Note: This is an unfinished analysis on League of Super Evil I started writing but scrapped last September. I'm sharing it since there's some interesting tidbits here. I should take another crack at this at some point...
League of Super Evil was a Canadian CGI animated cartoon that ran from 2009-2012. It followed the daily exploits of the appropriately named three man and hellhound villain team L.O.S.E. as they harassed their neighbors with mundane pranks or fleeced the pizza delivery guy for free pizza via a Rube's Goldberg machine set of schemes to stop him from arriving within the 30-minutes or less delivery window. Voltar, Docktor Frogg, Red Menace, and Doomageddon are firmly in the camp of Saturday morning cartoon villains that start with Snidely Whiplash and never progress much further than the tamest bad guy in a Scooby Doo unmasking montage.
In a nutshell, League of Super Evil was an affectionate love letter to lame comic book villains while satirizing superheroes and pop culture as a whole. Given the time it came out, the idea of following a set of heel villains was still pretty novel. For some context, Megamind was at the 'ahead of its curve' part of its lifespan. The jokes and social commentary were hit or miss. In my opinion, L.O.S.E. is at its strongest when it plugs our lame protagonists into common cartoon trope scenarios and sets a couple of clever subversions.
For example, the episode "Voltina" is rib-ticklingly hilarious to me. It's a take on the tried and true trope of a masculine-presenting individual cross-dressing and getting mistaken for a woman. Voltar's clothes turn pink because of a laundry mishap and everyone assumes he's a woman because of said pink costume. The local intergalactic warlord Humungo mistakes Voltar for his tall, frilly and pink-clad fiance Voltina. Hijinks ensue and Voltar agrees to marry Humungo in exchange for the piles of expensive, frivolous gifts and galactic power he could receive as the newly crowned warmongering empress. Voltar hates the color pink because of the classic childish aversion to anything "ew, girly" but he's selfish and materialistic enough that big pricetags and flashy status overpowers everything else.
Voltar's posing as Voltina is, arguably, one of his most evil and manipulative moves throughout the entire series. It's great because there's enough previous character writing to establish Voltar as the short-sighted, arrogant leader that prioritizes declaring war on the squirrels in his backyard over anything close to world domination. And here he is, about to pull the greatest con of his villain career. He's thwarted of course, but it's a fun, wild ride leading up to that. Plus, Humungo is one of the few characters that has any kind of overarching continuity in an otherwise episodic series. The continuity adds to the humor here; he's painfully familiar with Voltar and has already experienced an unpleasant run-in with this weird, helmeted man.
In contrast to Voltar's day in the life of Bugs Bunny's playbook, hero characters like Glory Guy or Wow Woman function better as shallow name-play characters vs any really meaningful parodies on the superheroes they're a rough approximation of. For example, Wow Woman is fawned over by every man she meets and her most significant on-screen moment was talking about how much she loves collecting shoes.
Why this is significant at all is that superhero parody characters are stronger when they walk a tight rope balance between this is a unique character in their own right as well as calling back/poking some fun at the source material. Dexter's Lab features a gallery of playful hero parodies. One solid example: Valhallen is a mix of Thor with a classic rocker. He has a bass guitar in place of Mjolnir, a more laidback, cavalier attitude and surfer slang compared to classic comic Thor as a proactive and vigilant hero that speaks very proper and uses old English vernacular. Valhallen works in the series of Justice League brand shorts he stars in and what superhero-in-sitcom antics those shorts set him up with. If Wow Woman was supposed to be set up with a similar parody framework in mind, she's too far removed from what kind of character Wonder Woman is for that approach to work.
The one exception to this critique is the Cougar. She's a very on-the-nose Catwoman parody as an elderly cat burglar that has a line of younger suitors and a few scenes where she's on a date with L.O.S.E.'s version of Batman.
