If you’ve never encountered it, there is a very funny list of movie tropes which goes by the name Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Were Evil Overlord. If you’d like to read all 235 things on the list, it’s here.

Some of my favorites include:

The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

Another great one, though now dated:

Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45MB in size.

For those too young to get the joke, floppy disks were often used in movies of a certain era (before the internet) to transport crucial information in movies, such as the plans to a super-weapon or the evidence that a villain committed crimes. In the sorts of movies we’re talking about from this era, it was common for heroes to secretly get access to the villain’s computer and copy this information onto a floppy disk. The hard-cased 3.5″ floppy disks which were the most common for this purpose had a capacity of 1.44MB.

Another great is:

One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

Though I think that my all-time favorite is:

I will not waste time making my enemy’s death look like an accident — I’m not accountable to anyone and my other enemies wouldn’t believe it.

I tend to paraphrase this one when quoting, though, to “I will not waste time making the hero’s death look like an accident. My friends won’t care and my enemies will not believe it anyway.”

---

This came to mind because twenty some-odd years ago I wrote a script that randomly picks one of the quotes to be the “evil overlord quote of the day” in my email signature, and yesterday someone else recognized it and commented on it, reminding me that I did it.