So, your favorite down-to-earth character is just tooling around their town, getting into their usual amount of shenanigans and complications when — suddenly — a magical being shows up to turn their dull, ordinary world upside down! This trickster character is the trope of the magical imp guest star, a trope I have a particular affinity for. I'm here to drop the official Top 5 dissecting this particular variety of shark-jumping insanity.
Disclaimer: These are specifically guest-starring magical imp characters. Don't expect series regulars like Orko or non-magical imps like Salacious Crumb. They belong on other lists.
5. Jingles the Elf
Archie comics and Christmas go together like peanut butter and jelly. In fact, every Christmas-themed Archie comic on stands right now is labeled as "The Official Comic Book of Christmas." For a comic series mainly about how straight-laced teens deal with school, jobs, eating, dating, and money, Christmas is the perfect nexus point for all of those plot threads. How will Archie decide on whether to kiss Veronica or Betty under the mistletoe on Christmas Eve whilst finding the money to get gifts for his parents but also find the time to get his car repaired before he can arrive at the local orphanage dressed as Santa? Oh, the relatable problems of Archie!
Jingles the Elf, along with his cohort of other magical elves, occasionally arrive in the never-ending parade of Archie Comics Christmas tales to remind the Riverdale teens what Christmas is all about: Santa and being selfless. You see, Jingles works for Santa and reports back to the big guy on the good vs. bad aspect of our Archie teens, but he's not above a little trickery to make his point. Reggie being a brat? Jingles is quick to turn invisible and throw a snowball. Mr. Lodge being a real scrooge? Jingles can quickly whip up a fully trimmed tree to drop into the Lodge family living room. His appearances always add a touch of Christmas whimsy to the fairly static world of Riverdale.
4. Eugene the Jeep
Eugene the Jeep has been bedeviling Popeye and pals since his first appearance in 1936. Preceding — and allegedly helping inspire the naming of — the vehicle by seven years, Eugene the Jeep was only the latest of the fantastical line of Popeye characters. While folks like the magical witch Sea Hag and Alice the Goon came first, Eugene fit into the surreal tone that E.C. Segar brought to the Popeye stories.
As Professor Brainstine (a minor character in the Popeye lore) explained shortly after Eugene's first appearance, a Jeep is an African "Hooey Hound" that got vibrationally similarly fourth-dimensional cells fused into its standard three-dimensional cells. Look, it happens. After being delivered into Popeye's care, Eugene took it upon himself to prank our favorite sailor man with his ability to turn invisible. He was also quick to become a partner in crime to the infant Swee'pea. Over the ensuing decades, Eugene the Jeep appeared sporadically in the Popeye canon, turning up whenever the current Popeye team wanted to inject a little lightheartedness into the story.
3. The Great Gazoo
Listen up, dum-dums! Bow down to the Great Gazoo!
Originally something of a Honeymooners ripoff, The Flintstones had sailed into its sixth primetime season when the show's creators wanted to shake things up a little bit. Fred's get-rich-quick schemes, his concern with what "the guys down at the Water Buffalo Lodge" would think about any given marital issue, and his ability to change his entire personality after getting bonked on the head had all been classic story structures that had been reused time and again. It's a lot of work to create 26 to 32 half-hour episodes of TV a year! To help make something new, the Great Gazoo was born.
This little green alien was from the planet Zetox and forced by his people to learn humility by helping the first people he met on Earth. Fortunately for Flintstones viewers, he first met Fred and Barney. While he attempted to help them with their caveman problems, most of which revolved around impressing their wives, the Great Gazoo turned out to cause more problems for the duo than assistance. He would continue to turn up in various Flintstones media over the years, each time causing certain members of the fandom to grind their teeth over his apparent disregard for the rules of a prehistoric setting in which mammoths provided the water for sinks and small birds' beaks were the needles for record players. Truthfully, the Great Gazoo's silly magical nature wasn't too far away from the regular lives of Fred and his neighbors.
2. Bat-Mite
Instead of coming into Batman's story intentionally to cause mischief, like Eugene the Jeep and other trickster characters before him, Bat-Mite just wanted to be around his personal hero, Batman. However, when you're an imp with nigh-infinite power and you want your hero to be impressive, you tend to force the issue more than you probably should. That was Bat-Mite's problem. Wearing a homemade Batman costume and a head two sizes too big, Bat-Mite's appearances always meant that his desire to see Batman do feats of derring-do would take precedence to, say, Batman's safety or his ability to logically follow clues.
Bat-Mite's appearances have been sporadic over the years, with more modern stories attempting to claim the imp as being some sort of manifestation of Bruce Wayne's ongoing psychosis regarding his need to be Batman. Personally, I'd rather he just be a magical imp who loves Batman. I mean, that's a character trait that I can relate to!
1. Mr. Mxyzptlk
Where Bat-Mite is there to adore, Mr. Mxyzptlk (née Mr. Mxyztplk) is there to harass. A true trickster character in every sense of the word, Mxy is happy to irritate and fluster the Man of Steel for no other reason than it being fun. Boasting the same nigh-infinite powerset as Bat-Mite, Mxy careens into the DC Comics line of books every 90 days to see what kinds of trouble he can make for those boring beings in the third dimension.
The aspect of Mr. Mxyzptlk that makes him superior to the other characters on this list is his limitations. While the Great Gazoo can only be sent away when he wants to be sent away, if a specific action is taken by Mxy or others around him, he will agree to go back to his home dimension for at least 90 days. Early tales had all the same prerequisites for this departure: getting Mxy to say his name backwards. Finding that plot point to be too confining, John Byrne revised Mxy's endgame to come about with a new rule each time. Superman had to do things like make Mxy paint his face blue, have Flash beat Superman in an honest footrace, and punch Lex Luthor with full power. The change was refreshing and allowed for a wider variety of Superman smarts to show. But either way, allowing our main character to win over a magical imp through simple cunning and calculated risk allowed the reader to undertake the same challenge. As fun as it is to see Popeye or Archie confounded by magic, it's more fun to try to figure out a logic puzzle alongside one of your favorite characters.
What about you? Who are your favorite magical imp guest stars in pop culture? And why is the real answer to this question actually "all of the times that Bat-Mite and Mr. Mxyzptlk teamed up together"? Be sure to let me know!
