Western Animation / Villainous (Cartoon Network)

Evil is Our business, and business is good. From left to right: Demencia, 5.0.5. (back), Black Hat, Dr. Flug, & a Medusa head (floor).

"Problems with heroes?"

— Black Hat

Villainous (Villanos in Spanish) is a Cartoon Network animated series created by Alan Ituriel. The show was the winner of a "Pitch Me Anything" contest hosted by the television network in conjunction with Mexican creative arts festival Pixelatl. It is the third original animated production to come out of Cartoon Network Latin America following CN Mexico's Santos vs the Clones miniseries and CN Brazil's Jorel's Brother.

The series follows the misadventures of the infamous Black Hat, a vulgar and sharply dressed narcissistic inhuman fiend who does his part to make the world a little more vile and its heroes a little more dead. Aiding him (with varying degrees of consent) are his cohorts: the meek scientist Dr. Flug, the adorably failed bestial genetic experiment 5.0.5., and his biggest and most violently deranged fangirl, Demencia.

Villanous began as a 10-episode Mini Series that premiered May 15, 2017 and was distributed through the Cartoon Network Anything App, with episodes first being released in Spanish (fansub here), with them becoming officially available in English weeks later.

A "second phase" began December 21, 2017. This consisted of eight additional minute-long shorts, a series of 11-minute Villain Orientation Videos in which Black Hat and company critique the work of various CN villains, and a more formal 11-minute pilot episode. Most of these are available in this playlist here, with those not linked available here, here, and here. This second phase also included a short series of comics that can be found on Cartoon Network Mexico's Facebook and Twitter feeds, with unofficial English scanlations available here.

On September 8, 2018, a teaser trailer for a full-length series was released, with a pilot episode for said series being released June 2019. After some delays, the series would debut on both HBO Max Latin America and Cartoon Network Mexico on October 29, 2021.

Villainous has also had a number of crossovers with other Cartoon Network properties outside its own various shorts. In October 2018, the Halloween Episode of the CN Latin America web series Toontubers, which stars Mordecai and Rigby as gaming YouTubers, had the characters used by the Black Hat Organization as test subjects against the animatronics of Freddy Fazbear Entertainment, which Black Hat recently bought in a corporate takeover (original version here, ENG Sub, here). In October 2020, the characters would made their United States debut in the Victor and Valentino episode "Villainy in Monte Macabre." The English dub was released on HBO Max Latin America on November 24, 2022, with the exception of Ituriel and Markiplier, featured a new voice cast for the series replacing A. Sayer and Melaney Sems with Yian Ruiz and Cindy Eliz-Perez respectively. This dub premiered (along with the Spanish and Portuguese dubs) on Max in the United States on May 23, 2023.

---

This series features examples of:

