Mxyzptlk (1984)
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Cartoon Animal |
Outfit: Bowler hat / Tomorrowland cast member uniform / Piss yellow unitard
Tagline: "Catch me if you can!"
Plot summary: Say you've invented the world's most recognized and beloved comic book hero. You're living the high life. At the culmination of another whirlwind of sex, drugs and swing jazz that has become your routine weekend, you stagger home, just in time to faintly recall that the deadline for the storyboard for your next big issue is tomorrow morning. You quickly hobble to your desk and crash, face first, onto your typewriter. Next thing you know, it's 8:40 in the morning, you have 20 minutes to get to work, and the only thing resembling a plot note you have prepared is a piece of paper with an amalgation of letters your face rested on overnight typed on it.
What do you do now? Simple: sell it as the name of Superman's crazy new foe! An imp from another dimension not bound by the limits of our own, giving him godlike powers similar to that laser-proof armor the kid from around the block that you don't really like but you always end up playing with suddenly announces that he's wearing after you pretend shoot him in the face during a game of Cowboys and Evil Scuba Divers. Now make him as annoying and difficult to get to go home as kid from around the block, and congratulations, you've just accidentally created the most powerful being in the DC comics Universe besides "The Presence," which is what they call God because they're afraid of pissing off atheists or something. "Oh, this omniscient, all powerful being who created all things is named The Presence? Phew, I was about to get angry at my comic book for tricking me into reading about the Lord for a second." (more)
User comments: Mxyzptlk—pronounced Mix-el-plik in the cartoon, because they couldn't read, either—is from the Fifth Dimension, so it'd take one and two-thirds IMAX theaters just to see his true form. Since we're a three-dimensional people, our eyes can only make out a tiny man dressed up for Mis-match Day at school. That's the one dress-up day at which the boys were better. The girls just looked like Avril Lavigne. And while that'd go well with Mxyzptlk's Complicated nature, cross-dressing in cartoons was strictly reserved for Bugs Bunny. And Shaggy and Scooby when they stopped being scared and managed to come up with a disguise in the two seconds before the Creeper ran into the door.
I hated whenever Mxyzptlk showed up. Hated it. Sure, I've never had a job involving writing to meet a deadline, so maybe I can't truly appreciate the occasional need to fill an episode's worth of a lack of ideas with this guy being annoying and doing magic again, but it still seems like lazy filler to me. Especially considering that the only way to defeat him is to get him to say his impossible name backwards. Which would've been a great "fuck you" tactic, in the same way that maybe Bowser could have just, you know, not had floating platforms or question mark blocks hovering over his lava pits, had Superman not used the same "get the idiot to spill the beans" trick used in every cartoon ever created. "Ha! You won't trick me into saying Kltpzyxm this time! O shi" That seriously worked every time, but how else are you going to get a limitless being to say that word without going "Please read the word on this piece of paper, or I will sternly ask you to stop doing bad things again!" If they really wanted to make Mxyzptlk unbeatable, they should've made it so he could only be sent back whenever ANYONE said, "This looks like a job for Marvin and Wendy."
User Rating: 
(58,008 votes)