Harmless Villain / Anime & Manga

• ACROSS from Excel♡Saga is probably an example (until the Gainax Ending), although that's because it would lapse into Black Comedy if they seemed genuinely villainous, as opposed to any censorship keeping them that way.
  • In the manga, Il Palazzo is genuinely villainous and is actually really creepy at points, particularly when he's suffering from multiple personality disorder or laughing weirdly, but Excel, Hyatt, and Elgala remain utterly useless at their villainous tasks.
  • Similarly, depending on whether you think ACROSS is right or not (and given the Crapsack World that Excel Saga takes place in, it's hard to argue that they're wrong about the world being corrupt), Kabapu's group is very bad at what they do as well, especially Iwata who, ironically, is the one who takes his job the most seriously.
• The Team Rocket trio from Pokémon: The Series, Zig-Zag this with great infrequency. Typically they're much better at being good than they are at being bad. But there are times when they can be quite dangerous as villains.
  • They could be far more competent and dangerous in the early episodes; actually quite intimidating in their first appearance. By the Johto arc, however, they had gone through complete Villain Decay and fully solidified themselves as comic relief. The original creator of the characters, Takeshi Shudō, had by that point lost control of them, and stated his dissatisfaction with how the characters have devolved on his blog.
  • By contrast, in Best Wishes, they rose up to levels that make them seem more fearsome than even when they first appeared, making them Not So Harmless Villains. Partway through they were booted down a bit to be more comedic and similar to their classic tone after the fanbase complained, but kept some of their more competent traits.
  • By the "XY" series they hit a healthy balance of the competence gained in Best Wishes alongside their more affable comedic selves. For example in Sun and Moon they actually manage to defeat Ash in a battle. Of course, Bewear showed up and dragged them away, but still.
• How I Became a Pokémon Card, a manga full of one-shots, has a protagonist named Hiroshi in one story. He's a kid who wants to be a part of Team Rocket, but he's always accidentally doing good things. Team Rocket, in that manga, is also this, though they're depicted as being a menace for some reason.
• Florsheim from Tentai Senshi Sunred has tried a few villainous schemes from time to time, but they always get caught up in helping Sunred with his love life, or saving a stray cat, or doing things that seem out of character for an evil organization. Kawasaki Branch Big Bad General Vamp even goes out of his way to import a coconut oil-based cleaning product because it's biodegradable and he doesn't want to litter. However, this "harmlessness" only really applies to Sunred, made evident when rival and competent-appearing evil organization Devil Eye tries to make themselves the scourge of Kawasaki. After Sunred turns them away by mentioning that Florsheim is his arch-nemesis, Devil Eye tries to attack General Vamp, only to end up on the receiving end of a Curb Stomp from Armor Tiger in civvies while General Vamp lectures at them about how their delinquent aesthetics are making his monsters look bad and they don't respect their elders.
• Emperor Pilaf and his two henchmen in Dragon Ball. He was the series' first Big Bad, but he later becomes an incompetent git whose plans are always easily foiled by Goku. Of course, he also freed King Piccolo and, much later in Dragon Ball GT, accidentally made Goku young again at the cost of the Earth with the Black Star Dragon Balls.
• The pirates in Porco Rosso are positively polite:
  "Do you really want to take all fifteen of them hostage?"
  "Of course I do! It wouldn't be nice to separate them from their friends."
• Tom and Tab from Kimba the White Lion are too stupid to carry out orders and too weak to pose an actual threat to Kimba.
• Hayate Ayasaki starts his manga series like this: after having been left by his Abusive Parents with a debt he could only pay by unwillingly donating his organs, he thinks of kidnapping Nagi when he first sees her and ask for the debt value as ransom (over 150 million yen, by the way), but he does nothing but being kind to her, and never outright states his intentions...Only to turn into her savior when some thugs, well, beat him to it.
• In the pilot episode of Samurai Pizza Cats, The Big Bad threatens to not invite his henchmen to his birthday party if they don't follow his orders (at least in the German dub).