• Actor Allusion: In "The Foul Flower," Flug mentions that 5.0.5 makes reaction videos on the internet. He also does lets plays.
• Actually a Doombot: According to Flug, the Black Hat that was turned to stone in the OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes episode "Crossover Nexus" was actually the Black Hat clone created in The Perception of Evil short.
• Affably Evil: Aside from the fact that he proudly advertises himself as an Evil Genius, and that he has absolutely no problem with enacting horrifically painful and monstrous experiments on test subjects, who can range from well-known villains from other shows to his own sentient robots, Dr. Flug is relatively reasonable and easy to get along with (if you're not any of the narrators, that is.) He's polite, dotes on 5.0.5. like a loving parent, is disgusted with Demencia's impassioned violence to the point of nausea, and Penumbra's Instagram page shows that he sent her a birthday gift of a jar of chloroplast to try and help her with her environmentalism research, along with a card that read, "Hope you have a happy birthday! Better days and more surprises are coming! —Flug"
• Ambiguous Situation: In "Guide for an Evil Conquest", Vilgax tries to transform into Black Hat using the omnitrix Flug made. It backfires terribly and transforms him into a blob with both his and Black Hat's heads, with the latter eating the former before the omnitrix absorbs it. It's not clear if Flug incompetently built the omnitrix or if Black Hat's nature was the issue, similar to Ghost Freak breaking out.
• Arms Dealer: The cast, although not all of their products are strictly weaponry.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: In "Bad Security", Flug's exterior security system includes a small army of laser-spewing drones, a flaming hellscape, and a bunch of kids mercilessly pelting the intruder with snowballs.
• Artificial Gravity: One episode advertises and demonstrates a device that simulates a low-or-zero gravity environment, but Black Hat is enraged that it wasn't in the form of a ray gun.
• Big Bad: Black Hat and the Black Hat Organization.
• Big "WHAT?!": Black Hat and Flug were less than happy to find out Mojo Jojo inadvertently created his own heroes.
• Black Comedy: Much of the humor involves Black Hat abusing his minions. In The Lost Cases of Elmore it's shown that they killed Townsville's narrator...and it's Played for Laughs.
• Canon Welding: For the Cartoon Network lineup. For example, apparently the Organization uses Townsville as a testing site for their kaiju and assorted evil products, having Mojo Jojo as one of their big clients and a member in the local government. It's the Mayor.
• Cape Busters: One of Black Hat Organization's services is providing consultation to super villains who'd like a hand dealing with their respective archnemeses.
• Characterization Marches On: The initial shorts seemed to set the Organization up like a group of Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains, with comedic levels of incompetence, stupidity, and dysfunction. From the orientation videos onward, while they are dysfunctional and have occasional moments of stupidity, Black Hat, Flug, and Demencia are shown to be very competent in their fields and the Organization is the Greater-Scope Villain and Man Behind the Man to all of Cartoon Network's villains, with galactic warlords and world breakers like Aku and Anti-Pops reliant on their products and living in fear of Black Hat.
• Continuity Nod: Some impressive ones include:
  • The Samurai Jack orientation guide ending with Aku disappearing from existence.
  • One orientation guide shows the Gangreen Gang watching but Ace is missing and a Gorillaz poster can be seen in the background.
• Crapsack World: The more that is revealed about the Villainous universe, the clearer it is that Black Hat has far more influence in world affairs than the shorts suggest. The best example (so far) is a newspaper article in podemosbailar.com about the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world. There is a hat in the picture of the CEO office. Can you guess what color it is?
  • There's also the fact that he can easily help conquer planets if he gets paid for it.
• Creepy Jazz Music: The teaser trailer features this as the background music. Black Hat's leitmotif, Black Hat Mischief, is also in this genre.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Staunchly averted. While the main characters are villains themselves, Black Hat Organization mainly sells their services to other supervillains as consultants or mercenaries. In-universe, most of the shorts are infomercials meant to sell Flug's inventions (and any random malevolent detritus laying around their base of operations.)
• Dark Action Girl: Demencia, and she's proud of it.
• Dark Is Evil: Black Hat is dressed in black, has black skin, and is a sadistic demon.
