Tuesday, June 15, 2021

How They Compare: Revolta (Scooby-Doo)

 

One of my favorite pieces of Scooby Doo media is Scooby Doo and The Ghoul School, which is ironic because the reason I like it is the concept is so strong that I really wanted them to just write the Scooby Doo characters out of it and make it its own series, so today I thought It’d be fun to look at the main villain of the film, Revolta, The Witch of The Web. In the Southern portion of the Bayou lies Barren Bog, a nightmarish swamp filled full of terrors right out of classic universal, and additionally, is home to Mrs. Grimwood’s Finishing School for Girls, a prestigious academy, attended by the Daughters of the most Powerful Monsters in the world, including Dracula, Frankenstein and The Wolf Man. But overlooking this land is the spooky Castle Revolta, where the Witch of the same name watches on.

Revolta is a 4 armed Spider Witch, who seeks to capture and control the students of Grimwood to use as leverage against their powerful fathers, so that they will not stand in the way of her goal to take over all of Monsterdom. She is strong enough to endure a massive explosion and subsequent volcanic eruption, and is able to compete with and be a relevant threat to the Ghoul School girls, who are officially ranked as level 4 in the OK KO Rating system, which would mean she scales at least somewhat to Rad’s feat of making a continent sized crack across an Earth Sized Planet with a handshake. Speed Wise, Elsa can time Lightning Strikes, Tanis has been able to swim the length of the Nile River 1.5 times in 30 seconds (measured at Mach 972) and all of them scale to the Relativistic feats of Level 3 KO Heros.

Revolta has a fairly large spell variety that relies on her control over things around her, particularly plant manipulation. She was able to make a very strong octopus-like plant creature called the Grim Creeper, who can think and act independently, elastically extend his limbs and is relevant to the Grimwood Girls in speed and power. She can also grow specific plants throughout the Barren Bog, including spy pods that not only let her keep constant watch of everything in her surroundings, but function as portals which she can travel through. Revolta can also summon and manipulate creatures called Spider-Bats, Bat Sized flying arachnid creatures that shoot webbing restraints. If this webbing comes into contact with one's Head, it allows Revolta to use her trademark hax, Mind Control. Revolta’s Mind control can manipulate one's thoughts from things as simple as putting subliminal messages in their heads, to taking full control of them as a mental slave, even against those with mind control abilities of their own like Sibella. While the Spider-Bat Mind Control does wear off after a few hours she can make a potion to permanently control people should she have prep time.

Revolta is in control of the mirror dimension and can trap foes inside of mirrors, or let loose a monsterous version of her foe called a Mirror Monster bent on hunting them down and taking their place in this world. Offensively she can also Fly on her Broomstick, and use her wand to fire powerful magical blasts, or beams that Transmutate her foes into animals or objects. She has shown to be quite intelligent with technology, potions and strategy, though a major weakness she has is lacking adaptability when her plans go array, she is not able to improvise in the field when things become chaotic. Revolta is also very reliant on magical tools she can be disarmed of, and has a sense of entitlement about her that has led to arrogance and mistakes.

Name: Revolta, The Witch of The Web.

Origin: Scooby-Doo

Classification: Witch.

Powers and Abilities: Plant Manipulation, Numerous Demonic Summons, Super Senses, Portal Creation, Web Manipulation, Mind Control, Sealing, Flight, Transmutation, Magical Blasts.

Weaknesses: Arrogance, Reliant on Tools, Not Skilled in Combat.

Destructive Capacity: Continent Level.

Range: Hundreds of Kilometers.

Speed: Relativistic.

Durability: Continent Level.

Stamina: Average.

Intelligence: Above Average Human.

 

So How Would She Do in Other Verses?

In DC Comics, Revolta would be similar in stats to Aquaman and his villains, but would likely be a threat dealt with by the more magic and investigation based characters like Constantine and Zatanna as she is more likely to stay in the shadows and build up power through subtle use of her powers. She is significantly above the vast majority of Magic Users in raw stats yet she is not nearly as hax as they are, so in a fight with them she would need to blitz and oneshot, and if anything gets in the way of that they could take her out with some advanced hex. She could probably Mind Control a great deal of smaller heroes and prominent DC Figures over a relatively short time. However she would need to be careful and not draw the attention of powerful heroes before she is fully ready. Someone like Poison Ivy would be very problematic for her as she could take control of her plant network and use it to gain new abilities and Really upgraded monsters.

In OK K.O. Revolta would rank as a -4 Villain, relevant to the Boxmore Bots. Her tactics of mind control will work a bit better here as it is unlikely to be discovered nearly as quickly, however similar abilities have been seen here before and weren’t enough to solo. Her most broken move in this series would be Transmutation, which is generally considered a potent ability in verse and has multiple times taken episodes to counter. She also has very good movement options and ways to summon backup to herself which would be helpful if caught out in the open. That said in a head to head fight characters like Rad or Fink would be able to direct counter her by using telekinesis to simply disarm her, without her wand, Broom or other materials she’d be pretty helpless.

Because KO also did a crossover with this series, in Little Witch Academia, Revolta would have stats eerily similar to the Witches of Luna Nova and would be able to compete with them physically. That said her power variety is fairly lacking in verse and would likely not be able to defeat one of the witches in a head to head fight due to powers like attack reflection, anti magic and extremely common telekinesis, among others. That said, Revolta would likely take a more observatory angel and try to steal the magic Grand Triskellion by spying on them from afar which the Witches would not be able to detect. Witches also don’t have much resistance to mind control without outside help, so with a coordinated strategy she could potentially take over Luna Nova.

