[CORRECTION: The original edition of this article confused John Von Neumann with Werner Von Braun, and very unjustifiably referred to Von Neumann as an “Evil Nazi.” Von Neumann was neither Nazi nor Evil. We hear he was a pretty cool guy, and we wish A Beautiful Mind had been made about him instead. OTI very much regrets the error.]

Great heroes are often defined by their villains. Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader. He-Man had Skeletor. U.S. Grant had Robert E. Lee.

But some heroes aren’t defined by their villains, they’re defined by their shiny, brushable hair, their many collectible colors, or their gracefully molded haunches.

Designing villains for heroes that go around saving planets or slaying dragons is easy — some good ideas might begin with a dragon or something that could destroy a planet, not necessarily in that order.

But in the maddening crush to narrativize, syndicate and cross-market every collectible under creation, every once in a while, somebody, somewhere has to confront the one of the most daunting challenges a character designer can face.

How do you make a villain for a hero who doesn’t do anything? Maybe you start with something like this:

Today, we discuss one of the most compelling answers anyone came up with for that question: The Smooze, the sentient Grey Goo that terrorizes the prancing protagonists of 1986’s My Little Pony: The Movie –

Jean-Paul Sartre once said “Hell is other people,” but his characters were just stuck in a plain old room with some other folks and no exit.  None of them was the lone existentialist trapped in a children’s television program.

Here’s a tribute to those top five hapless souls who, though depressed, distraught, or just plain angry, are doomed to live in saccharine-filled worlds where cotton candy lines the streets and the power of friendship is always, always the answer.

5. Oscar the Grouch: Poor Oscar.  Even if he weren’t grouchy, “the Grouch” is still part of his name and his species.  He lives in a trashcan, he has no legs, and his only friend is a worm.  I’m fairly sure he became a grouch back in ‘Nam and at some point lived in a van down by the river.  To add insult to injury, the only way he can make enough money to scrape by is to teach dumb kids the letters of the alphabet.

Oscar can’t be too high on this list, however.  After all, he’s not the only one of his kind like those poor saps below.  Then again, even having kindred spirits in the wonderful land of Sesame Street isn’t too much help for Oscar.  If this clip from the Sally Messy Yuckayel show is to be believed, even other grouches hate Oscar because he once had his heart melted by an adowabul kitten.  The fellow just can’t win.

Wanna know 4, 3, 2, and 1?  Well, you’ll have to click, won’tcha?

I recently had the pleasure of watching a play I had written go up as part of the New Works New Haven theatre festival, and sitting in the green room with the actors and techies before the show, I was confronted by a question that every writer hears quite a lot.

“How do you get started?”

Now, I could tell them the truth — it’s a three step process:

1. Coffee
2. Don’t fall asleep
3. Write a script!

But they don’t want to hear the practical details on the act of writing. Everybody wants to have written, but nobody really wants to write.

Aspiring writers want to know how their impulse to put something on paper can come to fruition in a fully formed idea that basically writes itself. (Thanks to the death of the author, writing is really just a matter of exposing a laptop to the right combination of socioeconomic preconditions. Once you can get started, you can just minimize the window and play Minesweeper.)

“The Secret” that isn’t actually The Secret, but is still about as Secret, by which I mean, not secret at all, plus a real-life Hollywood bonus, after the jump.