Figure 7.6 Characters by sex and motivation
There are 72 characters who are truly bad, in major and minor roles.
They include the poacher and would-be child-murderer Percival McLeach
in Rescuers Down Under with his contrived Southwestern accent and
idiom (“purty feather, boy!” “I whupped ya’ll!” “Home, home on the
range, where the critters’r ta-id up in chains”), and the whip-and-cleaver-
wielding Stromboli of Pinocchio, with his threats of dismemberment,
incredible rages, and florid, contrived Italian accent. Of these evil 72,
however, a full 85 percent are native speakers of English; almost half are
speakers of U.S. English. Bad guys with foreign accents account for only
15 percent of the whole (Figure 7.7 and Table 7.4).