Dark Danny, also known as Dan Phantom, is the main antagonist of the Danny Phantom TV movie, The Ultimate Enemy, and its 2023 graphic novel follow-up, Danny Phantom: A Glitch in Time. He is the evil future version of Danny Phantom, who accidentally killed his friends and family and then separated from his human-half before fusing with Vlad Plasmius' ghost-half. He is Danny's second arch-nemesis and the most dangerous and hated foe he has ever faced.
Appearance[]
After fusing with Vlad Plasmius, Dark Danny appeared the same as he did as Danny Phantom, except that he had Vlad's pale skin, red eyes with black rims, fangs and pointed ears. His white hair also flowed like fire.
After aging a decade, Dark Danny became taller and much more muscular. His hair is longer and he has grown a goatee too. His costume's arms and waist sides are now white and his gloves are black, and now sports a cape that's white on the back and black on the underside.
Personality[]
Originally, Danny was a benevolent character who, after gaining ghost powers, used his abilities to protect the innocent from evil ghosts. However, his desperation to secure his future ended up costing him everything, leading him to spiral into misery and guilt that resulted him him wanting to separate his human and ghost halves.
After the procedure, Danny Phantom became a hostile, power-hungry ghost like all the villains he ever faced, choosing to separate Vlad from his own ghost half and then fusing with it to become even more powerful. As a result of the fusion, Dark Danny became the embodiment of all of the worst aspects of both his and Vlad's personalities, including Vlad's arrogance and cruelty towards others and Danny's more unpleasant traits while having none of their more positive traits such as their shared love for Maddie and Danny's kind-hearted nature. He also seemed to retain his hatred for Vlad despite being far more evil than him telling Jazz his plans to destroy his portal once he gains access to it and presumably him as well.
Dark Danny himself is completely heartless and utterly callous. While most of the other Danny Phantom villains had some level of morality and are honorable to some extent, he has nothing of the sort, making him the most evil villain in the show. He is brutal, sadistic, destructive, ruthless, misanthropic, vicious, and remorseless, as well as being perfectly willing to kill anyone, even if they were people his human self cared about, in order to fulfill his own goals. He also proves to be depraved enough to be willing to risk destroying an entire timeline for the purpose of ensuring that his younger self will become him. In addition as a result of possessing no humanity whatsoever, Dark Danny can outright accurately be described as a psychopath.
Dark Danny is also highly prideful, cocky, arrogant, and egocentric, most likely because there was no one in the future able to fight him and this made him underestimate his younger self. As such, it was his arrogance that proved to be his major weakness, as it led to his defeat by his younger self as he never expected him to master the Ghostly Wail several years before he did. He proved just as inhumane and merciless to even his fellow ghosts, as he injured, scarred, or otherwise deeply embittered many of the villains in the series in his realm. It's unknown if he did this out of sadism, out of spite for all the trouble they caused him when he used to be a hero or both.
For all his pride and arrogance, he is also very intelligent, manipulative, and persuasive, as he was able to fool his younger version friends in his world into thinking he is the one true Danny, at least for a brief time until he revealed his true colors. He is also shown to have a rather warped and sadistic sense of humor, as he quipped to his younger self's parents, "Hello? Danny Fenton? Danny Phantom? Ever notice the similarity?", though this could have been to sadistically taunt at his parents rather than make a joke. Thus, his attempts at humor make him more heinous than anything else. He also showed no remorse when trying to kill his past self's parents, friends, and teacher.
Though he comes off as sadistic and arrogant by heart, he is also actually capable of fear, as he was stunned to see his counterpart developed the ghostly wail, a power that he wouldn't develop for a decade and was seen worried when Danny used it on him a second time. This also shows that, as with Vlad, Dark Danny can be highly overconfident in his abilities as he didn't even prepare in case his counterpart did most.
