The 10 Most Deranged Sidekicks of All Time
Some sidekicks are known for their blind loyalty (Tonto), their bizarre choice of clothing (Robin) or their ability to harmonize (Garfunkel). Other sidekicks are known primarily for lurking in the background and weirding everyone the hell out.
A look at the 10 lackeys, hype men and right hands that make us more than a little uncomfortable, as well as a diagnosis of what' probably wrong with these tortured souls.
Tattoo from Fantasy Island
On TV' Fantasy Island, Herve Villechaize played Tattoo, the boot-licking human poodle to Ricardo Montalban' Mr. Roarke.Tattoo' duties included:
- Ring bell / "De plane!"
- Listening to his boss explain the plot of this week' episode
- Getting his boss drinks
- Boot licking
Tattoo lived to serve his boss, even sleeping on the floor at the foot of the bed (in case any snakes got in the room). He can also be credited with starting a national obsession with midgets that has resulted in midget-tossing parties, the character Mini-Me and Ryan Seacrest' career.
EVIDENCE:
In this very special intro to Fantasy Island, Tatoo shows a little moxy, asking his boss why he never gets his. Roarke responds with some lame metaphor about candy shops that he made up, totally ignoring this cry for help from his tortured slave.
DIAGNOSIS: Dysfunctionally intense focus on needs of his boss, bacterial infection on tongue from shoe shine.
Jerome from The Time
What series of events has to happen in your life for you to become The Guy That Holds Morris Day' mirror? Meet Jerome, Morris Day' preening sidekick/valet/underling. In addition to taking up valuable space in the luggage compartment of The Time tour bus, Jerome' duties apparently include:
- Holding up a huge mirror so Morris Day can check himself out while he sings.
- Brushing the lint off of Morris Day' jacket while he sings.
- Dancing around a little bit while Morris Day sings.
- Holding up the huge mirror again.
EVIDENCE:
In this video of Morris Day and The Time doing their thing, notice how quick Jerome is with Day' mirror. Also, we can't help but point out that Jerome, by dedicating all of his time to perfecting his Morris Day-related responsibilities, has rendered himself completely unemployable.
Honestly, if things don't work out and Jerome gets fired, what other job could he possibly be qualified to perform? Brushing lint off the Queen? Holding up a huge mirror for a chief justice of the Supreme Court? He'd be perfect for those jobs, if they existed.
DIAGNOSIS: Symbiotism, HPD (Habitual Preening Disorder).
8.(tie) Twiki from Buck Rogers
In the 25th century, mankind will improve the human condition by creating sophisticated robots that will follow people around like puppies, but instead of being cute and making adorable yelping noises, they will look terrifying and make horrible stuttering bleeps.
But, why wait for such startlingly practical advances when you can travel to the future with Buck Rogers in the 25th century, which features Twiki, a short be-mulleted robot sidekick.
Twiki' robo-do could be considered cute in a sort of robo Maddox Jolie Pitt way, but Mel Blanc (also the voice of Bugs Bunny) gives Twiki a voice like a Texas oil baron with throat cancer. Also, Twiki has only one volume setting: just a little louder than seems appropriate.
EVIDENCE:
In this clip from the TV show, Twiki crudely propositions a female, short robot with an even worse vocal tic than his. They go off to have short-robot sex. Buck laughs and has another drink to help blot the image of child-like robots having sex from his mind. The audience of teens and children have no such recourse.
DIAGNOSIS: Tourettes Syndrome, autophilia.
8.(tie) Farnsworth Bentley
After Flavor Flav and his giant clock necklace struck out on their own to pursue the riches of ironic fame, hip-hop was in need of a borderline-pathetic clown, prince sidekick specializing in prop comedy. Enter Farnsworth Bentley and his umbrella.
To get an idea of just how troublingly and depressed Bentley must be, it' important to remember that the man over whose head he holds an umbrella got his start as a sidekick. Sure Diddy is now a mega-mogul, but when he first came on the scene, he was just the skinny guy who said "Take that, take that, ha!" in the background of Biggie' songs.
Basically, imagine if Robin had killed Bruce Wayne, taken all his money and then hired you to hold an umbrella over his head. Such is the lot of Farnsworth Bentley.
EVIDENCE:
To see just how mean-spirited their relationship is, skip directly to the end of Diddy' music video for the song "DIDDY." He and his back-up dancers pull the old stop-dancing-and-look-at-the-one-guy-who'-still-dancing-like-he'-an-asshole on poor old Bentley.
Even sadder is that Bentley appears to be embracing the shackles of his vicious enslavement, trying to sell his own line of umbrellas.
DIAGNOSIS: Stockholm Syndrome.
Chaka from Land of the Lost
So you're trapped in another dimension, surrounded by dinosaurs and other monsters. What' your first move?
That' right, you take a hairy, easily-excitable, hideous-looking ape boy named Chaka under your wing so you have someone to slow you down, eat all of your food and contribute nothing. Good. Now that that' out of the way, you have plenty of time to get eaten by dinosaurs. And don't think that Chaka won't help you in that department. He' as useful at attracting dinosaurs, as he is useless at everything else, which is to say, extremely.
EVIDENCE:
At the 6:16 mark of this entire Land of the Lost episode, Chaka shows what an annoying brat he can be to travel with, screaming way louder than is necessary that he' hungry, even though a two-headed monster is within ear shot and is presumably hungry himself.
DIAGNOSIS: Poor self-image, hirsute, fecalphelia.
