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Dean Edward Rooney
Ed Rooney is not a smart man. It's one thing to take an active interest in your students, even to the point of investigating fraudulent absences; it's another to break into the kid's house to try and catch him playing hooky, only to get attacked by a dog, lose your wallet, have your car towed, and shuffle off in shame. The villain of Ferris Bueller's Day Off never had a shot at stopping the titular hero from having a great day in the sun, but he was still determined to try. Rooney's a great comic villain because he's unceasing but ultimately harmless. He doesn't even catch up to Ferris until the end of the movie, and even then he gets the boot. He was the ultimate fantasy villain for kids in the '80s: the authority figure you could actually defeat.
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Principal Richard Vernon
"Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?" Nobody respects their high school principal, but Richard Vernon (played by Paul Gleason) really got the brush-off from the detention-bound students of Shermer High in The Breakfast Club. To be fair, he asked for it: His brand of rule was authoritarian and petty, and he clearly delighted in getting into shouting matches with 18-year-olds. (Yes, Judd Nelson was in his mid-20s when the film was shot and looked close to 30, but narratively he was a kid. It's a mind-bender.) He probably wasn't a bad guy, just a bureaucratic tool. He never seemed to understand that kids didn't care about getting the horns; they just wanted to mess with the bull.
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Professor Jerry Hathaway
William Atherton specialized in playing obstinate men throughout the 1980s, from a snotty EPA official in Ghostbusters to an odious TV newsman in Die Hard. But Real Genius' Jerry Hathaway is the worst. The other characters were minor annoyances, but Hathaway's a full-on bully to his students, from the suck-ups to the rebellious Chris Knight (Val Kilmer). This being an '80s comedy, Atherton gets his comeuppance — his house is filled with popcorn as Tears for Fears plays on the soundtrack, an era-appropriate ending — and the hero saves the day.
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Johnny Lawrence
"Sweep the leg, Johnny." Although Billy Zabka played a number of villains in the 1980s, he'll always be remembered for his role as uber-jerk Johnny Lawrence in The Karate Kid. Johnny hated Daniel (a tiny Ralph Macchio) for all the right '80s reasons: Daniel was poor, Daniel was vaguely ethnic, Daniel was the new kid who inexplicably won the attention of the popular blonde. Johnny was the ultimate bully, ready to fight Daniel at every turn and even willing to follow his sensei's instructions to brutally hurt the other kid in a tournament showdown. Of course, we all know how it ended: Daniel beats Johnny with the crane kick, Johnny's little bully heart breaks open, and peace is restored to the universe. If only real life were so easy.
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Tom "Iceman" Kazansky
Iceman is many things: ace pilot, class hotshot, homoerotic foil for rival naval aviators. But most of all he's the man who actually beat Maverick. Top Gun is weirdly anticlimactic like that: Instead of Maverick bouncing back from Goose's death (25-year-old spoiler alert), he skates to graduation and loses the trophy race to Iceman, only to wind up finding some half-hearted closure by flying with him in a mission to scare off some Soviets. That's the utter power of the Iceman: He beats everyone, even the guy who's supposed to win. He's cocky, petty, snarky, dismissive, and probably not that much fun at parties.
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Freddy Krueger
Freddy Kruger appeared in five Nightmare on Elm Street movies in the 1980s alone, making him the ideal representative of mainstream '80s horror bad guys. True, Jason of Friday the 13th fame was more prolific — he was in a stupefying eight movies in 10 years — but Jason was always a mindless killer even as his movies got worse. Freddy, though, warmed up and became an audience favorite, drifting from his dark roots as a burned-up child molester to something of a camp anti-hero. He ceased being scary and became kind of dopey and fun, even though he was still, you know, a psychotic killer who slaughtered people in the netherworld of their dreams. He defined '80s cheeseball horror. Not even a 2010 reboot of the franchise could change the way people remembered him.
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Biff Tannen
About as smart as a screen door on a submarine, Biff Tannen lived to torment generations of McFly men and try to steal their women. He was rude, domineering, pig-headed, and maybe even a little insane. He became an iconic villain thanks to the pop culture success of the Back to the Future franchise, even as he and his family were destined to repeat the same mistakes and suffer the same defeats. (No matter where a Tannen man is, there's a pile of manure nearby.) Like all classic bullies, he's a total pushover, too: One good punch and he's down for life.
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The Joker
The '80s were a special time: Only then could you have a comic-book movie villain strut through town to the strains of Prince songs while decked out in orange satin. Tim Burton's Batman is a pop pleasure anchored by Jack Nicholson's performance as the Joker, a giggling lunatic that straddled the border between charming and evil. His Joker was so definitive that no filmmaker bothered touching the character for 20 years, when Heath Ledger reinvented the role for Christopher Nolan. Nicholson's Joker absolutely stole the show, though he also paved the way for the increasingly cartoonish villains that would clog the series and inspire the eventual reboot.
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