The Mortal Kombat universe may have crossed over with the DC Universe a couple of times, but once it had a taste for crossovers, it had its own share of guest kombatants. Technically, the first guest character to appear in a “real” Mortal Kombat title was Kratos, the Greek/Sony God of War, in Mortal Kombat 9.
For anyone unfamiliar with this seething ball of rage, Kratos basically has the same backstory as Scorpion. He just wanted to be a family man that incidentally murdered boatloads of people, but, in a horrible twist of fate, one night, it was Kratos’s own family that was murdered. And, bonus problem, Kratos technically killed his own family! Gasp! Granted, it was on the orders of Ares, God of War, so Kratos decided to avenge himself upon Ares… and then, incidentally, kill every other living creature, god, man, or goat, in Greece. According to MK kanon, somewhere in there, during the events of Nu Mortal Kombat 3/9 (we’ll get to that next week), Shao Kahn summoned “the most bitchin’ fighter of all time”, and Kratos popped through a crossover hole. In the microcontinuity of Kratos winning the tournament, he murders Shao Kahn for this summoning, and becomes bros with noted gods Raiden and Fujin. He returns home, confused at himself for not murdering a pair of gods when they were right there. What has he become!?
Note that this is the first crossover character that doesn’t originate from another dimension, and is just nebulously part of the universe (in this case, “the past”). That’s going to continue with the majority of MK guests.
Oh, and before we move on, let’s note that Kratos came with a few “restrictions” compliments of Sony. For instance, Kratos is never allowed to be afraid in fatalities. This means he often faces his own death… like some kind of annoyed, impatient idiot. Okay, I guess that is kind of par for the course for the dude…
Interestingly, unlike every other fighting game franchise out there, Kratos is currently the only MK guest to originate from a videogame. This is likely because a whole host of other MK guests hail from movies, specifically horror movies. And that all started with Mortal Kombat 9 and its final DLC fighter, Freddy Krueger.
Frederick Charles Krueger is the dream monster you know and love from his many films. In this universe, he’s apparently an immortal denizen of the Dream Realm (never mentioned before in MK, but does make a return in Tremor’s backstory in MKX), and Shao Kahn accidentally draws out Freddy during the invasion of MK3/9. This has the side-effect of making Freddy mortal and severely depowered, so he’s forced to forge a second knife hand thingy. To be clear, he has two matching claws because he needs the extra power to defeat Shao Kahn and return to the Dream Realm, and not because it would be a bear to animate a fighter with asymmetrical hands (and they didn’t even try with Hellboy). Unfortunately, Freddy doesn’t make much of an impact on MK9, as he’s almost entirely silent, and a Freddy that isn’t cracking marvelous one-liners every five seconds is no Freddy at all.
Other unfortunate news: Freddy was DLC for MK9. He stayed in MK9, and it wasn’t until Mortal Kombat X that we got Jason Voorhees. No Freddy vs. Jason for you! (Well, this is possible in the mobile version of MKX, but that’s little more than a card game…)
Jason is still the homicidal mama’s boy of Crystal Lake, and his “signature move” seems to be being completely unkillable. Jason officially exists in the Mortal Kombat universe, and is explained as a sort of “zombie man” that has been killed time and time again, but keeps busting out of Netherrealm to punish teenagers with the improper use of sleeping bags. His official story is that the current ruler of Netherrealm, Liu Kang, decided having an unstoppable killing machine in his army would be a good thing for morale, but, bad news, Jason can’t be caged. Liu Kang is bisected for his hubris, and Jason wanders off to see if anyone needs a new goalie.
And rounding out the horror heroes of the MK universe, Leatherface also swung on in for Mortal Kombat X. Jedidiah Sawyer puts the “chainsaw” in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and he also puts a chainsaw in anyone that remotely gets in his way in the MK Universe. Leatherface is a mute cannibal that… well, I don’t think I need to explain exactly what he does with that chainsaw (or the hammer, come to think of it). This Leatherface is distinctly from the pre-reboot continuity (yes, there are multiple Leatherface continuities), and his purpose in Mortal Kombat is to find the tastiest “meat” available for his hungry family. So everybody please watch your various appendages around that guy. Leatherface seems fixated on Cassie Cage (Sonya and Johnny’s daughter), but otherwise doesn’t much care for the overall plot of the franchise. Just as well. I wouldn’t want to be the one to have to sit down and explain the complex relationship between Kitana and Kung Lao to that guy.
