What's MacGregor syndrome?
So they punch him a bunch.
It's made up.
Well what is it in the confines of the made up world?
It's really close to MacGuffin syndrome. It's a thing that makes 80 year olds tired a lot.
Nina, what bad guy-good guy team up have you chosen to talk about today?
So Brian, I know that when you talk about good guy-bad guy team ups in the MCU,
most people would probably think about Thor and Loki, that's a good go-to example, but I wanted to
pick a different MCU villain-turned-good because while they're only bad briefly, it has really fun
ramifications for the rest of the MCU. So my pick is Wanda Maximoff, who is introduced as a
villain in Age of Ultron and ultimately becomes an Avenger, and then got her own show. So she's very,
very briefly a villain, right? She's working with Ultron to destroy the Avengers. Wanda and her
brother realize that Ultron is pretty hell bent on genociding everyone, so they get out of there.
They briefly both join the Avengers until Pietro is killed in battle, but obviously we get
great ramifications of that, which means we get Elizabeth Olson in the rest of the MCU,
appearing alongside various Avengers, and then we get Wandavision, which is probably my favorite...
It's definitely my favorite of the MCU television shows, I think it's one of the most interesting
things the MCU has done in a really long time in terms of how different and fascinating it is,
and I loved it when I watched it. I'm already ready to watch it for a second time even though
it came out fairly recently, relatively. And so even though... and she's not called Scarlet Witch
at the beginning, obviously, that's a title she earns later, but Wanda is introduced in
a post credit scene. Remind me, which movie is the post credit scene? Is it in Iron Man?
I think it was Winter Soldier.
It was Winter Soldier! Thank you. It was not in Iron Man. She's very briefly introduced as
a very powerful villain, and the stuff that she does to the Avengers when she's
fighting them is horrifying. She's like "Relive your worst memories".
She does her spirit fingers. Yeah. That's a scary villain.
One's fast and one's weird. I like how they're
just like, "She's weird. That's her power, she's weird".
Her power is weird. I think we're all starting to realize she's probably one of the more powerful
Avengers out there in terms of sheer magical trickery. I know she wasn't a villain for
very long, but she eventually teams up with the good guys and she becomes a villain of sorts and
Wandavision of large sorts by trapping an entire town in a grief driven fantasy world, but...
Her grief prison.
Yeah, exactly. I think her journey has been pretty dang fascinating,
and I love that she does not stay a villain and disappear.
What's cool about this one too is that it mirrors the comic... all these MCU movies,
they're all adaptations of comic books, but a long time ago,
I think a lot of comic book fans generally were... started to become okay with the fact that
these movies were going to take pretty extreme liberties. They go far from the source material
enough but keep the spirit. So similarly, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver started out as bad guys,
they were members of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants because they were Magneto's kids.
Right, I forgot that.
And then eventually they become Avengers, and they're testy and they fight with the team,
but that's what all Marvel comics characters did because that's interesting. And eventually,
they've become... heroes for decades, but then maybe 15-ish years ago, there was this storyline
called Avengers Disassembled where all the Avengers started getting attacked and some of them
were even killed, and it turns out that this was a manifestation of Wanda's grief over her lost kids.
And she wound up being the source of all of these problems, without anybody realizing it,
she was causing all these terrible things to happen against the Avengers, and then that's
eventually what led to House of M where she said no more mutants, and they created that whole...
And they referenced that in cute little... very subtle ways in Wandavision.
Exactly. The wine bottle and everything, yeah. I'm really glad that you brought that one up because
I think that is a really good... it's a great bad guy-good guy team up, and it's easy to...
it's hard to remember I wanted to say, that Wanda starts out as a villain and that's kind
of what makes her pretty villainous turn in Wandavision, even though she didn't really
know quite what she was doing, that much more believable, so I think that's a really good one.
Yeah. I love that like... we've talked about the MCU maybe having a villain problem before where
you get a great villain, but they have to disappear because they have to be vanquished,
so turning her into a good guy ensures Wanda's longevity, and means that she gets to be a huge
part of the MCU for the foreseeable future, which I love, because I think
she has really grown on me as a character and has become one of my favorite Avengers.
