Gorilla Grodd (DCAU)

Justice League Unlimited

Gorilla Grodd is a huge gorilla with yellow eyes, thick black eyebrows, a prominent belly, black fur and snort nose. As a gorilla, he has massive and powerful arms and pseudo hands for feet.

Much like his rival Lex Luthor, Grodd is brilliant, manipulative, ambitious, charismatic, confident and arrogant. He is a brilliant scientist and criminal mastermind who managed to form the largest alliance of supervillains ever to oppose the Justice League. Using both his charisma, intellect and his mind control powers, he is a master manipulator who is capable of turning nearly anyone into his pawn and has a shocking ability to read and understand people just by their facial expressions and body language. He is a brilliant strategist and scientist and is one of the few villains who manages to defeat the Justice League on occasion.

One of Grodd's prominent traits (and greatest flaw) is his ego. Grodd saw apes as inherently superior due to their physical strength and intellect and held strongly racist views towards humans. He saw humans as inferior in every way and fit only to serve him. Grodd even saw himself as superior to even other apes due to his own intelligence. Despite his pride in himself and his kind, he despised the society of Gorilla City, to the point he tried to destroy it completely when he couldn't find it. This arrogance blinds him to the resourcefulness of humans, especially Lex Luthor, which results in his death.

He is quite the ladies' man, whether he controlled them or they simply loved him. In the episode "The Brave and the Bold", he has a scientist, Dr. Sarah Corwin, assist him in his takeover. Flash believed she was controlled by Grodd, but she reveals that she helped him out of love. Giganta was in love and loyal to him; revealing that she was once a gorilla, and Grodd turned her into human, but could grow to any size. Out of loyalty, she had tried to break him out of prison several times. Grodd betrayed their affair/friendship by sacrificing her and tried to fry her brain and when she was arrested, he did not try to break her out.

She broke out and joined in the mutiny but on Luthor's side and tried to squeeze Grodd to death. His current love Tala freed him but he knocked her out. When Giganta was imprisoned, Tala became his new love interest but became Luthor's interest when the gorilla was overthrown. Tala realized her mistake and freed him to stage his mutiny.

Grodd was a scientist in Gorilla City. He developed a helmet that allowed him to control the minds of others. The Gorilla City security force stopped him from using it in the city, but he escaped capture and eventually wound up in Central City, where he ran afoul of Green Lantern and the Flash.[2] Grodd was seemingly rendered harmless after Flash "crossed a few wires" in his mind control helmet and tricked him into using it. This fried his brain and everyone assumed that he was brain dead.[3] Grodd not only recovered from this, but no longer needed the helmet to control minds.

At some point, according to a story he would later tell Clayface, Grodd met a female gorilla named Giganta, whom he transformed into a human, who could grow to many times her normal size. It is unknown if she always had this ability or if it was as a result of Grodd's work, or even if the story itself was true or not. Grodd and Giganta would later recruit Shade, Parasite, Clayface, Killer Frost, and Sinestro into the Secret Society, a group to oppose the Justice League.[4] Grodd started playing mind games with the league, which left their integrity as a team fragile and the individual members vulnerable to capture. With the Justice League incapacitated, Grodd brought his Society to a stadium in Gotham to announce to the world about a new order. When the League escaped captivity and reforged its bonds, both sides faced off, but the Secret Society was defeated in the end. Grodd would later revive the Secret Society, but on a much grander scale; nearly every supervillain on Earth was inducted into one group. To this end, Grodd helped Lex Luthor escape from prison, and secured Luthor's services in Grodd's employ by promising Luthor the last piece of Brainiac, a cube which contained Brainiac's entire computer code, from which Luthor could reconstitute his "partner".[1] Grodd also installed psychic safeguards in each of his allies' minds; if they were ever in a situation where his plans could be revealed, their brains would automatically "short circuit" and shut down, wiping their memories and leaving them comatose.[6] Grodd also freed Tala from the mirror Felix Faust tricked her into, winning her loyalty and affection in the process.