• Decoy Protagonist: While Black Hat is initially framed as the main character, the show appears to focus primarily on Flug, 5.0.5., and Demencia with Black Hat as a peripheral Big Bad.
• Didn't Think This Through: "Bad Security" has Flug and Black Hat standing outside Hat Manor and showing off the security system Flug made around their base, and when Black Hat says to turn it off so they can go back inside, Flug nervously says that he didn't consider that they might need to be able to deactivate it from the outside.
• Disembodied Eyebrows: Everyone has these except Black Hat, who has antennae instead.
• Downer Ending: "Dreadful Dawn" ends with Penumbra unknowingly going home empty-handed since she planned to use his captivity to make him listen to her and the Umbras' plight and let her restrict daily sunlight, but Demencia ate him and Penumbra's soul is now owned by Black Hat. Furthermore, Flug, Demencia, and 5.0.5 expect praise from Black Hat since Flug's plan to defeat Sunblast worked, but instead he's furious at the trio for luring Sunblast to the island in the first place and plans to punish them for their incompetence. However, it's later revealed that Black Hat found out about Sunblast's predicament and managed to extract him from Demencia's stomach and send him back to Penumbra.
• Droste Image: In a short advertising a statue-making machine, Black Hat angrily exclaims that the first statue that comes out doesn't look like him at all, first in the exact same pose as the statue, and then in the same pose as a picture of him on the wall, with the caption underneath it saying, "NO HE DOESN'T."
• Dub-Induced Plot Hole: In "BH's Bizarre Bad-Venture", there's a Cutaway Gag to the Black Hat lawyers accusing several other Cartoon Network characters of plagiarism. Frankie from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends gives an angry retort, voiced by her Latin American actress in the original Spanish dub, but the studio was unable to get Frankie's English actress, Grey DeLisle, to voice the part, resulting in an awkward silence while Frankie mouths the words. This was eventually fixed by getting a stand-in actress to dub the line, but the joke is still somewhat dulled by Frankie's voice not being the same as the original series.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The original 2012 shorts, enough said.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: According to Flug in one of the orientation files videos, there are a many female villains who are respected and recognized in the world of villainy, and this equality between villains of any and all types extends to Black Hat Organization's policy as stated on their website's FAQ.
  Black Hat Organization FAQ: Black Hat Organization does not discriminate any kind of villain in terms of age, gender, species, bodycount, or otherwise. Black Hat Organization helps any and all villains to begin their path to villainy with accessible resources customized to the villain in question.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: 5.0.5. loves Flug just as much as Flug loves him, which is to say, very much.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Alan Ituriel once said in a stream that Demencia considers 5.0.5. and Flug her family, and thinks of Flug as an older brother.
  • Flug dotes on 5.0.5. like a devoted father, constantly praising him and treating him with boundless kindness and love, and when the Dapura Repulsa flower forces him to spout cruel things about 5.0.5.'s hobbies, he chases after him frantically apologizing as soon as Black Hat rips it off.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • While Black Hat himself doesn't seem to have any high standards, he, along with his clones and Flug, were outright disgusted with Earl. Also, despite him considering himself the evilest thing imaginable, he doesn't discriminate against any villains and provides support to them through his company. While he's willing to hold an entire family hostage to make a client pay off their debts, he does sometimes make sure that they got their promised part of a deal, as after the events of Dreadful Dawn, he found out that Demencia ate Sunblast and caused Penumbra to go home empty-handed, so he retrieved him from Demencia's stomach and sent him off to Penumbra.
  • Flug clearly takes great pleasure in torturing his test subjects, so much so that he tells Mojo Jojo before experimenting on him that the way he's about to be treated won't kill him, but he might wish that it did, but he's disgusted to the point of nausea with the way that Demencia beats the hell out of Sunblast.
  • In the crossover episode with Victor and Valentino, Flug loudly and angrily objects to Demencia eating a baby that she sees on the street, and beats her over the head until she spits him out.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Played with, as while Black Hat does seem to understand how things like love and friendship can be used against villains (and rather effectively), his methods of preventing it with the Dapura Repulsa flower completely misses the point of why those things work in the first place.
