A good villain can redeem even the shittiest of films. Just look at how Darth Maul almost single-handedly rescues The Phantom Menace from Jake Lloyd, or the joy that is Tom Hiddleston’s Loki in the middling Thor. A bad villain, on the other hand, can hinder an otherwise great film (Guardians Of The Galaxy comes to mind). With its new video, WhatCulture is more interested in the disasters that could’ve been. In “10 Terrible Early Drafts That Almost Ruined Iconic Villains,” a number of effective bad guys are explored in their embryonic states, when they had the potential to veer into absurdity.
The Alien series, it appears, was rife with unfortunate early approaches that included the casting of a dog as the monstrous four-legged Xenomorph in Alien 3 and a design scheme for Alien: Resurrection’s alien-human hybrid to sport a raw-looking, smooshed-together fusion of male and female genitalia.
Perhaps the video’s biggest surprise is that Toy Story’s Woody was initially written as a total douchebag, prompting the video narrator to ponder just how much of a villain Woody actually is in the series. Or maybe it’s that Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine was initially called Cos Dashit, which is a 14-year-old rapper just waiting to happen.