After the Legion recovered various artifacts and devices (including the Heart of Nanda Parbat), Grodd had his Society invade Gorilla City. Taking control of its advanced shield generator, Grodd finally revealed his grand scheme: With the Heart boosting its power and a DNA sequencer installed in its circuitry, the generator would broadcast a signal to turn all of humanity into apes. Grodd succeeded in his plan, but his smug assurance of victory would be his undoing. Moments after Tala teleported Grodd, Luthor, and herself away, the Justice League arrived and destroyed the device, reverting everyone on earth back to normal. Back at Grodd's headquarters, Luthor was so disgusted with Grodd's plan that he incapacitated Grodd by shooting him with a non-lethal weapon and took over the Legion (which Luthor was planning to do eventually, but the sheer ridiculousness of Grodd's plan prompted him to bump up his schedule) to the apparent approval of the membership.[7] To add insult to injury, Grodd was thrown into his own prison and left to watch Tala transfer her fickle affections towards Luthor within moments of his takeover. Luthor kept Grodd alive for information on the Brainiac piece, even attempting to use his own mental technology to tear the information from the ape's head. However, due to the League's attempts to track Grodd and the Legion down (and some bad timing), Grodd became a circuit that caused Luthor and the Flash to switch minds. Grodd was immediately aware of the switch, but chose to keep quiet for his own amused revenge, having decided to see how long the Flash could keep up the ruse before being discovered and torn apart by the Legion.

After many fruitless attempts to get Luthor's attention away from Brainiac, Tala decided to go back to Grodd, helping him to escape and lead a mutiny against Luthor. The Society was effectively split into two factions; Grodd loyalists and Luthor loyalists. While the two sides fought a full-blown civil war, Grodd and Lex had a one-on-one fight that Grodd clearly dominated. Unfortunately, the gorilla's arrogance worked against him; despite having Luthor at his mercy, the latter's taunts goaded Grodd into using his mental powers, hoping to dominate Luthor's mind. The moment Grodd activated his telepathy, Luthor used a failsafe device to turn Grodd's own powers back against him. Under Luthor's control, Grodd bowed before his rival and walked forward into an airlock. For the final insult, Luthor released his reflected control on Grodd. Outraged at being outsmarted (least of all, by a human), the gorilla expressed his regret of recruiting Luthor. Luthor gave his farewells to Grodd just before opening the airlock. Glaring impotently at the treacherous human, Grodd swore revenge before being sucked out into space, never to be seen again.

As a gorilla, Grodd possessed strength and stamina much greater than that of even the strongest normal human being, though he prefers the role of leader and organizer to actual combat, which he considered beneath him. Despite this, Grodd demonstrated himself to be a skilled fighter, having developed a fighting style that took advantage of his inhuman physiology. Grodd's strength, while superhuman, was no match for powerhouses such as Superman, who was capable of flicking Grodd the length of a football field with one finger. In addition, he possessed a hyper-developed brain, and was one of the most intelligent beings on Earth. His advanced brain developed incredible mental powers (with some accidental help from The Flash's tinkering),[3] most notably mind control and telepathy. With these abilities, he could manipulate a person's movements or simply terrorize them into helplessness.[4][5] He could also implant psychic "fail safes" in his underlings which would cause them severe mental trauma, rendering them comatose, if they attempted to reveal his secrets. His genius was equal to Luthor's, but unlike Luthor, Grodd is more patient and level-headed in his schemes, and never let his emotions or thirst for revenge get in the way of greater goals. Moreover, while Luthor typically held his teams together with money and threats, Grodd kept his teams in line by appealing to their desires, allowing for a more organized and superior fighting force. Like Luthor, however, Grodd's main weakness was his overconfidence in his own superiority, and at certain points even he could be goaded into letting his guard down. This ultimately led to his death, when--in response to Luthor's insults--he attempted to mentally dominate his rival rather than simply using his superior strength to "snap [his] neck" as he had threatened.

Bisexual