Editorials
Why NECA’s New ‘Puppet Master’ Action Figures Mean So Much for Longtime Fans
When I was eight years old, I picked up a toy magazine on a trip to Borders with my dad. I was a huge X-Men fan and my favorite villain, Mr. Sinister, was on the cover. So I guess I have Mr. Sinister to thank for introducing me to my greatest childhood—and, to a degree, adulthood—obsession. The magazine was an issue of Lee’s Action Figure News and Toy Review, covering Toy Fair 1998, with extensive coverage of a whole slew of toy lines for the upcoming year. I hit the middle of that magazine and things changed for young me, when I stopped dead on a double-page spread showcasing Puppet Master: The Action Figure Series. I had no idea what Puppet Master was. I was firmly getting into horror by that age, but hadn’t dipped much at all beyond Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, maybe Halloween by that point. But it didn’t matter.
As soon as I saw those figures, as soon as I caught a glimpse of those dynamic, macabre character designs, I was hooked. So why am I bringing that up right now?
I’m mentioning it because on Halloween, NECA, the absolute leader in accessible, quality horror collectibles, announced that they were making Puppet Master figures. In particular, new ultra-detailed Ultimate figures of Blade, Tunneler, Pinhead and Torch to be sold in two-packs. I’m pretty sure the sound I made when I saw their announcement led my wife to think someone had died. I don’t think I’ve ever actually gasped with excitement before, but I did then. And after I took a minute to catch my breath, I started to wade through the reactions. Hundreds of positive reactions (rare for anything on Twitter) to the news. It was a joy to see people other than myself calling this a dream come true. But there was something else that really caught my eye: people saying they had no idea what Puppet Master was, but that they’d be buying them because these figures looked incredible. And that’s when it started to hit me; what this really meant. Because that’s exactly how it started for me. NECA’s not just making Puppet Master figures. They are, in doing so, potentially making a new generation of fans.
I don’t know how easily available the figures will be, though it looks promising especially with the fact that NECA changed their Twitter profile picture to Blade, but in some ways it doesn’t matter. For eight-year-old me, all it took was a page in a magazine and for some people in 2020, it looks like all it took was a tweet. But to start to get into why that’s all so important, I want to talk about what it was like to grow up as a fan of this franchise. I was sold on sight by the designs of the puppets, rented the first movie almost immediately and truly fell in love with the series. 1998, however, was a very different time, eons before Full Moon had its own streaming service. Full Moon had initially partnered with Paramount to distribute their films and by the time I discovered them, that deal had since ended. Obsessed as I was, I couldn’t buy the Puppet Master movies even if I somehow convinced my parents to let me. I had to make do with what I could find in the video store and so my weekends basically became a rotating schedule of renting Puppet Master I, II or III.
It was similar with the toys. They were successful—in fact, I still don’t think people realize how successful the original Puppet Master figures were—but were sold in comic book and specialty shops and, growing up in Maine, I had one comic shop within an hour. When I would find Puppet Master toys in stores, they were never the core puppets that I loved. My first figure was the evil Totem from Puppet Master 5 and my second was Mephisto, the puppet that appears for a single scene in Puppet Master II, looking like Blade at a Renaissance Faire. But I cherished them anyway. After years of obsessing, I did get my hands on all of them, and that was partially because of the continued success of Full Moon Toys, which led them to put more and more figures in more and more stores. That’s the key. They brought more exposure to the characters and the franchise than even the movies did at that point. I owned Retro Puppet Master toys years before I saw the movie. In fact, to this day, I think more people probably cast a glance to the Retro Puppet Master figures in Suncoast and FYE at the time than have still ever seen the film.
