Upon the suggestion of my new favorite suggester (he's such an eager beaver!) I have added Ratigan. Because of my ignorance on this fellow I think I'll yeild the floor to Monsieur Loneheart, who has proven himself time and time again to be the resident expert on seemingly-obscure British animation factoids. And now I'm going to pass the mic... Professor Ratigan is clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes' archenemy, Professor Moriarty. However, unlike the sly and impersonal Moriarty, who only got one scene in the original Holmes stories and only met Holmes in the flesh twice, Ratigan is extravagant, extroverted and built like a battleship. He's got a huge inferiority complex because he's a rat instead of a mouse. Apparently rats are subject to some kind of class prejudice in Victorian mousedom and the Professor has suffered under it at some time.... to the extent that when we first see him he interrupts his first big song and kills one of his henchmen for referring to him as "the world's greatest rat" instead of "the world's greatest mouse." Ratigan doesn't care for the gold and power he claims to seek half as much as he wants to prove himself smarter, braver and stronger than any of his so-called betters. To this end he kidnaps a toy maker named Flaversham and forces him to build a robot copy of the queen of all mousedom by threatening his daughter. Voiced by the late Vincent Price, Ratigan's sinister, velvet tones are at their best when he's gloating over the captured Basil, showing his need to prove himself better than his opponent. His extravagance shows itself when he announces Basil's fate: "I thought of so many ways to kill you I couldn't decide which one to use. So I decided to use them all..." And as for his arrogance... in a film where the hero didn't get to sing and the villain had two songs, Ratigan rushed off to fulfil his evil scheme and left his second song playing on a record player instead of singing it in person. The guy practically phones in his big number at his moment of triumph, like it's no big deal. Can you imagine another Disney villain with an ego big enough to do that? In the end, Ratigan defeats himself. His weakness was his quick temper, which leads him to act unwisely. He destroys his own robot after Basil causes it to insult him, and he falls from Big Ben when his fury causes him to forget that the clock is about to strike. Excellent once again, Loneheart! Oh, and he brought up a great question for suggester-wannabes... The answer to his question was "Yes." Oh, the question was "Will you accept Villains from movies?"
Advertisement