Skip to main content

marvel - Who is depicted in the statues on the Grandmaster's Palace in Thor: Ragnarok?


In shots of the Grandmaster's Palace, you can see the heads of various Gladiator Champions carved on the side. The Hulk is clearly being constructed on the top. One of them (I'm fairly certain) was Beta Ray Bill. Another may have been the Bi-Beast (hat tip to a commentor on io9).


Any idea who else was on there? I seem to recall that there were five heads: Hulk, plus four completed ones.



Answer



Given this imperfect still, I might surmise the Man-Thing, Ares (the God of War), Beta Ray Bill and The Bi-Beast have all been champions at one point or another in the Grandmaster’s games.


enter image description here


Each of these beings is highly formidable and given their capabilities would have made fine champions for the Grandmasters gladiatorial games.


enter image description here


Man-Thing: A creature formed of muck and science, the Man-Thing has two properties which would make it a fine gladiator.





  • The first is that it’s crazy durable. As long as you can keep it supplied with swamp and muck, it is effectively immortal and indestructible. It has increased its strength under certain circumstances allowing it to be as strong as the Hulk.




  • Against people using conventional bashing weapons, they would eventually tire, or even possibly become afraid. Which is where its second power comes in: Who ever knows fear, burns at the Man-Thing’s touch. The creature is sensitive to emotional states and if a creature becomes afraid of it, the Man-Thing will secrete sulfuric acid causing nasty caustic burns where ever the Man-Thing is touching it.




enter image description here


The Bi-Beast: A creature of fantastic strength and savagery, the Bi-Beast has strength and durability rivaling the Hulk’s.




  • Created as a creature purely designed to fight the Hulk and win, the Bi-Beast has changed in appearance and power levels over the years. He first appeared in The Incredible Hulk #169 (1973). He probably made the Grandmaster a lot of money during his time as a gladiator due to his incredible strength and durability. His one weakness was his psychological instability.


enter image description here


Ares - God of War: The son of Zeus and Hera, Ares was worshiped as the god of war in ancient Greece and Rome. While physically not quite as powerful as the Bi-Beast or the Hulk, what Ares lacked in superhuman strength compared to both of those titans, he made up for in his sheer versatility, skill and capacity for violence.




  • Ares was the god of brutal warfare and being trapped in an arena where most of the fighters were bigger and stronger but likely lacking the training his thousands of years of fighting had given him, would make him a long-running champion.




  • How Ares might have come to be under the control of the Grandmaster is anyone’s guess, since the Grandmaster was thought to have never been to Earth, Ares may have been a museum piece of the Collector and traded to the Grandmaster in the past.





  • However he may have arrived here, his expertise in killing would have made him a crowd favorite until he made his escape. Being a god would give him a great degree of patience and he would have likely only spent a few years before escaping.




enter image description here


Beta Ray Bill: The cybernetic champion of the Korbinites, a species all but destroyed by the actions of the fire-demon Surtur, Bill protected the last of his species from destruction with the aid of his AI warship, Skuttlebutt.




  • In the comics, even before his transformation into Beta Ray Thor, Bill had proven he had the fighting capacity to best Thor in a hand to hand struggle. He was also worthy of wielding Mjolnir which made his relationship with the Thunder God even more challenging.





  • With his cybernetic reconstruction, Beta Ray Bill would have been a terror to face in the Grandmaster’s games and would have likely remained a noted champion until he and Skuttlebutt figured out a way to escape. Bill’s dedication to his people would not have allowed him to remain away from them for too long. Beta Ray Bill was created by Walt Simonson and first appeared in Thor #337 (1983). In the comics, Odin was so impressed with Beta Ray Bill and his quest, he gave him his own hammer and enchanted it with capacities for energy manipulation similar to Mjolnir.




  • Stormbreaker was a warhammer enchanted with powers similar to Mjolnir’s. Bill can use it to fly, manipulate weather, absorb and channel various energies, teleport, and sense various energies.




This article was written by me and first appeared on Quora as part of the question: Who were the grand champions depicted on the Grandmaster's tower in Thor: Ragnarok?


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Did the gatekeeper and the keymaster get intimate in Ghostbusters?

According to TVTropes ( usual warning, don't follow the link or you'll waste half your life in a twisty maze of content ): In Ghostbusters, it's strongly implied that Dana Barret, while possessed by Zuul the Gatekeeper, had sex with Louis Tully, who was possessed by Vinz Clortho the Keymaster (key, gate, get it?), in order to free Big Bad Gozer. In fact, a deleted scene from the movie has Venkman explicitly asking Dana if she and Louis "did it". I turned the quote into a spoiler since it contains really poor-taste joke, but the gist of it is that it's implied that as part of freeing Gozer , the two characters possessed by the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper had sex. Is there any canon confirmation or denial of this theory (canon meaning something from creators' interviews, DVD commentary, script, delete scenes etc...)? Answer The Richard Mueller novelisation and both versions of the script strongly suggest that they didn't have sex (or at the very l...

Why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize Missy right away?

So after it was established that Missy is actually both the Master, and the "woman in the shop" who gave Clara the TARDIS number... ...why didn't The Doctor or Clara recognize her right away? I remember the Tenth Doctor in The Sound of Drums stating that Timelords had a way of recognizing other Timelords no matter if they had regenerated. And Clara should have recognized her as well... I'm hoping for a better explanation than "Moffat screwed up", and that I actually missed something after two watchthroughs of the episode. Answer There seems to be a lot of in-canon uncertainty as to the extent to which Time Lords can recognise one another which far pre-dates Moffat's tenure. From the Time Lords page on Wikipedia : Whether or not Time Lords can recognise each other across regenerations is not made entirely clear: In The War Games, the War Chief recognises the Second Doctor despite his regeneration and it is implied that the Doctor knows him when they fir...

story identification - Animation: floating island, flying pests

At least 20 years ago I watched a short animated film which stuck in my mind. The whole thing was wordless, possibly European, and I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine it... It featured a flying island which was inhabited by some creatures who (in my memory) reminded me of the Moomins. The island was frequently bothered by large winged animals who swooped around, although I don't think they did any actual damage. At the end one of the moomin creatures suddenly gets a weird feeling, feels forced to climb to the top of the island and then plunges down a shaft right through the centre - only to emerge at the bottom as one of the flyers. Answer Skywhales from 1983. The story begins with a man warning the tribe of approaching skywhales. The drummers then warn everybody of the hunt as everyone get prepared to set "sail". Except one man is found in his home sleeping as the noise wake him up. He then gets ready and is about to take his weapon as he hesitates then decides ...

warhammer40k - What evidence supposedly supports Tau as related to the Necrontyr?

I've heard of rumours saying that the Tau from Warhammer 40K are in fact the Necrontyr. Is there anything that supports this statement, in WH40K canon? I just found this, on 1d4 chan 1 : Helping Necrons? Or are they Necrontyr descendants? An often overlooked issue is that Tau have no warp signatures, just like Necrons, hate Warpspawns and Warp in general, just like Necrons, have the exact same skull shape,stature and short lives, and the overwhelming need for Technology and beam weapons, JUST LIKE NECRONS. GW may have planned a race that simply prepares a pacified, multiracial galaxy for Necrons to feast upon, supported by Ethereals that have a C'tan phase blade. Then there is a reference of "dark seed in east" by the Deceiver, so the tricky C'tan might give Tzeentch the finger in the JUST AS PLANNED competition. Or maybe GW just has so little creativity that they simply made a new civ conforming to an Old One's standards without knowing it. Is this the connec...