• He may be more malicious in the anime than in the games, but King Dedede is still pretty much as harmless in Kirby: Right Back at Ya! as he is in the game franchise. The only time he does threaten to hurt someone (other than Kirby or Whispy Woods) is when he orders the Dedede Stone to stomp Tiff - which would've resulted in her death if it weren't for her knight in shining armor, Meta Knight, coming to her rescue.
  • Speaking of Meta Knight, some of Dedede's Demon Beasts/monsters actually managed to hurt him - which was not what Dedede wanted.
• Happosai of Ranma ½ may be this. Invoking Panty Shots, stealing underwear, scaring girls, and overeating hardly makes him the demon-in-human-form Soun and Genma claim him to be, although there's no denying he's a huge Jerkass. Happosai is also a very powerful martial artist, but Ranma can defeat him with ease through distraction, with only a bucket of cold water and the Jusenkyo curse, or even just an item of ladies' underwear.
• Mon Colle Knights brings us another Terrible Trio: Prince Eccentro, Batch, and Gluko. Eccentro tries to be as evil as his father and Chuzaemon trained him to be, but he doesn't seem to go anywhere near even putting the slightest hurt on someone, and as a result, he and Batch often get punished by Chuzaemon with back-breaking exercises related to each episode's content. Gluko rarely gets punished, however, considering how airheaded and cheerful she is all the time even when she, Prince Eccentro, and Batch are always losing to the heroes.
• Clawdia from Fighting Foodons is another example, being incapable of even stealing a certain item such as Chef Crock Pop's scroll (which she ended up replacing with an empty fake scroll) or even the ultimate recipe held at Hamsterdam (in fact, what she got instead, to her embarrassment, was a pair of underpants), and can't even come anywhere near beating Chase and/or any of the other good chefs. One of the times she actually came close to winning for once was siccing a seemingly-indestructible Bearafooda on the good guys in Episode 10 (who of course gained back the upper hand when they used a power topping). She finally got one more chance to impress King Gorge in the third-to-last episode and she blew it, of course (which in turn leads to Gorge to attempt to kill her as punishment only for Chase to stop him, after which she later redeems when Chase and the others break Gorge's spell on her with their food).
• Cait Sith Cheshire, from Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas, who is mostly a Plucky Comic Relief character who acts more like a servant than a combatant.
• In Kyo Kara Maoh!, Stoffel is an interesting example, in that he was an Evil Chancellor in the past, manipulating the previous Maoh (his sister!) to some pretty extreme ends and generally causing a lot of damage and sorrow to a lot of people. But his villainy is all about politics and manipulation: in the current timeline, the new Maoh's advisors keep a close eye on him, and Yuuri himself is Too Dumb to Fool into being politically manipulated, so after spending his first appearance trying and failing to win Yuuri's favor and nearly starting a civil war, Stoffel becomes a comically inept sycophantic toady in short order.
• Satania from Gabriel Dropout. She thinks she's committing the most heinous acts imaginable, but in reality most of her "evil wrongdoings" amount to petty and minor inconveniences, like putting a bottlecap in the wrong receptacle. The closest she's gotten to something actually illegal was pointing a gun at Gabriel's face and threatening to shoot her with bullets that would make her laugh uncontrollably for 10 minutes - and even then, Gab turned the tables back on Satania at the last moment.
• The Spacy Brothers from Tamagotchi are aliens from an unnamed planet who moved to Tamagotchi Planet and come up with all sorts of schemes to dominate it and become its rulers. However, any plans they make to take over Tamagotchi Planet tend to crumble quite easily, probably because of all three of them being school-going children who are hard to take seriously as villains. Nobody even suspects they want to rule the planet (except for Uwasatchi in one episode, but even then nobody believes her).
• Played for Laughs in Sailor Moon with Ms. TogeToge, a Monster of the Week summoned by CereCere to eat a dream mirror and then battle the Sailor Scouts. The creature refuses, claiming the mirror is icky, leading to an argument between here and her master which culminates in CereCere trying to force-feed the mirror to the struggling monster. Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon take advantage of the distraction to summon Pegasus and blow Ms. TogeToge away before she can even use an attack. The monster even lampshades that she didn't do anything threatening or villainous as she dies:
  Ms. TogeToge: But I didn't even DO anything! Stage out, Toge!

---