Have the movies lost all respect for Nazis as villains?

[Bones Justice]

aka: I just saw an advert for SciFi's new movie: Reign of the Gargoyles.

It seems to me that the bad guys being Nazis just isn't good enough anymore. Now days, the movies and television have to juice 'em up. It's as if to say, hey, if the bad guys are just Nazi's, that's no challenge. We know they can be beaten easily. They're pushovers.

Remember the shock and horror when Captain Kirk found out one of his favorite teachers had transformed an entire alien planet into...Nazis? I mean, these Nazis didn't even have ray-guns yet it was still terrible news.

Now they always have to give the Nazis something more. If it's not a super-soldier (SS Doomtrooper), it's aliens (Star Trek: Enterprise; Ultimate Avengers 1&2), weapons from the future (again, Enterprise; Galactica 1980; Time Cop; Justice League), or even the Ark of the Covenant (Raiders of the Lost Ark).

I guess Nazis with their real super-weapons like jet aircraft, V2 rockets, and super-tanks are no longer frightening enough for movie viewers. I doubt even the smooth-skinned Klingons would be caught associating with them these days. Too bad -- I thought they were real creeps just as they were.

[Wounded_Dragon]

I wouldn't say they're not enough; rather, if you need villains to juice up in some manner, they're the safe "group" to use from without offending anyone of importance.

[Mynd Hed]

I'd say it's the other way around; if the villain you have isn't enough by himself, make him a Nazi, too.

"Vampires? Man, everyone's seen vampires a hundred times. Vampires are old hat. But vampire NAZIS!"

"Aliens? BOOOOOOORING! Better make'em NAZI aliens!"

[MonkeyFunk]

McBain to base! Under attack by COMMIE-NAZIS!

[Sharklady]

It depends on which movie you watch.

The ordinary human Nazis in 'Schindler's List' were profoundly frightening, precisely because they *were* ordinary humans. The idea of great evil being perpetuated by 'people like us' is far more terrifying than monsters or invading aliens, because it's actually happened, and could happen again.

[Crash]

Well, part of the thing is that Nazis--or at least segments of them--were just crazy enough to do some of that stuff. They had a fascination with the occult that makes their participation plausible in movies like Hellboy and Bulletproof Monk and the Full Metal Alchemist.

[The Weed Of Cri]

Nazis are "easy" villians for Hollywood, a fallback choice to avoid thinking up new villians or using groups with controversial ideologies >cough<Islamofascism>cough<. There's a number of reasons why Nazis are considered "safe" villians for writers wanting to avoid controversy:

1. They were unarguably bad. Unlike a lot of the world's current crop of "real" villians >cough<Islamofascism>cough<, their villiany is not based on the perversion a legitimate ideology, nor on one which has support in the entertainment industry, like Communism.

2. They did their damage before the current vogue toward multiculturalism, back in the days when good and evil were black-and-white concepts that weren't mitigated by cultural bias.

3. There aren't enough of them left to cause trouble. And those few that are left are pathetic losers who are afraid to show their faces and admit what they are.

4. They were White. Every major ethnic/gender/lifestyle subset of the American melting pot has its own set of watchdogs ready to howl if their particular group isn't being represented "fairly" (sympathetically). Ever wonder why their are so few movies with black serial killers? When was the last time you saw a movie or TV show in which a rapist turned out to be Asian or Hispanic? Compare the actors who played the terrorists in Flight 93 with pictures of the real 9/11 hijackers. The actors were a lot, um, paler than their real-life counterparts. That was intentional, so that the makers of the film could dodge any charges that they were picking on any specific group (I'm convinced that if the studio could have made the terrorists Nazis, or Norwegians, without completely shattering any sense of credibility, they would have done it.) Luckily for Hollywood (and the rest of us), the Nazis do not the equivalent of the NAACP or CAIR looking out for their interests, probably due to some combinations of Points 2 and 3 above. The birthplace of Nazism, Germany, has fortunately not succumbed to multi-culti relativism and has actively sought to expunge the Nazi presence in their land (most modern Nazis are, in fact, Americans, not Europeans).