Mean Machine Angel
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Mean Machine Angel is a villain in the British comic book series Judge Dredd. He is one of the sons of Elmer "Pa" Angel, and as such, is/was a member of the Angel Gang. He was played in the 1995 movie by Christopher Adamson.
When he was young, he was gentle, nice and utterly unlike his viciously criminal family. Pa Angel was not pleased by this, and kidnapped a surgeon from nearby Texas City to operate on him, making him the crazed cyborg he is now.
He has a mechanical right arm and a steel dome over his skull with a dial on the front. This dial has four settings; from 1, where he's surly and disagreeable, all the way up to 4, which is when he is fully berserk. His favorite attack is a head-butt with his steel skull.
He is not very bright, at best, and has often been outwitted. When Seven-Pound Sally Suggs (a competing Cursed Earth criminal, named after the 7lb hammer she used when committing her crimes) married him, she easily tricked him into demonstrating his highest setting by ramming the side of the shack the Angels lived in, collapsing it on the rest of the Angels and then absconding with the loot the Angels had extorted from neighboring people as "wedding gifts".
He died during the Judge Child saga, but was brought back from the grave by the Judge Child to seek revenge on Judge Dredd. At the end of his return, he was captured by the Mega-City One judges and imprisoned. While there have been escapes and attempts to cure him, he is currently incarcerated in Iso-Cube 666 (which holds the most dangerous foes Dredd has gone up against and subsequently captured, such as Stan Lee and the Dark Judges) in Mega-City One.
Technically the only member of the Angel Gang left, in a recent break-out Mean Machine has discovered that he has a son from his brief relationship with Sally Suggs. His son is exactly like Mean Machine was during his childhood; good, kind, gentle and sweet. As well as working on his own, Mean Machine occasionally teams up with other crooks, such as Judge Death (in Judgement on Gotham). He is also occasionally "loaned out" to the Judges for missions. One of his most unusual missions was when he was part of "The Three Amigos"; Himself, Judge Dredd and Judge Death.
Mean Machine's dial settings are:
- Surly
- Mean
- Vicious
- Brutal
On rare occasions, an extremely hard headbutt causes Mean Machine's dial to get stuck on 4½, which causes him to enter an Uncontrollable Butt Frenzy, where he can't stop headbutting.
In a parallel universe, ruled by Judge Dread (an insane version of Judge Dredd), Mean Machine is one of Dread's lieutenants and has a 5th setting- Book a Plot in the Cemetery.
In Judge Dredd Megazine #218, Mean Machine Angel Heart Part 1, Mean Machine received a cranial cybernetic implant called a Warden Device, which delivers extreme pain whenever he gets angry. His doctor, the creator of the device, released him on the grounds that the implant would make him a fit member of society. He has also married Porsha Wuss, an Iso-cube visitor with a history of getting attached to prisoners she works with. Mean was soon reincarcerated, however.
