand of sultry over-the-top villainy, Forte and his motivation take the idea of the enchanted castle and the Beast’s curse to a chillingly dark place. Unlike the rest of the castle denizens, Forte prefers his new body as he was once the castle’s resident composer who now embellishes the Beast’s tortured soul with melancholy tones. He is driven to keep the Beast (Robbie Benson) from ever falling in love and breaking the spell so that he can remain the Beast’s sole confidant and musical entertainment for all time. With Tim Curry’s operatic performance and eerie late 90’s CGI, Forte makes the Beast the second most terrifying resident of the castle.

Sabor ('Tarzan')

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Image via Disney

When it comes to Disney animal movies, the antagonistic threats typically came from man’s presence disrupting the natural order of the wilderness or from within the animal kingdom itself with villains like The Lion King’s Scar or Shere Khan from The Jungle Book. Regardless of species, these villains were driven by identifiably human motivations like greed and expressed it through words and calculated actions. In Tarzan, while we did get a traditional villain in the form of Clayton (Brian Blessed), the film’s initial threat was the ferocious leopard Sabor. In a film with talking apes and elephants acting with exaggerated human emotions, Sabor does not speak a word of dialogue and is the only animal character in the film to behave like a true beast with only a single thought driving their actions: kill. Just within the film’s first five minutes, he is already credited with killing infant Tarzan’s human parents and a baby gorilla. Sabor’s presence alone communicates to the audience almost immediately how dangerous the forces of nature present in the jungle are.

Demona ('Gargoyles)

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Image via Disney

Why Disney has yet to revamp 1994’s Gargoyles for a new age, we’ll never know, but the Disney Afternoon original was Disney’s answer to other 90’s comic book toons like X-Men and Batman: The Animated Series, being a neo-noir action fantasy with dramatic storylines, gothic undertones and fully-fleshed out characters. Although the series was mostly episodic with an array of different villains coming and going, the main overarching antagonist of the series was the vengeful Demona, played by Marina Sirtis. Scorned by man’s treatment of her species a thousand years ago, Demona spends the bulk of the series embarking on a solitary war to exterminate the human race at any cost, with only her fellow gargoyles standing in her way. What makes her a compelling and tragic villain is that her centuries-long quest for vengeance for what happened to her kind are what make her an enemy to her former allies. She trusts no one and is often the cause of her own suffering, always blaming the cruelty of humans on her own mistakes.

Chuckles The Silly Piggy ('Dave the Barbarian')

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Image via Disney

Long before Gravity Falls’ Bill Cipher and Phineas and Ferb’s Dr. Doofenshmirtz became the fan-favorite villains of Disney Channel, there was a dark and twisted master evil that wielded mystical powers, commanded hordes of minions and most terrifying of all, had an adorably curly tail. 2004’s Dave the Barbarian, which is somehow still not on Disney+, is a high-fantasy comedy that follows a royal family of barbarian warriors as they fight to protect the kingdom of Udrogoth from monsters, wizards and time-traveling department store clerks. The Dark Lord Chuckles the Silly Piggy, voiced by Animaniacs writer Paul Rugg, is the series’ main arch enemy and is a classically overblown cartoon villain in all the best ways. He constantly plots to seize power and destroy his foolish barbarian foes by concocting such absurdist schemes as invading with a legion of pretzel men, inserting subliminal messages into popular music and even kidnapping the show’s narrator. He may be cute, but within his porcine stature lies a power-hungry megalomaniac who serves as a perfect comedic foil to the barbarian brood, laughing and hamming it up along the way.

Dr. Carver ('The Proud Family Movie')

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Image via Disney

George Washington Carver developed hundreds of uses for the common peanut over the course of his scientific career. In The Proud Family Movie, his descendant continues his research on a remote island to prove what further genetic wonders the nut is capable of. The experiments of the new Dr. Carver (Arsenio Hall) result in the creation of an evil clone bent on world domination. He does everything a great Disney villain should do; he sings, he dances, he laughs, but what makes him especially memorable is the absolute absurdity of his backstory and motivations. He’s a sentient legume who amasses an army of genetically altered peanuts warriors to become king of the world and prove peanuts as the superior race. That is, for lack of a better term, nuts!

The Sheriff of Nottingham ('Robin Hood')

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Image via DIsney

Disney’s Robin Hood brought the classic hero to life the only way Disney animation in the 1970s could; with famously recycled animation and a full cast of anthropomorphic animal characters. While the titular hero robbed the rich to feed the poor, the “honorable” Sheriff of Nottingham (Pat Buttram) acted as enforcer to the crown and robbed the taxes of the poor to feed the infantile Prince John (Peter Ustinov). While only following orders as a secondary villain to the prince, the Sheriff still takes gleeful joy in his job of keeping the peace and collecting taxes, even going so far as to take money from the church donation box and a blind man’s cup. The animation by Milt Kahl and John Lounsbery also illustrate the bouncy exuberance he takes in what he does as he struts and sings down the street to remind the villagers that every little bit helps.

Zira ('The Lion King II: Simba's Pride')

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Image via Disney

The original Lion King taught the message to leave the mistakes of the past behind and learn from them to make a better future. In the straight-to-video sequel The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, these lessons fall on deaf ears and a grieving heart in the form of Zira (Suzanne Pleshette). Zira and her pride are a sect of lions who followed Scar’s rule and saw him as the true king before Simba (Matthew Broderick) reclaimed his rightful place on the throne. With Scar dead and Simba as king, Zira’s family are now outsiders forced to live in the shadow of the Pride Lands with less food and water. She then hatches a life-long plan for revenge by breeding her youngest son Kovu (Jason Marsden) to become a usurper of the throne and rule Pride Rock over Simba’s dead body. Among the villainous Disney matriarchs, Zira is the most ruthless as she plants the seeds of vengeance in her young cubs to suit her own desires. In an infamous deleted scene of the film’s climax, when offered the chance for redemption and to be saved from certain death, she lets herself fall off the cliffside and into the rapids, choosing to take her own life rather than learning to forgive and forget the past. Zira represents the darkness that comes with grieving a loved one that Simba was able to overcome in the original film.

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