Yeah. And you know also that she can probably turn bad.
Exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of complexity too. She contains multitudes. We love that.
She contains multitudes.
We love to see it. So that's my pick. Wanda Maximoff, Scarlet Witch.
That's a good pick.
Tom, what was your pick for the best good-guy bad-guy team up in movie history.
Brian, Nina. I'm going to paint a picture for you.
All right.
It's 1997. Nina, you're about seven years old, right?
Yeah. Weird how quickly you knew that but yeah.
You've just turned 46.
46, yep.
And you're both so excited because one of the largest
motion picture events in movie history is about to take place.
I think we all know what I'm talking about, do we want to say it all at once? One, two, three...
Titanic.
Batman and Robin, Batman and Robin.
I don't think that's the year Titanic came out. Anyway.
Starring George... never heard of it. It was a titanic feat, it was a terrific movie, and George
Clooney is Batman, you've got Chris O'Donnell as Robin. It's a beautiful film that ends with
one of my favorite villain-hero team ups of all time. Batman and Robin's butler, Alfred, gets
something called MacGregor's syndrome and the only person that knows how to cure it is Mr. Freeze.
What's MacGregor's Syndrome?
So they punch him a bunch.
It's made up.
What is it in the confines of the made-up world?
It's really close to MacGuffin syndrome. It's a thing that makes 80 year olds tired a lot,
if you can believe it. It's a dark world, Gotham, but in this world...
So Alfred just gets sleepy and...
Oxygenarians. Need to lie down, yeah.
And everyone's like, "No".
He can't bring his billionaire client, who he raised...
His tea.
As much dinner anymore.
Amazing.
Too much gazpacho for one old man to carry, yeah.
Amazing.
So they punch Mr. Freeze into curing this old man of his disease. They're like,
"Hey, we've got this old guy who makes form fitting clothes for his niece in a basement,
and we cannot live without him as a constant presence in our life".
Incredible.
And so Mr. Freeze saves his life. They inject this old man with glow sticks.
Doesn't he deliver a line too? He says,
"Take two of these and call me into morning", right? Doesn't he say that?
Oh my god.
Yeah, he says exactly that while he hands him two glow sticks that will cure the old man.
Sounds like an SNL sketch. This is not... I know this is real, but it doesn't sound real.
They appeal to his humanity, right? Because they're like,
"That's what your wife had, and that's what our butler has".
That's exactly right.
And he's like, "All right Batman, you win this time, here's some medicine, take me to jail".
The best part about this deal, to my eyes anyway, is that afterwards, Batman says, "We're going to
have your frozen wife sent to the prison that we're putting you in so that you can keep doing
science to her". So there's kind of... there's kind of a quid pro quo thing that happens. The
implication does also seem to be that they get it hooked up so that Mr. Freeze gets to keep his cool
killing people armor while he's in jail, and then be in the same prison cell as Poison Ivy. So they
essentially... they said, "We've watched you kill dozens of people, but we're going to set it up
so that you get to share a prison cell with this person that you want dead because we're heroes".
It's not a super realistic movie.
Yeah, I don't think that's how the prison system works for one.
I don't see that. I don't know.
Not sure.
Everything about the movie really stands up to scrutiny, I think, but...
How do you feel about Batman's suit? A very popular one.
Nipplelicious.
I have no problems with it.
No notes. Perfect.
No notes.
No, that's exactly right.
My second choice would be also Batman, but at the end of the Snyder cut, when they do
the flash forward to the future and he teams up with the Joker and there's just no reason for it.
Yeah.
Besides, my theory is that Zack Snyder spent the last three years telling everybody Batman
is going to say the F word in this movie, and then he... it was three weeks before
his homework was due and he was like, "Oh, I forgot to put in the Batman F word scene".
And he was like, "We're shooting the scene tomorrow and I don't have
anything". It's like 3:00 AM the night before.
I need half a gallon of grease paint and some rubber gloves and Jared Leto's phone number. Yeah.
Perfect.