Now we’re getting into borderline horror, but definite sci-fi. The Predator is next up. The Predator (or… uh… “this” predator) enters the fray of Mortal Kombat X for the blisteringly obvious reason of just plain killing everybody. There is prey here, he is the predator, it’s time to kick ass and take pelts. He doesn’t have any particular rivals (even if Jax is looking strangely familiar), and he doesn’t have any distinct goal beyond destruction. He’s going to fit right in with the rest of these dorks. His ending sees him mastering “sorcery”, so now he’s a magical Predator. Great. You can’t win this, Dillon.
(And side note, the Predator’s general… everything obviously inspired the design of Cyrax/Sektor in Mortal Kombat 3. While Predator can fight Triborg, it’s kind of a shame he’s forever separated from the OG cyborg hunting machines of the franchise.)
But he might need that magic, because the last Mortal Kombat X guest is Alien. The official word on this monster is that xenomorphs showed up on Outworld ages ago (of course they would go for Outworld, that realm is like 70% acid lake), laid some eggs, and then knocked off to the pub for a cig (and to maybe catch up with Kenshi). These eggs were discovered around the time of MKX by some tarkatans, and a few face huggers later, we’ve got an Alien running around with all the powers of Baraka. And that’s how Baraka kinda-sorta got on the MKX roster! But Alien’s other moves shine through in its other fighting styles, so, don’t worry, it isn’t just limited to knifes for hands and poor dental care. It doesn’t have a particular goal for participating, but if Alien wins Mortal Kombat, it’s going to drag every last fighter back to its nest, and we’re probably going to have to deal with at least one Xenomorph with a flaming skeleton head. Can you kill such a thing with fire? Let’s not find out.
But if something needs killing, Mortal Kombat 11 did give us The Terminator. This is the first guest in a while that distinctly originates from another dimension, as this T-800 is from a separate “future” timeline. Sektor never could get his cybernetic rebellion off the ground, but Skynet managed to conquer the whole of the world on an Earth that is not wholly karate-based, and it’s from this timeline that The Terminator that is distinctly from Terminator: Dark Fate hails. I’m not going to spoil the opening of Dark Fate, but, suffice to say, this Terminator is really good at his job. Anywho, this Terminator got waylaid on his way back in time, wound up in Mortal Kombat 1990s, aged to the present day of MK11 (robot flesh is still flesh, I’m told), acquired a conscious somewhere along the way, and, in his microcontinuity, defeated the big boss of MK11 in an effort to regain control of time and space. But, thanks to that pesky conscious, he realized that being a robot with omnipotent knowledge and power was maybe a terrible idea, so he drowned himself in a bottomless sea of blood. Literally, to be clear. The Blood Sea. That’s a place in the Mortal Kombat universe. It’s not great for vacations. But before his self-imposed suicide, he hit Kabal with his motorcycle (Kabal deigned to reference Jingle all the Way, he knew the consequences), so it wasn’t a total loss.
(Side note #2: Kano’s cybernetic eye was originally based on the look/coolness of The Terminator. Terminator does get to square off with Kano in MK11, and justice is wrought for this slight against androids.)
And, finally, Spawn brings us full circle, back to the world of comic book heroes. For those unfamiliar with the Spawn mythos, Spawn was originally Keith David, mild-mannered actor known worldwide for his involvement with the unfairly maligned and often forgotten Disney hit, The Princess and the Frog. Unfortunately, Keith David was murdered during a secret mission in Botswana for the USSG’s Operation Knightstrike (dude is a very dedicated method actor). Thanks to the unforgivable sin of playing the absolute worst villain on The Flash television series, Keith David was damned to Hell, but made a deal with a being named Malebolgia to become the one and only Hellspawn. Or maybe there’s a lot of them? There was at least the medieval one… Whatever. What’s important is that Spawn (he dropped the “hell” part so he wouldn’t scare the kiddies) travels to the Mortal Kombat universe thanks to some kind of Hell-exchange program. Apparently, MK’s “The Netherrealm” is just one of eight or nine multi-dimensional rings of Hell, and skipping across them is perfectly fine. Miraculously, Spawn actually makes friends with Scorpion and Sub-Zero in the MK universe (I thought for sure he would start a rivalry with that other hellspawn vengeance demon with a penchant for chains), presumably because they’re all (mostly) revived former demons (or however the cosmology works here) at this point in their respective timelines. Together, they battle the forces of Hell(s), and things end poorly for the various Time Goddesses and Violators running around.
Remember kiddies, even when you’re triumphing over your enemies, if you team up with Mortal Kombat, you’re probably going straight to Hell.
Next time: Mortal Kombat 9 Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Reboot
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