BONUS FUN FACT: Chaka could have been played by a young Clint Howard (Ron Howard' brother), without requiring any makeup for the role.
Rene from Aqua
"I am the Candyman - coming from Bountyland!"
Rene Dif is the Yul Brynner-looking dude in Aqua who shot to superstardom with the words "Come on Barbie, let' go party" in Aqua' hit "Barbie Girl." He' actually huge in Denmark; a bald-headed Flavor Flav for the Northern European bubblegum dance scene. For anyone out there who was stuck for a reason not to ever travel to Denmark, you're welcome.
And, while we're sure it' great to have someone in your band who can rap like a muppet, we'd imagine that the rest of Aqua has to get pretty tired of having to keep Rene away from kids all the time.
EVIDENCE:
The Aqua video for "Lollipop (Candyman)," in which Rene is oddly menacing and otherworldly as The Candyman, singing:
Come with me, honey,
I'm your sweet sugar Candyman
Run like the wind - fly with me to Bountyland
Remember kids, even if he says he' the candyman, you shouldn't let him take you to bountyland. Just ask him to drive you straight home after he makes good on that trip to the candy store he promised.
DIAGNOSIS: Danish.
Einar from the Sugarcubes
Einar was a, um, vocalist in Bjork' band the Sugarcubes. If you remember the band, he' the guy with the accent that rants in the background while you're just trying to frickin' hear Bjork sing! Couldn't they have gotten him a tambourine or something to keep him busy?
Einar' share of the lyrics in Sugarcubes make even less sense than Bjork' and they're sung in his signature vocal styling, which, on the continuum of things that are awesome to listen to, registers somewhere between an alarm clock and your parents having sex.
EVIDENCE:
You have to wade through 2 minutes of Bjork and the BAM! before Einar pops up and lays some shrill Icelandic rap on your ass. But if your heart hasn't been frozen in terror yet today, it' well worth the wait.
DIAGNOSIS: As the law of sidekicks states, a sidekick must be at least as crazy, if not crazier, than his or her leader, lest they cease to serve a purpose. Well, Einar is Bjork' sidekick, meaning he must inhabit levels of sheer insanity not yet charted by the institutions of mental health.
BONUS FUN FACT: Einar is a ninth level elf wizard.
Renfield fromWhile most remember Igor as the ultimate creepy horror henchman, Dracula easily out-guns the good doctor with the vermin-eating Renfield, whose thing is devouring the souls of little animals. He starts with flies but things get out of control and soon he' eating vermin.
You know how it is, we've all had crazy weekends.
Hey, Ren, guess who has lots of rats? That' right, it' Dracula! There' just a few things he needs done first ...
EVIDENCE:
This clip from Werner Herzog' Nosferatu illustrates how messed up Renfield is by putting him next to the creepiest thing in the universe: Klaus Kinski' hideous vampire makeup.
Yep, ol' Ren is still creepier. That' talent.
DIAGNOSIS: Paranoid schizophrenia, eats rats so probably some vitamin deficiencies, too.
Lil Jon
"You know what this song needs?""Some guy in the background screaming 'OH-KAAAY!!!'"
"By Jesus, you're right! But where the hell are we going to find someone with that unique skill set?"
Thus, Lil Jon' career is born. To be fair, he' an accomplished producer who might take exception to being labeled a sidekick, but when it comes down to it, he' basically a hype-man for hire who will come in, spend two hours in the studio screaming "WHAAT!" and bump up your album sales by 25 percent.
EVIDENCE:
Here' a video that shows Lil Jon doing what he does best: ranting in the background of somebody' song and making lots of money. It should be noted that we didn't even watch this video, we just searched YouTube and picked a link at random. We are confident, however, that our description would be appropriate no matter what video we picked.
DIAGNOSIS: Severe voice imodulation, mild hearing loss, crunk accumulation.
C-3PO from Star Wars
As a robot, C-3PO is one of the only characters in the Star Wars universe that shouldn't be scared shitless. He' just a collection of wires, lights and bolts that can be put back together again.Sure, R2-D2 is basically a faceless, trash can with wheels, but at least he opened some doors and started a few fires. C-3PO, on the other hand, was so afraid of everything that he spent six fucking movies doing absolutely nothing.
EVIDENCE:
Really, go out and rent either Star Wars trilogy. Watch any scene from any Star Wars movie for plenty of evidence of C-3PO' shiny, golden worthlessness.
DIAGNOSIS: Panophobia (fear of everything). That' his only disease until the DSM officially recognizes "being a gay robot" as a pathology.
Smithers from The Simpsons
Not since Ahab has a fictional character suffered from monomania as intense as Wayland Smithers. To use a marine metaphor that Smithers might approve of, he is like a lamprey suckling on the might of Mr. Burns' shark.
In either metaphor, the tragedy of their relationship is present: Mr. Burns barely knows he' there. Smithers' life is utterly devoted to his unattainable white whale, an old man who still thinks that gay means happy. Moreover, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, he is doomed to have the object of his affection forget any hints he drops by the next episode.
While at first his devotion seems almost sweet, various revelations throughout the series hint at a darker obsession, like a screen saver of a naked Burns saying, "Hello Smithers. You're quite good at turning me on" and more disturbingly an enormous chest tattoo of he and Burns that reads "The Boss of My Heart."
EVIDENCE:
Here' a link to a montage that perfectly illustrates the complex yet brutally hierarchical relationship between Smithers and Mr. Burns:
DIAGNOSIS:
Unhealthy parasitic relationship, sexual-identity issues, monomania.