The Duck’s final silly scoundrel is none other than the unlicensed dentist and amateur brain surgeon from Psychonauts, Dr. Caligosto Loboto, who also just so happens to be featured in the above banner image.  This unhinged fellow may have been a former patient of Thorney Towers Home for the Disturbed, a long-since abandoned insane asylum that he now uses as his base of operations.

While Dr. Loboto calls himself a dentist (and a visit inside his mind does indeed reveal an obsession with teeth), he also has a great interest in brains.  In fact, in the first game, he is responsible for stealing the brains of the kids at Whispering Rocks Psychic Summer Camp in order to power psychic tanks!  As he explains to one of his unsuspecting victims before making them literally sneeze out their brain, “if a tooth is bad, you pull it”.  Um, seems like sound logic to me….  His scientific endeavors also extend to mutating fish into his obedient minions, so he is clearly a very busy dentist indeed, even if much of his work actually has nothing to do with teeth.

In case it wasn’t already abundantly obvious, Dr. Loboto is clearly a very unstable individual, whose childish behavior, high-pitched voice, and bad jokes serve to make him a very amusing character.  Even so, while he might make me laugh, he’s also a rather terrifying villain.  Not only are dentists rather scary to begin with, this guy’s unpredictable behavior would make him decidedly unnerving if one were to personally meet him.  If he thinks outright removing a patient’s brain will cure them of what he calls “the insanity of a manatee”, who knows what else he’s capable of?

Fortunately, thanks to the events of Rhombus of Ruin, his moral compass is figuratively restored, leading to his possible redemption in Psychonauts 2.  While I had expressed in my last post that I wanted Dr. Nefarious to remain a villain, there’s something about Loboto that makes me think he’d be even more lovable as a good guy.  Perhaps this feeling comes from the fact that he has one of the most tragic backstories of any villain I know.  I often don’t have any sympathy for the lazy excuses most villains get for their evil deeds, but Loboto’s past is just so tragic.  If he does indeed reform, I might just need to give this goofball a hug!