By 2000, I was finally seeing exactly what I wanted. The original batch of Puppet Master toys were re-released as repaint “Movie Editions” with new accessories and were sold in more stores than ever before. Blade, Tunneler, Pinhead, Torch, Jester and Six-Shooter were suddenly being sold in Spencer’s, even in Kaybee Toys. There was a 12” Blade doll and Spencer’s had an exclusive Blade mask that Halloween. It finally felt like the world was catching up to how successful I spent my childhood wishing this franchise could be. And at ten years old, I thought that was going to last forever. New toys were even announced that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on. By the next year, Full Moon collapsed once again, and it was all gone, just like that. I’ve remained a fan ever since, but it has never been the same. The budgets of the movies have only gotten lower and lower, and while it has remained impressive to see what a crew can do for pennies, shooting a new sequel in a week, especially for an FX-heavy franchise as this one is, the flame that fueled that passion has dimmed. My excitement for the series in recent years has been largely fueled by the incredibly impressive recent comic book series than the later films themselves. But for those not as feverishly obsessed as I had been, the flame had burnt out long ago.
Full Moon has certainly survived, selling replicas of varying quality and even tapping the bit of occasional brilliance—like the Plush Buddy Blade, for example—but those are for the most part things you need to buy directly from them. The movies themselves now premiere directly on Full Moon’s own streaming channel. Over time, the idea of seeing Puppet Master merchandise in stores became a ridiculous notion, despite the fact that it was once the norm. The idea that Puppet Master was ever a successful action figure series seems preposterous twenty years out, considering the fact that it’s a franchise that never even had a theatrical entry until its reboot, and even that one showed in select cities for one night only. That’s a testament to what Full Moon Toys accomplished back in the day, as well as to the potential of the characters. Puppet Master: The Action Figure Series was an instant success. The first two figures, Blade and Six-Shooter, sold out immediately, and the people buying them were certainly not all longtime fans. It made the cover of several toy magazines, it even won awards in various toy magazines. The success of Puppet Master as a toy line helped pave the way for a new age of horror collectibles that has only grown, and grown, and grown in popularity since. McFarlane’s Movie Maniacs came the following year and that line certainly set the stage for NECA and everything they’ve done for the horror collectible market over time.
When I stopped regularly collecting figures when I was younger, my last purchases were NECA’s Freddy vs. Jason set and NECA’s Hellraiser Cenobite Lair set. And it was NECA that got me back into it when their gorgeous renditions of some extremely specific, amazing things. I dreamed a lot about one day having horror toys in the days when I had to put a paper hockey mask on my Peter Parker just to have a Jason figure, and what I dreamed wasn’t nearly this good. It will never not blow my mind that I can walk into Target and have my pick of not one but two figures based on Friday the 13th Part V. Because of that, it still hasn’t even begun to sink in that Puppet Master is going to get the same treatment. What that means, as a fan, truly can’t be overstated. If I think it’s surreal and amazing that there’s a Final Chapter Jason that comes with a corkscrew, or that Part 2 Freddy comes packaged with the bizarre dogs with the baby faces, imagine how it feels to see that the Pinhead figure will include the wrench he used to wail on a Nazi in Puppet Master III. Or that Blade and Torch have moveable jaws, just like the characters have in the movies.
I was a kid raised on Puppet Master figures and had long accepted that that age would never come again, because as an adult I’d come to realize what a miracle it was that it ever even happened in the first place. Sure, Full Moon have started releasing their own little mini figures, which are delightful, but not nearly the same as this. To see figures this detailed, from a company so big it has its own rabid fan base, figures based on something I love so much, but that I also recognize is pretty niche, feels genuinely surreal. These four figures look beyond perfect. Torch, in particular, looks like he stepped directly out of the screen in Puppet Master II. It’s the kind of attention to detail NECA is known for, directed toward something I never thought possible for them to tackle.
