All The Doctor Stranges In The Multiverse, Power Ranked
This week we told you about Doctor Strange's forgotten 1978 TV movie where he has a pornstache and he earns it, but that's not the only Strange variant out there in the multiverse. Dr. Stephen "Doctor" Strange has been inspiring homages and ripoffs for decades, since long before he even got his own actual theatrical film. Given that the new movie involves visiting alternate realities, let us take a tour of our own across the various ersatz Doctor ... Stranges? Doctors Strange? Let's go with Doctors Stranges. Anyway, we've ranked them by how likely we think they are to go messing around in the multiverse ... of madness! (Yeah, we just wanted to throw the name of the movie in there real quick.)
Doctor Orpheus (The Venture Bros.)
Dr. Byron Orpheus is the powerful necromancer who serves as the Venture family's go-to mystical expert and occasional teenagesitter, since he rents out a place at the Venture Compound.
Despite his melodramatic tone of voice, Orpheus is actually a pretty chill guy who always steps up when his friends need him and who deeply cares for his goth daughter. He is both a better hero and a better dad than the show's protagonist, Rusty Venture. Plus, he's considerate enough to warn others when they should wait a while before entering a restroom he just used, which Rusty would never do.
Multiversal Madness™ Ranking: 1. Orpheus has never been one to trifle with multiversal forces, other than putting a portal to a hell dimension in his daughter's closet (but who hasn't?).
Doctor Mordrid (Doctor Mordrid)
No, not Michael "I am a doctor" Morbius. We're talking about Mordrid, which is what happens when a B-movie producer loses the rights to make a Doctor Strange movie but decides to go ahead with it anyway. Mordrid is pretty much Doctor Strange minus the doctorate and facial hair.
Mordrid was sent to Earth from a wizard dimension to stop his childhood friend from opening a gate to Hell. He ends up impaling said friend with a stop motion dinosaur in a sequence Sam Raimi probably wishes he could get away with inside a Disney movie:
Multiversal Madness™ Ranking: 1. We know he can traverse dimensions since he comes from another one, but he seems far too responsible to do it. Spider-Man: No Way Home would have lasted 20 minutes with this guy.
Ducktor Strange (Howard the Duck)
Yep, that's a thing. Dr. Simon Strange was a famed veterinarian in the duck-ruled world Howard the Duck comes from until he became a Mallard of the Mystic Arts and decided to spend several years "communing with the spirits." Meaning getting duckfaced drunk. He once helped Howard and his human girlfriend get back to Earth from Duckworld, and, years later, repeated the trick for another human who doesn't even have sex with ducks.
Marvel Comics
Multiversal Madness™ Ranking: 2. Despite his drinking problem, Ducktor Strange has only ever used his powers to send people back to their dimensions. Plus, he's unlikely to use his reality-hopping powers if he can't even remember he has them.
Plasmo the Mystic (The Simpsons Comics)
Plasmo the Mystic is a teammate of Bart Simpsons' favorite superhero, Radioactive Man, and the star of his own comic within the Simpsons-verse, Mystical Plasmo: The Mystic. He has mystic powers, in case that wasn't clear, and uses them to combat evil along with Cheech, the stoner version of Doctor Strange's Wong.
Bongo Comics
Plasmo has proved to be pretty reckless with his abilities, especially when it comes to multiversal travel. In one issue, he's accidentally responsible for the band Fall Out Boy crossing into his reality and making Fallout Boy miserable. Another time, he came up with the idea of replacing a dead teammate with a variant from another universe and ended up progressively replacing the entire team, with disastrous results.
Bongo Comics
Multiversal Madness™ Ranking: 3. Disney even owns this character now, so there's literally no excuse not to put him in Multiverse of Madness.
Doctor Strangefate (DC vs. Marvel)
Doctor Strangefate is a combination of Doctor Strange and DC's Doctor Fate created when their universes merged in the 1996 DC vs. Marvel crossover. Strangefate spends his entire comic trying to hunt down and kill the one character who can restore the two original universes since he's afraid his world will stop existing if that happens. When he fails, he takes off his helmet and we find out that he's also ... Professor X, for some reason?
DC Comics, Marvel Comics
Multiversal Madness™ Ranking: 4. Dude only exists because of multiversal #@$%ery and has no intention to fix it.
Rick Sanchez (Rick and Morty)
Upon doing research for this article (looking up "Doctor Strange ripoffs" on Bing.com), Rick Sanchez's name came up and it's hard to argue with that. Rick's technology is so advanced that it's indistinguishable from magic, plus there's this:
Multiversal Madness™ Ranking: 5. If we understand the multiverse as a collection of all possible realities, then Rick exists there and there's exactly a 0% chance he wouldn't be involved in a clusterfung of these proportions. Realistically, the movie should end with Strange finding out that all of the intra-dimensional chaos was due to Rick trying to make a machine that can untoast bread or something and being unceremoniously killed by the automatic defense systems at the Smith family's garage. Then Rick walks in, says "Ugh, another one," and throws Strange's corpse into a pile containing all of the characters we've mentioned so far. If the movie doesn't like that, clearly we live in an inferior timeline.
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Top image: Warner Bros. Television Distribution, Full Moon Entertainment