Powers and Abilities[]
Dark Danny has the combined powers of both Danny Phantom and Vlad Plasmius at his command, making him extremely powerful. Dark Danny is arguably the most powerful ghost that has ever existed, (due to only time traveling being able to stop him) and possibly more powerful than either Vortex, Undergrowth, Nocturn, Freakshow (with the Reality Gauntlet) and Pariah Dark, the Ghost King. It assuming Dan raw power rivals or even surpass the Ghost King which is taken into consideration that the Fright Knight serves Dark Danny, it is possible that he is the only one to beat Pariah without help or the aid of a weapon (even when the lateral is using the Ring of Rage and the Crown of Fire). This would explains why the Fright Knight chose to serve him. Similar to his young counterpart Danny and possibly Vlad, he can sense nearby ghosts and half-ghosts with red wisps of mist emerging from his nose when one is nearby. Dark Danny's ghost powers grant him superhuman strength, speed, agility, and durability, and he can fly and turn invisible and become intangible. This along with his experience made defeating his past counterpart an easy task before his pride led to his downfall.
His most powerful attack is his Ghostly Wail, a powerful shriek of sonic force that sounds like moaning ghosts and can use it more than once without losing energy, unlike Danny who can only use it one or two times before feeling a severe energy drain. Dark Danny has a wide variety of powers and can possess other people, fire ectoplasmic energy blasts, unleash a pseudo-electrical attack to shock people, generate an ectoplasmic energy shield, create duplicates of himself, form bonds made of ectoplasm, teleport, shape-shift into a version of his younger self, create portals to the Ghost Zone, manipulate the shape of his body, use a sleep beam to knock people out, turn into ghostly vapor and fuse objects into beings with his intangibility powers, making it unreachable by human or ghost means. That said, while he is powerful, him getting defeating by his younger self's Ghostly Wail proved that he has limits. Even then, that was only because he underestimated him and they had a life link.
Due to him now existing outside of time and Danny changing the future, there is nothing preventing him from trying to eliminate Danny since they no longer have a life link. Since he exists outside of time, if it stopped, he wouldn't be affected by it, proving he is nearly unstoppable at the moment.
Trivia[]
- It was stated that if the series had not been canceled and Clockwork's voice actor David Carradine had not passed away, Dark Danny would have indeed returned. It is possible that he would have been the final villain Danny faced with the help of the other ghost of the Ghost Zone or at least retain his status as Danny's biggest threat, as Danny had a harder time fighting him than other ghost.
- When Danny temporarily turned evil in the episode "Control Freaks", his eyes became similar to Dark Danny's and were red under Freakshow's mind control.
- During the development of "The Ultimate Enemy", Butch Hartman had come up with the idea for what became "The Ultimate Enemy" as a movie involving time travel and ghost battles. He realized the best enemy for Danny to fight would be the worst enemy for any teenager - their own future self. Thus, Dan Phantom was created.
- Technically speaking, Dark Danny is not the future version of Danny as a whole. He's an older version of Danny's ghost side which is transformed into the evilest ghost/villain after fusing with Vlad's. Though technically, Dark Danny can be seen as a symbolic result of his younger self's selfish actions.
- It is unknown why Dark Danny didn't fade from existence after Danny promised himself that wouldn't become him or after Clockwork saved his family and friends from being killed.
- One possibility is that as a result of Danny Phantom traveling to the future and Dark Danny traveling to the past, a temporal paradox was created that enabled Dark Danny to continue existing even after the terrible future he created was erased.
- It is also possible that Dark Danny infused the time medallion he used to travel back into the past into himself just as he did with Danny's to ensure that he wouldn't disappear if Danny still didn't make the choices he made. This would mean that he deliberately lied to his younger self and still attempted to destroy his life just to prove his point that his fate was sealed to begin with, or perhaps he just wanted to make him suffer out of amusement.
- While fighting Vlad when he ran as mayor for Amity Park, Danny overshadows Plasmius in order to make it look like he hurt the human Danny. However, nothing happens on that occasion most likely due to Danny Phantom not being separated from his human self and that the Plasmius he overshadowed was a clone.
- Despite his only appearance, Dark Danny is by far the most popular villain of the series.
- It's unknown if Dark Danny is capable of using all of Danny's abilities like Cryokinesis.
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