Now I feel like a kid again when I start to think about the accessories they might be packaged with, although the pictures have revealed a bit. Blade, it appears, will come with an alternate bloody head and bloody knife, according to one of the pictures. Pinhead will clearly have alternate hands for wrenching and punching, Torch will have a flame accessory that looks almost identical to that of the original figure, which is clever even if it’s accidental. But what else? Will Tunneler have an extra head to make it look like he just ran through someone’s mouth and out the other side? Will Torch have an extra head with unlit eyes, or maybe a head that looks like after he’d just been hit with a fire extinguisher in Puppet Master II? It feels ridiculous to speculate about these things, but it feels even more ridiculous that these figures are happening in the first place.
Of course, my most prominent thought is what could happen if these figures are successful, as it looks like they will be, just based on the reaction to the announcement. Will there be more two-packs to round out the main group? Will NECA finally give me a closed-mouth Leech Woman figure, as the original figure depicted her right in the middle of leech-vomiting mode, much to my mom’s disgust? Can I finally get a Decapitron that is in-scale with the rest of the group? After all, NECA loves their extra heads and he is truly the guy for it. What about a Blade for their 8” clothed line, which would be incredible? Could the puppets get the Toony Terrors treatment? It’s absolutely surreal how possible some of these things sound. And even if these four upcoming figures are all we get, it’s so much more than I ever expected. Even that feels impossible.
I do think the franchise has taken huge strides forward with their recent Blade spinoff, allowing to shift the focus toward one puppet, given their budgetary realities, to move in new directions and tell new kinds of stories. But an announcement like this is exactly the shot of adrenaline that this franchise has needed for a very long time. It’s a kind of exposure that previously felt unattainable. There are now fourteen total Puppet Master movies, so the series has certainly never stopped, nor even slowed down by any stretch. And I can’t quite say that NECA’s reveal has left me remembering why I love it, because I’ve had a lot of practice putting that into words, but it has reminded me how I loved it when I was younger. How it felt to see those toys, whether in a magazine or on a store shelf, or in this case an announcement on Twitter of figures with a level of quality I had previously thought impossible. More than anything, though, I think of the people who saw that announcement, or are just now seeing it, and fell instantly in love with the designs, like I did. Who, I imagine, immediately opened a new tab to type “puppet master” into the search bar. And I’m so excited for everything they’re about to see.
Soon after the New Hollywood generation took over the entertainment industry, they started having children. And more than any filmmakers that came before—they were terrified. Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Eraserhead (1977), The Brood (1979), The Shining (1980), Possession (1981), and many others all deal, at least in part, with the fears of becoming or being a parent. What if my child turns out to be a monster? is corrupted by some evil force? or turns out to be the fucking Antichrist? What if I screw them up somehow, or can’t help them, or even go insane and try to kill them? Horror has always been at its best when exploring relatable fears through extreme circumstances. A prime example of this is Larry Cohen’s 1974 monster-baby movie It’s Alive, which explores the not only the rollercoaster of emotions that any parent experiences when confronted with the difficulties of raising a child, but long-standing questions of who or what is at fault when something goes horribly wrong.
Cohen begins making his underlying points early in the film as Frank Davis (John P. Ryan) discusses the state of the world with a group of expectant fathers in a hospital waiting room. They discuss the “overabundance of lead” in foods and the environment, smog, and pesticides that only serve to produce roaches that are “bigger, stronger, and harder to kill.” Frank comments that this is “quite a world to bring a kid into.” This has long been a discussion point among people when trying to decide whether to have kids or not. I’ve had many conversations with friends who have said they feel it’s irresponsible to bring children into such a violent, broken, and dangerous world, and I certainly don’t begrudge them this. My wife and I did decide to have children but that doesn’t mean that it’s been easy.
