Mumm-Ra or Venger

Who was the scarier 80s cartoon villain, Mumm-Ra or Venger?

— Kane Magus (@KaneMagus) January 19, 2022

---

Made that as a kind of one-off, throw-away tweet last night, but now I'm going to follow-up on it.

Here was my thought process on it, from initial thought to now. Was looking at random stuff on TVTropes last night, and some of the examples of whatever happened to mention both Thundercats and Dungeons and Dragons. Which got me to thinking about Mumm-Ra and Venger, because of course it did. At first, I was like "I don't know, man, both are pretty scary, but I remember more about Mumm-Ra, so probably him? But... Venger was pretty fuckin' scary, too."

Then I looked up images for Venger online, and my thought was like "...man, this dude looks a lot... ...goofier... ...than I recall him looking as a kid. As a kid he was pretty terrifying, but now... maybe not so much." What I remember thinking as a kid was that there was just... something about the fact that he only had one horn on the side of his head that made him a lot scarier than if he'd had two, one on each side. But then, I also found a best of Venger video on Youtube, and that sort of swung the pendulum back in his favor. (Thanks in no small part to the voice of Peter Cullen, of course.)

But, in the end, I'd probably have to give it to Mumm-Ra. As far as I was concerned, most of any given episode of Thundercats was basically just filler, killing time up until Mumm-Ra transformed, at which point Shit Got Real™. Mumm-Ra was kind of a badass, even as he was scary. Also, there's the fact that Mumm-Ra once gave fucking Superman, of all people, a run for his money. (As an aside, how they managed to get nearly 5 minutes out of Mumm-Ra's theme, I have no idea.)

I guess the real question is who's scarier between the Ancient Spirits of Evil and the Nameless One? *shrug* I dunno.

Seriously, though, I remember essentially nothing about either Thundercats or the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon at this point in my life, aside from the intros for each. (Knowing quite a bit more about D&D now than I did way back then, thanks to stuff like Counter Monkey and Critical Role and such, the fact that they're just straight up fighting Tiamat for a bit there is kind of ridiculous.) If you tasked me with recounting the plot of any given episode of the D&D cartoon, I would fail. I certainly don't recall Venger chasing a fighter jet, that's for sure, though that seems pretty badass and makes me want to hunt down and watch the show now. On the other hand, I do remember the plot of at least one episode of Thundercats, which was the one where Lion-O had to test himself against each of the other Thundercats before they would really accept him as the leader or some such, i.e. prove himself stronger than Panthro, faster than Cheetara, etc., and then he had to fight Mumm-Ra without the Sword of Omens, iirc. I remember thinking as a kid "There's no way," but, of course, he pulled it off.

(Also, it's quite possible that I'm forgetting or neglecting a cartoon villain from the 80s who was way scarier than either of these two. I actually did a Google search for "scariest 80s cartoon villains" before starting this, but nobody else immediately popped out at me as being obviously scarier. Not Megatron or Cobra Commander or Serpentor or Skeletor and certainly not Shredder and Krang or Gargamel or whoever.)

"The Emerald Eye"

The comic.

The associated blog.