That was my other favorite. Brian, you've been
uncharacteristically quiet about this whole good-guy bad-guy situation, talk to us.
I've been quiet this whole time.
You've been breaking my heart.
Everybody misses me talking, yes.
I miss you talking.
Same.
We published an article on Looper about this very topic, and some of the choices on there are pretty
good. We've got Batman and Catwoman teaming up in Dark Knight Rises, Rocky and Apollo Creed,
Rocky 3. Terminator 2 when the Terminator, the T-800, right? T-800? Comes back from the first
movie. He's an unstoppable killing machine in the first movie, comes back in the second movie,
and he says, "Come with me if you want to live". The villain has become the hero. It's great. It
is really one of the best bad guy-good guy team ups. We've also gotten this list here
where Luke and Darth Vader team up at the end of Return of the Jedi, which...
Great choice.
Yeah, it's a good choice, but when I saw it, I was also kind of like, do they team up so much as
Luke is getting zapped by lightning, right? This move where the emperor is doing this, and then
they post-production put lightning bolts on his hands so he was doing this in front of camera.
Oh, that wasn't a practical effect? They didn't have...
Oh my god.
No, they didn't actually have lighting.
The more you know, can we get a star wipe now?
And then Darth Vader picks up the emperor, spoilers, and throws him down.
Spoilers? This movie came out in what, 1980...
This movie... 30 something years ago...
Spoiler alert.
Right? So for me...
That sounds like a team up to me.
It sounds like they're both on team "Don't electrocute that guy".
Right. So, yes, you're not wrong there, but at the same time, it's not like they're fighting
together. They're not back to back. They're like "Shake and bake, let's go". That doesn't happen,
it's more that Darth Vader redeems himself once. Does one really good thing, and then dies.
One, parentheses one, good thing, ever.
The good thing is killing a guy.
It's still murder.
He basically kills the living embodiment of evil in the entire universe,
so that's pretty good. If you're going to kill one more guy, that's a good one
to redeem yourself, and you save your son in the process. I've gotten away from the point.
I think a better Star Wars good guy-bad guy team up is from The Last Jedi
when Kylo Ren and Rey team up to fight those Imperial guards.
That's a good one.
Those Snoke guys.
Yeah. Kylo Ren kills Snoke through subterfuge in that scene, and in the moment, and even
afterwards, I was really frustrated because I really wanted some backstory. I wanted some
more explanation as to who this guy was, who Snoke was, and we never got it. But, ultimately, it fits
in so well, in my opinion, with the theme of the movie, of getting rid of the past, forging a new
path forward, and yet at the same time... well, anyway, the fight that follows is really good.
So good.
It's visually really exciting. It's a great fight scene.
Phenomenal. Whatever your feelings about that movie might be,
whether you like it, whether you hate it, you can't deny it. That's a great fight scene.
I love that pick, and I'm a Last Jedi apologist partly because I
do like that it tries to subvert a lot of what Star Wars has set up in a way I find interesting,
and also cause I love Rian Johnson and think he's like...
Yeah, I think it's a great movie.
Amazing. Yeah.
I don't want to get too far into The Last Jedi.
You're right, you're right. But that is a great... that's
such a visually striking fight scene, I love that fight scene. Huge highlight.
What's so good about it too is that afterwards Kylo Ren is like "Join me,
we're going to do this thing", and she's just like, "No, have you been paying attention"?
Right. Have you heard anything I've said?
And then he's an even worse villain for the rest of the movie. And so it's
a really great moment where the bad guy and the good guy team up because their interests
align for just this brief window of time, and then gone again.
I love that one.
So I really like that scene. I got a few others...
And I love that you picked, sorry, just quickly, I love that you picked that one instead of them
ultimately teaming up in Rise of Skywalker and then getting together, which I hated very much.
That's terrible.
Thanks, I hate it, I don't want it.
It's so bad, it doesn't work.
And it's so much better. It doesn't work at all. When they kissed, I was like,
"What"? There was no payoff for that, no setup, up nothing.
Kiss and then die.
Yeah... hate. So I'm really glad you picked the better team up of those two characters.
Yeah. It's much better.
So much better.
