Top 10 Worst Decisions by Disney Villains

My what a fallllll, GASTON!! Wait, that isn’t how the song goes… He may be capable of a lot, but apparently having a strong grip isn’t one of Gaston’s many abilities. While trying to kill Beast, Gaston is scaling the side of the castle in the rain and only holding on with one hand. After a skirmish, he slips right off the castle and that’s the end of it. This is of course a convenient plot device that lets the Beast remain innocent by sparing Gaston’s life, while still giving the villain an ending he deserves.

Even though you wouldn’t expect your toys to come alive and seek vengeance, torture is never a good idea. You see Sid loved to torment his toys; he would burn them and try to launch them into space, but his favourite mode of torture was creating Franken-dolls by ripping them apart and putting them together in sinister ways. Woody rallied Sid’s victims to save Buzz, turning them against their creator. Sid’s actions are almost excusable, since he didn’t know the toys were alive, but Lotso in “Toy Story 3” was a toy himself. That psychopath left the toys to die, but the gang escapes and gets justice.

The Horned King is one of the scariest of all the Disney villains, but he sure isn’t the smartest. His entire plan for world domination revolves around the Black Cauldron, which creates an undead army. The Horned King works hard looking for the thing, even using a pig to find it, but once he finally gets it he leaves it totally unguarded. It’s not like he didn’t have the resources with all the dead guys supporting him. The lack of guards meant that little Gurgi could stop the cauldron, instantly killing the army and putting an end to the Horned King.

When you’re hanging by a thread, or a vine in this case, it’s not a good idea to cut your only lifeline... especially when there is another vine wrapped around your neck. Clayton shows a disdain for the animals of the jungle throughout “Tarzan”, but in the end he proves himself to have much less humanity than they do. To defeat him, Tarzan doesn’t even need to get blood on his hands since Clayton unintentionally hangs himself in the vines in one of the more graphic villain deaths in the Disney canon.

He sure puts the rat in Ratcliffe. This villain is obsessed with gold and will stop at nothing to get it. He thinks the natives are hiding treasure in the new world, so he decides they need to die. His men weren’t necessarily on board with the whole mass murder thing, but they rally together when John Smith is sentenced to death by Chief Powhatan. Luckily Pocahontas stopped the impending battle, but Ratcliffe decided to fire anyway and shot John. Whether he was aiming at John is irrelevant, since John was the only reason his men went to war in the first place. He would have been better off literally shooting himself in the foot.

If you’re going to go through the effort of kidnapping a princess, then you better put some thought into your plan. When Mother Gothel took Rapunzel from her family, she took her to a hidden tower in the middle of nowhere. But it seems common sense stopped there because she kept Rapunzel’s original birthday, instead of changing it to literally anything else. You know, the same day thousand lanterns are released in honor of the missing princess? The connection between the lanterns and her birthday lead Rapunzel to the truth, and ultimately to Gothel’s downfall.

Some Disney villains just can’t pass up an opportunity to brag. Mr. Waternoose makes the mistake of revealing his plan before he can even act on it. His power plant, which supplies power through the screams of human children, isn’t doing too well so his brilliant idea is to kidnap children to harvest their screams. This breaks ethics codes even in the monster world and luckily he reveals his plot while being unknowingly recorded and is promptly arrested. Mayor Bellwether makes a similar mistake in “Zootopia”. She reveals her plan to Judy, who is always armed with her trusty carrot pen/recorder. Will villains ever learn?