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The 8 Most Evil Leprechauns


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?Every March 17th, everyone is Irish. We watch parades, drink green beer and toast St. Patrick for apocryphally banishing snakes from Ireland and other wonderful feats we assume happened. And like Christmas and Easter, St. Patrick’s Day has its own colorful mascot — the tiny leprechaun, clad in green, obsessed with gold, and talking in rhyme like a bad Irish stereotype. He’s a trickster character, but doesn’t really mean any harm… most of the time. For some reason, most leprechauns that end up in pop culture are invariably kind of evil. I mean, there are some leprechauns you nae wanna mess with, no matter how big their pot of gold is. Here are the 8 nastiest of the bunch.


8) Notre Dame Fighting Irish

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?The mascot of the Notre Dame football team is one badass, mean-looking little leprechaun, looking to fight with anyone at any given moment. You can practically see the Jameson fumes wafting off him. Of course, you might only consider him truly evil if you’re a supporter of rival USC.


7) WWE


Hornswoggle, a.k.a. Little Bastard (real name Dylan Postl), was the maniacal leprechaun who would appear from his hiding space under the WWE wrestling ring and savagely attack anyone who was wrestling Irish wrestler Finlay. In true wrestling soap opera style, he was later revealed to be Vince McMahon’s illegitimate son, and then Finlay’s. Hornswoggle has actually had an impressive run in the WWE, though, becoming the first little person to win a WWE championship (the Cruiserweight belt). He’s currently in DX.


6) Aqua Teen Hunger Force

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?As seen in the episode “Escape from Leprauchpolis,” this trio used modern technology and people’s concept of leprechauns to commit petty crime. They e-mailed unsuspecting dupes about treasure that could be found at the end of a rainbow, but then sucked their victims into the forest with their rainbow machine (a device, of course, invented by the Aqua Teens’ kinda-nemesis Dr. Weird) and mugged them for their shoes and other valuables. They were killed off with most other Aqua Teen villains in the lunar-based adventure “The Last One.”


5) Buffy the Vampire Slayer

They don’t exist.


4) Folklore

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?The earliest existing reference to leprechauns appear in a medieval story called the Saga of Fergus mac L?ti, Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Fergus, king of the Irish province Ulster, makes the mistake of falling asleep on a beach. When he comes to, three of the little buggers are attempting to drag him into the water! What a bunch of jerkoffs! King Fergie jumps up and corrals the drown-happy bastards, and they grant him three wishes in exchange for not getting swiftly stepped on.


3) The Simpsons


The leprechaun on The Simpsons gets into all kinds of mischief, like dancing a jig on the head of the Simpsons’ dog, Santa’s Little Helper, and instigating a brawl with his orange-clad, Protestant, Northern Irish counterpart. But his most evil moment was appearing above the shoulder of the young, impressionable Ralph Wiggum and imploring him to, “Burn the house down. BURN THEM ALL!!!”


2) Lucky Charms


He might seem friendly enough, but the Lucky Charms leprechaun has been contributing to childhood obesity and dental bills for close to 50 years! He always keeps us entranced with the prospect of new marshmallow shapes, such as shooting stars, magic keys, and red balloons with stars on them. If only Lucky Charms weren’t so magically delicious!


1) Leprechaun (and Its Sequels)


The last thing you would want to do (and quite possibly would ever do) is to steal any gold belonging to the serial murderer of fairy tale yore depicted in the Leprechaun movies. The little green slasher was played by Warwick Davis, who was probably getting out some pent-up aggression after being stuck in a Wicket the Ewok costume for the entirety of Return of the Jedi and after Willow flopped at the box office. In the original Leprechaun movie, the titular character faced off with a pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston, which we’re sure she considers a shining star on her resume. The Leprechaun then soared to new heights in his murderous escapades (or lows, depending on your perspective) in the sequels, in which he ran amuck In Space and In the Hood, among other places. What helped make the Leprechaun so evil was the sheer joy and creativity he put into his kills. One that stands out is when, after being “killed” and pissed on by a space marine, the Leprechaun was reborn, bursting forth explosively from the marine’s penis as the poor guy was about to get laid. The Leprechaun had some amusing weaknesses, too, such as four-leaf clovers and his obsessive need to shine shoes. Okay, so you wouldn’t be able to stall Jason or Freddy from killing you by throwing your shoes at them, but I don’t think I’ve seen either of them make a guy think he was kissing a woman’s breasts when it was actually lawnmower blades, or grant a wish for a pot of gold by transporting it into a guy’s belly.