But wasn't the whole point of the new trilogy that if people do kissing, they disappear?
What?
Anybody that kisses in the Star Wars movies winds up gone, in the last trilogy. This is a fact.
Luke disappears because he kisses Leia. Leia disappears.
Luke, Leia, Han and Leia. Rose's screentime.
Han does kind of disappear. Rose. Yeah, that's right.
So they're playing by the...
For the most part by the last movie.
They're playing by the rules that Jamie Kennedy sets up in the screen.
Kissing people makes you go away.
Yeah. They're playing by screen rules.
Kissing people makes you go away.
A great lesson for the children.
Speaking as somebody who was very into Star Wars in elementary and junior high school,
I can say that this is probably the lesson that people need to hear.
You'll get cooties and you'll turn into a force ghost.
Yeah.
That's how it works. Everybody knows.
Exactly.
So are you saying that Obi Wan kissed Darth Vader and that's why he disappeared?
I'm saying that you just quoted all of my Catholic sex ed classes that I ever had to take.
And Brian, in answer to your question,
I'm sure there's a fan fiction out there that features that exact plot. I'm sure.
Yeah, as soon as I said it, I was like, "I'm sure that's out there a million times over".
That's definitely out there. Yeah.
I had a few other picks that I wanted to run through... cause this is one of
those things where when you see the topic, good guy- bad guy team ups, you're like,
"Oh, there's got to be a million of them", and it's actually surprisingly difficult to find ones
that work. That are memorable... in good movies. One of them that made me really
excited was in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey when they team up with Death.
Yeah. That's a good one.
That's a really good one because he's definitely a bad guy at the start.
He's here to take them to the underworld and they trick him and then he joins their band.
It's fantastic. Jurassic Park when the T-Rex shows up to save everybody. Does that count?
Great choice.
That counts. The T-Rex is not a good guy. And then he is.
And then he is a good guy.
She. She.
That's right, they're lady dinosaurs.
Damn.
Women dinosaurs can do anything Nina.
You're right. I need to be more progressive in my dinosaur beliefs.
Mad Max Fury Road, right?
When Nux... Nux is one of the war boys and he's got Max as his blood bag and he's ready to die,
shiny and chrome, he sprays his face.
Amazing.
And eventually he joins up with the good guys and helps them...
and he sacrifices his life to help them on their way.
That's Nicholas Hoult, right?
Yep, yep. His best role.
Great, great role. Amazing.
And the last one I picked was the Rocketeer.
Oh, when the...
When the gangsters find out they're working for Nazis and they're just like...
So they team up with the cops to shoot the...
There's this great line where he says,
"I may not make an honest buck, but I'm 100% American and I don't work for no two bit Nazi".
And then the FBI shows up and they start shooting the Nazis and then the gangsters and the FBI
are shooting the Nazis together. And there's just this great moment where the FBI guy and the
gangster guy look at each other and they're like... and then they keep shooting Nazis.
Yeah. Let me ask you guys if this one qualifies. Sirius Black in Harry Potter, because for the
whole third book and film, you're like Sirius Black is the villain. He killed a bunch of people
with one curse, blah, blah, blah. Not only is he Harry's godfather, but that has one of the best
twists in that entire series, which is that Peter Pettigrew has literally been there the whole time
masquerading as a pet rat. Yeah. I love that one. That's that's that's near and dear to my heart.
That's more of a misunderstanding though, right?
Well no. He's clearly.... he's made out to be the antagonist for the film. So for the large part
of the story of the book and the film, you think this is the bad guy, this is the villain. If you
have read books before or know movies, and you're an adult...
We haven't.
You can reasonably suss out that it's probably a big misdirect. But if you're a child
for whom these books and movies are made, you might actually think that the
bad guy is the person they're telling you is the bad guy.
When I first read that book, I was probably 12 or 13. And I remember being like,
"Whoah, I did not see that coming".
Yeah, what? It's the rat? Then Harry literally teams up with Sirius to, before the book and
film even end, to try to bring someone else to justice. I love it. I love to see it.
Yeah, that's a good one. That's a great one. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to hit like
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