In the Danny Phantom series, Revolta would have physical power eclipsing even the most powerful ghosts in the series, compete with them in speed and use her powers such as Mind Control and Transmutation to potentially hax anyone she comes across. She would likely attempt to usurp the throne of Pariah Dark and gain control over the spirit of Halloween, The Fright Knight. But the Ghosts of the verse would be extremely dangerous to Revolta despite that, particularly with their common powers like Invisibility to evade her spying on them, Intangibility to avoid all her attacks, and Possession which would simply one shot her. Characters like Undergrowth would be a challenge for her.

Yeah I had to, in Courage the Cowardly Dog, Revolta would be outclassed in stats by courage and his rogues gallery, but her more subtle manipulation tactics would work well for the series, and could actually make a more sweet episode where Courage helps more benevolent monsters stop her from taking over their world. Revolta’s Mirror sealing, Transmutation and Mind Control would work well enough to cause all sorts of mayhem in the verse and cause a horror threat, but Courage has resistance to these abilities and would be able to stop her directly like the courageous little pupper he is.

3 comments:

  1. Cool blog Thor! :) I am still surprised that OK KO crossed over with Scooby Doo and LWA but apparently it did that with a bunch of things. This Revola seems as bad as her name but her stats were quite strong. Most fiction tops at city and things above that are unusually strong, with something like rela continent being really high for a witch.

    Her haxes seem pretty normal for a witch, though her plant theme and her mirror abiities do give her a unique identity even in that regard. Still it made it very fitting that you would compare with LWA, their stats ARE unusually similar for such thematic characters, even if the versatility level is not :P I'd most want to ses Sucy fight Revolta for a fungi vs plants fight.

    The other verses were also pretty cool to see. Revolta can do better then you'd expect in the Scooby Doo verse despite the massive stat gap. If I can make a slight suggestion; if a character is signifigantly outstated or outstats a verse you might want to quickly express how strong the verse is to give an understanding of the difference as without it, it seems like the character is just slightly weaker/stronger. OK KO was a pretty natural inclusion and I imagine was pretty easy to stat scale given that you can scale from the same characters directly.

    DC was really cool for me as someone who really loves DC, although unfortunately she's in that awkward stat range where there's not many DC characters to fight evenly. Danny Phantom was probably my favorite comparison. She has a stat advantage but not an insurrmountable one and would be a signifigant threat but also due to her arrogance would naturally find herself undone fighting one of the few people in that verse that could beat her like Pariah or Undergrowth.

    It was interesting to read, and I did not expect a Scooby Doo villain outside that one galaxy level one to be so strong!

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  2. Awesome blog Thor! I am quite fond of this old film as well and it’s nice to see its characters recognized. I knew that the characters were involved with a crossover with OK KO, but I didn’t know that was canon and they would scale to country level feats! That makes Revolta an even more significant threat than I realized. In fact, she does surprisingly well in all of these verses, probably partially because she tends to work from the shadows instead of fighting people head on. Her mind control abilities seem like they would make that strategy work well. I find the Scooby/Courage comparisons interesting even if Courage would easily stomp the majority of Scooby characters; I’m glad to see Revolta wouldn’t do too badly in that verse though. And I find it cool that she would fit in so well with LWA witches.

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  3. Never heard of this groovy 80s movie, but how could I not know Scoob and the gang? Very cool of you to shine the spotlight on this little-known villainess and wow, you weren't kidding about how great of a concept this movie had. You could easily make a whole series out of the Ghoul School and while I'm sure she makes a great movie villain, Revolta could easily be the antagonist for an entire series with her scheming ways, minions and spying methods, and access to a wide variety of loathsome black magic.

    That OK K.O crossover is insanely convenient, what a wonderfully unexpected way to get scaling for this character! Revolta ends up with way higher stats than I expected from a Scooby-Doo character, though it's not that she really needs them with OP one-shot hax like transmutation and mind control. Kinda strange that the spider witch can't shoot out webs of her own, but those Spider-Bats sound like pretty cool minions. I also really like her spy pods, they might be my favorite part of her kit.

    I was surprised to see how well she does in DC. Speed+power vs other mages is a pretty nice combo. Great to see a crossover with the SD cast in your pic too. OK K.O. makes sense given the crossover, nice to see ya going beyond the crossover and giving a proper look at how Revolta stacks up with the rest of that verse. Wand dependence, man. Another academy of magical young girls, I see ya with LWA there. Nice to see the OK K.O. scaling makes this another solid verse to unleash Revolta on. Cool to see her mind control really shine here; that power can really make or break a series. Danny Phantom sounds like one of the tougher verses for this particular witch; ghosts are just too hax! Makes me curious which powers of hers would actually work on DP ghosts. Once again, looks like other plant users are a weakness of hers. Fantastic choice for the final comparison verse dude, this would make a great Courage episode! I really like your ideas for the crossover and while Courage could win if he could muster up the...courage, I think Revolta could get up to a lot of creepy hijinks before she gets defeated.

    I'm late for Halloween, but this blog is helping me get in the spooky mood even out of season! Let's see if we can keep the horror vibes flowin' all year 'round. Thanks for introducing me to a new character and a new movie, I'll have to give this a watch next October!

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