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| This villain was proposed but was rejected by the community for not being heinous enough or lacks what is necessary to be a purely evil villain. Therefore, this villain shall be added to our "Never Again List", where proposed villains rejected by the community shall be placed to prevent future proposals of the same evil-doer. They can be proposed again (with the permission of an admin) if new elements appear in their series that can change their status a non-PE villains. Any act of adding this villain to the Pure Evil category without a proposal or creating a proposal for this villain without the permission of an administrator will result in a ban. | ||
| “ | Everybody needs a Thneed, a fine thing that all people need! The Thneed is good, the Thneed is great, and it's just $3.98! | „ |
| ~ The Once-Ler's Thneed advertisement. |
The Once-Ler is the deuteragonist of Illumination's 3rd full-length feature film The Lorax, the film adaptation of Dr. Seuss's 1971 children’s book of the same name.
In the final film, he is portrayed as being generally sympathetic despite his destruction of the environment, but in the unused demo soundtrack songs for the film his character and motivations are significantly different to the point of him being an entirely different and significantly more sinister character.
His singing voice in the demo soundtrack songs is provided by Gabriel Mann.
Biography[]
The first song where he is depicted is "The Once-Ler's Travelling Madness" where he is shown to be delirious while traveling to find the Truffula Trees, engaging in weird activities such as playing his guitar upside down in order to pass the time. The second song, "I Love Nature" has him discovering the valley of the Truffula Trees, and singing about his love for the nature around him. However, he mostly talks about how the nature he's found can benefit him, and when singing about the animals notes that he hopes they don't have any diseases. The next song from him is "You Need A Thneed" which is him giving an advertisement on his Thneed product, pointing out the low price of $3.98, and then giving off a list of all the amazing things it can be, including: a sock, a suit, a boxing glove, a parachute, a butterfly net, a reusable diaper, an exercise belt, a runny nose wiper, a slingshot, a muzzle, a jump rope, a hat, and a colorful sweater you can put on your cat. The following song "Nobody Needs A Thneed" has him ranting about the fact that his product was a failure commercially, saying that the Thneed is dumb and lame, and even calling himself an idiot over having made it. The next song, "Biggering", time skips to when the Thneed does begin to see success, starting with him discussing the fact that he was originally fine with simply knitting his Thneeds in peace, but now that he's seen more success, he feels he needs more, such as a bigger office and factory. As his factory and business progresses, the Lorax appears to confront him on what he's done, saying that he is being greedy, but that the true reason he won't stop is due to his pride. The Once-Ler then laments on the fact that in nature, the animal that wins has to fight and eat other animals, and that his company is an animal actively struggling to survive. He affirms that he won't stop increasing the size of his company, not caring that he is chopping down trees in massive numbers and destroying the environment, finding it all to be extremely gratifying. While it's unknown what exactly happened to the Once-Ler after this, his actions of destroying the environment would lead to the events of the song "Thneedville (Demo)", which details the dystopian city of Thneedville, a consumerist society where everyone only cares about their possessions and a man named O'Hare has made a phony business off of selling bottled air.
Gallery[]
Human Concept Art[]
Non-Human Concept Art[]
Trivia[]
- It's unknown exactly what the Once-Ler was supposed to look like when the demo version of the songs were being made, considering there is a vast amount of concept art depicting him as both human and non-human.
External Links[]
- Biggering on the Villain Song Wiki
- The Once-Ler on the Inconsistently Heinous Wiki