Life is made up of simple pleasures. Enjoying your favorite food. Revisiting your favorite childhood movie. It's why I enjoy Halloween so much. It's a break from the drudgery of day-to-day to enjoy, if even for a small moment, a feeling of childlike whimsy...and there's little else in the world that delivers a simple pleasure like a shit post villain! Sure, there's nothing quite like a truly complex villain who makes us question ourselves, but sometimes you just want a character who is mean purely for the sake of being mean, and who better to represent this then a character who's very name is 'Meen'?
Whether they be comical on purpose like a Dr. Doofenshmirtz, more outwardly villainous like Skeletor or somewhere in between like ole' Ignatius here, yes that is his name. Ignatius Mortimer Meen, I looked it up -- The concept of a villain who is little more than a glorified shit post is something that everyone can enjoy. It brings us back to childhood where we always knew the heroes would win and the villain served little more then a toy we could buy so we had something for our good guy toys to beat up! It's wholesome fun that gives us a character we love to hate. This is such a strong concept in our cultural zeitgeist that I almost made this year's countdown themed around these types of characters, but I struggled to think of an entire month's worth of such characters that I both cared about enough to add in and I hadn't already used in prior countdowns.
All this said, I.M. Meen serves as the proper bottom rung in this year's ladder. I mean, just look at him! This misanthropic Andrew Jackson lookalike runs a library, yet has an irrational hatred of people being studious. The man self sabotages himself purely to prey upon children. Any able bodied adult could push this guy the hell over and all he would do is cry about it and call you 'bookworm' as though it was a slur! On the tier list of joke villains, Waluigi could kick this guy's ass! But...while his only feat may be the foil of an edutainment video game that would've been totally forgotten to time, were it not for the advent of YouTube Poops, I can't deny the sheer, raw, simple pleasure he brings me.
Laughing stock or no, the character single-handedly saves his self titled game from falling into total obscurity which is in no small part all thanks to the sheer exuberance Peter Berkrot brings to the role. He may be a pathetic, contradictory loser, but he's our pathetic, contradictory loser and in honor of I.M. Meen turning 30 this year-(I totally did this on purpose. It wasn't just something I happened to find out about as I was looking up reference material for this picture!)-lets give the old bastard his dues this year by giving him the dead last place in a countdown people may or may not see. That seems appropriate! And in honor of this moment...let's all raise a glass and sing along, shall we?