• Eviler than Thou: Black Hat is the king of this trope.
• Evil, Inc.: Black Hat Organization, to be precise.
• Exact Words: During the villain orientation on the Delightful Children from Down The Lane, Dr. Flug and 505 go to the manor to deliver their newest birthday cake. Flug leaves to get Father and the Delightful Children and tells 505 to only give the cake to the children. 505 proceeds to give the cake to first children he sees-Sector V.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Due to it's superhero setting, the show draws upon having heroes and supervillains from various backgrounds and settings-scifi, fantasy, horror, and mythological.
• Flat Joy: The narrator doesn't particularly bother to put much enthusiasm when dealing with Flug, due to the lateness of the hour, chronic overwork, and possibly being forced to stay in the same booth with the Townsville Narrator's corpse.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble:
  • Black Hat (choleric) - Ax-Crazy, bossy and short-tempered leader who will always make his anger at his followers known, even if they don't want want it.
  • Flug (melancholic) - the neurotic, mostly polite but still dedicated to his boss intellectual of the group.
  • Demencia (sanguine) - enthusiastic, hyperactive wild girl who is rather emotionally unstable.
  • 5.0.5. (phlegmatic) - Token Good Teammate of the group, a friendly and easygoing young bear who just wants everyone to get along.
• Frivolous Lawsuit: Conducted by the Black Hat Organization for plagiarism against anyone who has even a passing resemblance to the team - Nergal for Black Hat, The Creature for 5.0.5., the Villains' Coffee Shop Employee for Flug, and Frankie Foster for Demencia. Since those characters were created first, they would have better grounds to sue the BHO instead.
• Genre Savvy: Black Hat and his underlings to a lesser extent are all very aware of the flaws that plague most Card Carrying Villains and go to great lengths to ensure they maintain their diabolical standard without succumbing to dismantling their own schemes through arrogance or ineptitude.
• Genre Throwback: As you can tell by the Thick-Line Animation and an aesthetic inspired by shows such as Evil Con Carne and Courage the Cowardly Dog, it looks like Cartoon Network is revisiting their roots this time around.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: The show manages to sneak in quite a few "What the hell"s while still maintaining a G rating.
• Good Is Not Nice: Sunblast is an arrogant jerkass who fights Penumbra, who barely constitutes a villain, and he derives immense of joy he gets from beating people up, which makes it seem like he probably just does it for the attention and not because he cares about protecting the people of Atreno City.
• Graying Morality: By the show's basic premise morality is as black and white as a lemur's butt. However, in the series proper we do get to see that "villain" and "hero" are more like labels than moral descriptors, as Penumbra is as Anti-Villain as they come, and Sunblast is a total asshole.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Black Hat is this for all of Cartoon Network, supplying the other villains with tech and schemes.
• Hidden Depths: In one of the Orientation videos, a viewer asks a complicated question that requires Flug to do some extremely convoluted math to answer. He busts out an adding machine while Demencia takes out a piece of paper and a pencil, and even then she dawdles for a while before starting doing the math in her head (as in, she doesn't bother writing down the intermediate steps, she just writes the end number). It takes a good deal of time to do, with the calculator tape winding all the way around Flug's head by the time he's finished, and he finally announces the extremely long answer. But if you look over to Demencia, she's smugly holding up her paper with the exact same answer on it, which she figured out even faster using only mental math.
• Humanoid Abomination: Black Hat, maybe. Aside from his unnatural appearance, he's also shown over the course of the episodes to be able to shoot eye beams, shapeshift at will, give life to inanimate objects and even tear portals to other dimensions just by scratching his nails on a blackboard.
• Human Head on the Wall: While he's certainly not human, in the "Demencia wuz here" short you can see that Black Hat has the Beast's head mounted on the wall. And in a picture frame next to it is Steven's/Rose Quartz's/Pink Diamond's gem.
