Poor Doctor Head-in-a-jar. Nothing ever goes right for him, starting with losing his body. He started as kind of a one-off joke, and he never talked in the old single panel cartoons. (A tradition I’m unsure about in the new incarnation. Maybe he’ll just make bubbles, and other characters will reply as though they understand him.) A secret about the figure is that he NEVER had a body. The head is from an odd dollar-store jumping toy, that was just a head on a suction cup over a spring and a little base. You pushed it down till the suction cup stuck to the base, and as it came loose, the spring would make it jump into the air. I loved his sad, long-suffering expression, and his whole character was built around that. I put him in a “jar,” and the rest is history.
Over time, he became the whipping boy of the Legion of Doom, and the special target of bullying by Doctor Coldblood. I started putting his jar in the background in cartoons that had nothing to do with him, in “where’s Waldo” fashion. Finally, so that I could do more with him, I had Number 9 (in real life, our prop department, meaning me) build him a robotic body with arms so he could be more active. But as you can see in this cartoon that hasn’t gone well for him either.
Actually, I feel bad for Doctor Head-in-a-jar, especially when Coldblood is picking on him, and I’d love to see him get some payback some day. Amazing how much story potential can come from a sad, disembodied, plastic head.
There are a couple of other things I like about this panel. It establishes Number 9 as the go-to tech guy among the main minions. And I also love poor, clueless, Newbie back, there, about to cause some sort of nuclear catastrophe with a sledge hammer.
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