• In Love with Your Carnage: The reason Demencia is so infatuated with Black Hat.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Assuming the Villain Orientation videos are canon, then the world of Villainous shares the same universe/multiverse with every other Cartoon Network show.
• Medium Blending: Used frequently in the Villain Orientation videos.
• Medusa: Her head powers the statue-making machine in one short.
• Minion with an F in Evil: All of Black Hat's minions to a degree. Averted in following videos except for 5.0.5.
  • Flug is very skilled in inventing new gadgets and weaponry for Black Hat, but these devices often come with huge design flaws that wind up bringing much pain to him and his compatriots. He also has sandwiches as the "most evil thing" he can imagine (according to Alan Ituriel, this is because he had a traumatic sandwich-related event occur in the past.)However, he shows his sadistic streak to Mojo Jojo at the end of "The Lost Cases of Townsville" and whenever we see him experimenting on test subjects, whether they be other villains or his own sentient robots, and in "The Lost Cases of Elmore" he uses a shrink ray to shoot a plane out of the sky and put it in a glass globe with all the passengers inside. He puts it on a huge wall lined with other planes, assumedly with countless more trapped or dead passengers inside.
  • 5.0.5, by his very nature, is also one of these, as he's the result of a failed attempt at creating a destructive monster who wound up being boundlessly gentle instead of terrifyingly bloodthirsty. The narrator in the Villain Orientation videos calls him a "happy accident."
  • Demencia is Black Hat's Abhorrent Admirer which annoys him to no ends, and mostly just plays Poke the Poodle pranks when she's not mindlessly obsessing over Black Hat. That being said, see Hidden Depths, Hero Killer and Elite Mook in her character page.
• Mythology Gag: The song in the trailer says that you can call 1-800-Black Hat for reasons ranging from dealing with any hero, or if you're a parent with a terrible child. One of the Villainous shorts prior to Cartoon Network involved Black Hat listening to a pirate captain grouse about his misbehaving son.
• Nails on a Blackboard: Done by Demencia to deface a drawing 5.0.5 drew. Then Black Hat does it, seemingly tearing open another dimension that lets out a sound that's so unbearable to Demencia and 5.0.5. that they get on the floor and cover their ears, and it even cracks Demencia's teeth.
• Non-Dubbed Grunts:
  • 5.0.5's growls are left intact in all the dubs.
  • Demencia's flirty growl in "Sculpting Evil" is the same in English and Spanish.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Black Hat's pet snake, Lil' Jack. When asked to see her in the Orientation Q&A video, Black Hat gives a curt "No," followed by a shot outside of a large, extremely fast blur dragging an unlucky boy into a sewer.
  Flug: I think it's her lunch time right now.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: The whole cast save for 5.0.5., who couldn't hurt a fly.
• Number of the Beast: The orientation videos shown make up only 1 volume of 666.
• Pink Is Erotic: Miss Heed is a flirtatious superheroine and influencer with pinkish skin, hair, and clothes, decorated in heart shapes and motifs. Her outfit bares her midriff and her abilities involve brainwashing others with pheromones in her perfume.
• The Power of Love: To combat this empowering heroes or causing villains to have second thoughts, Black Hat puts the Dapura Repulsa flower up for sale during the Valentine's Day special; a parasitic plant that can turn a person's affection for others into disgust.
• Public Domain Artifact: In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it example, Black Hat has the head of the Spear of Destiny in his office.
• Rapid-Fire Comedy: The shorts have one joke happen after another, though this might be because they're only one minute long.
• Right-Hand Cat: Spoofed in "Dreadful Dawn," 5.0.5. sits on Flug's lap, but the fact that he's bigger than any of the cast and probably weighs more than a couch ends up nearly crushing him, and Flug desperately asks him to get off.
• Running Gag: Flug being painfully and humiliatingly teleported to Black Hat's office.
• Shrink Ray: "Bigger, Badder" has Black Hat demonstrating such a device on 5.0.5 and unintentionally enlarging him, prompting him to advertise it as creating giant, destructive monsters instead.
• Shout-Out:
  • Most shorts and episodes have at least one passing reference to other Cartoon Network original series in the background. These can also be found in recurring elements, such as Black Hat's portrait◊ seen in multiple episodes having Finn's sword (the first one, to be specific), Bubbles' octopus doll, Steven's shirt, Grim's scythe, and Sector V's treefort amongst the wreckage.
  • The inner security system in Black Hat's mansion utilize weapons such a bird in a slingshot, a flamethrower, and a piranha gun among the weapons.
  • When Demencia reactivates the anti-gravity device and is left floating in the air along with everyone else, she says, "We all float."
  • One of the statues that 5.0.5 creates in the last commercial has him eating Leonardo DiCaprio, who is clutching the Oscar he won for his performance in The Revenant.
  • Easter Eggs in the videos, when put together and analyzed by fans, revealed a group opposing Black Hat called "Men Without Hats," whose website, sure enough, is called "Podemos Bailar" (We Can Dance, a lyric from "The Safety Dance".)
  • In "Dreadful Dawn", when Sunblast is throwing the villains around like a lasso, one of them drops a cup that looks like Ms. Challice's head. Not to mention when Demencia is attacking him, she tells him "The sun's getting real low!" like another certain redhead.^note Somewhat lost in the redub of the pilot where the line is changed to "The sun is about to get eclipsed!"
  • In "The VVV", after Black Hat merges a man and a horse together after a woman said that she wanted to date them at the same time, the woman suddenly finds a dark rose and says "And this rose?"
  • In "Boo!-Lldozing", the haunted house momentarily turns into a perfect recreation of the possessed house from Monster House.
  • The Rickroll video tweeted by Cartoon Network LA starts with V.I.R.U.S., who has a skull-like visage, suddenly hijacking the screen and laughing. The video itself also shows Miss Heed dressed up as Blossom, which doubles as an Actor Allusion, as the Latin American voices of both characters were done by Cristina Hernández.
• Sliding Scale of Antagonist Vileness: In the Christmas short, Black Hat shows off a robot in his image known as the Hat-Bot, which Flug demonstrates how evil he can make it behave through a scale which from highest being the most evil and lowest being the least evil:
  • Almost Black Hat
  • Line Art and Clean Up
  • invokedVideo Game Movie Adaptation
  • Shipping Fees
  • Taxes
  • Fanfic Writer
  • Cartoon Producer
  • Toaster That Burns Toast
  • 5.0.5
• Soft-Spoken Sadist: Flug is generally a nervous wreck, but he's still very much a villain, as seen at the end of The Powerpuff Girls Orientation Files episode; when he has Mojo Jojo strapped to an exam table in his lab, he's clearly having an amazing time calmly and quietly explaining how the toxin he's about to inject him with won't kill him, but it'll be so agonizing that he'll wish that it would.
• Stock Sound Effect: The ship used in the pilot sounds identical to the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Demencia and Flug once provided the page image.
• Stylistic Suck: The Black Hat Villain Orientation Video has shaky footage, retro filters, shills the other products in Black Hat's catalogue, and is poorly edited with many rough cuts and technical difficulty cards left in.
• Stunned Silence: Rather than his usual reaction to Demencia's actions, Black Hat and his clones can only stare in shock at the buff clone, and remain that way until the video ends.
• Take That!:
  • The Villain Orientation videos, which are ultimately Black Hat (and later, Flug) calling out the villains of other Cartoon Network shows for their various failings.
  • When Flug asks what kind of person would dress up like them and try to steal their life, Demencia asks: "Isn't that what cosplay is for?"
• The Illegible: When Flug is writing things intended to be read by other people, his handwriting is fine, but when it's for himself, it's absolutely unreadable. The narrator in the Orientation Files, in live action, holds the script that Flug wrote, looking like a swarm of loop and scribbles with maybe one or two visible letters, and comments that he can barely make out what it says, but Flug says that his handwriting is just fine. The production team got the crew member with the worst handwriting to make it.
• The Stinger: At the end of "Boo!-Lldozing", Bulldozer is still roaming in the forest in terror until he finds a certain cave...with three familiar bears inside.
  Ice Bear: Ice Bear will call the police.
• Troubled Fetal Position: Flug assumes one after making it past the outside security system, only to find himself surrounded by the inside security system.
• Villain Protagonist: Right in the title, baby.
• Villain Respect: Generally Averted in the Orientation Video's where Black Hat sees all the other Cartoon Network villains as pathetic, but in the Adventure Time one he had a lot of respect for Princess Bubblegum. Felling the video should be about her instead of Lemongrab.
• Would Hurt a Child: As the last orientation video shows, Black Hat Organization has no problem in taking care of the Kids Next Door Organization if they try to go against them.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Miss Heed has 23 houses. When Sunblast breaks into one of them to save Penumbra, he finds this out and realizes that he got the wrong house and will have to keep searching.

---