Immediately following this scene comes It’s Alive’s most famous sequence in which Frank’s wife Lenore (Sharon Farrell) is the only person left alive in her delivery room, the doctors clawed and bitten to death by her mutant baby, which has escaped. “What does my baby look like!? What’s wrong with my baby!?” she screams as nurses wheel her frantically into a recovery room. The evening that had begun with such joy and excitement at the birth of their second child turned into a nightmare. This is tough for me to write, but on some level, I can relate to this whiplash of emotion. When my second child was born, they came about five weeks early. I’ll use the pronouns “they/them” for privacy reasons when referring to my kids. Our oldest was still very young and went to stay with my parents and we sped off to the hospital where my wife was taken into an operating room for an emergency c-section. I was able to carry our newborn into the NICU (natal intensive care unit) where I was assured that this was routine for all premature births. The nurses assured me there was nothing to worry about and the baby looked big and healthy. I headed to where my wife was taken to recover to grab a few winks assuming that everything was fine. Well, when I awoke, I headed back over to the NICU to find that my child was not where I left them. The nurse found me and told me that the baby’s lungs were underdeveloped, and they had to put them in a special room connected to oxygen tubes and wires to monitor their vitals.
It’s difficult to express the fear that overwhelmed me in those moments. Everything turned out okay, but it took a while and I’m convinced to this day that their anxiety struggles spring from these first weeks of life. As our children grew, we learned that two of the three were on the spectrum and that anxiety, depression, ADHD, and OCD were also playing a part in their lives. Parents, at least speaking for myself, can’t help but blame themselves for the struggles their children face. The “if only” questions creep in and easily overcome the voices that assure us that it really has nothing to do with us. In the film, Lenore says, “maybe it’s all the pills I’ve been taking that brought this on.” Frank muses aloud about how he used to think that Frankenstein was the monster, but when he got older realized he was the one that made the monster. The aptly named Frank is wondering if his baby’s mutation is his fault, if he created the monster that is terrorizing Los Angeles. I have made plenty of “if only” statements about myself over the years. “If only I hadn’t had to work so much, if only I had been around more when they were little.” Mothers may ask themselves, “did I have a drink, too much coffee, or a cigarette before I knew I was pregnant? Was I too stressed out during the pregnancy?” In other words, most parents can’t help but wonder if it’s all their fault.
At one point in the film, Frank goes to the elementary school where his baby has been sighted and is escorted through the halls by police. He overhears someone comment about “screwed up genes,” which brings about age-old questions of nature vs. nurture. Despite the voices around him from doctors and detectives that say, “we know this isn’t your fault,” Frank can’t help but think it is, and that the people who try to tell him it isn’t really think it’s his fault too. There is no doubt that there is a hereditary element to the kinds of mental illness struggles that my children and I deal with. But, and it’s a bit but, good parenting goes a long way in helping children deal with these struggles. Kids need to know they’re not alone, a good parent can provide that, perhaps especially parents that can relate to the same kinds of struggles. The question of nature vs. nurture will likely never be entirely answered but I think there’s more than a good chance that “both/and” is the case. Around the midpoint of the film, Frank agrees to disown the child and sign it over for medical experimentation if caught or killed. Lenore and the older son Chris (Daniel Holzman) seek to nurture and teach the baby, feeling that it is not a monster, but a member of the family.
It’s Alive takes these ideas to an even greater degree in the fact that the Davis Baby really is a monster, a mutant with claws and fangs that murders and eats people. The late ’60s and early ’70s also saw the rise in mass murderers and serial killers which heightened the nature vs. nurture debate. Obviously, these people were not literal monsters but human beings that came from human parents, but something had gone horribly wrong. Often the upbringing of these killers clearly led in part to their antisocial behavior, but this isn’t always the case. It’s Alive asks “what if a ‘monster’ comes from a good home?” In this case is it society, environmental factors, or is it the lead, smog, and pesticides? It is almost impossible to know, but the ending of the film underscores an uncomfortable truth—even monsters have parents.
As the film enters its third act, Frank joins the hunt for his child through the Los Angeles sewers and into the L.A. River. He is armed with a rifle and ready to kill on sight, having divorced himself from any relationship to the child. Then Frank finds his baby crying in the sewers and his fatherly instincts take over. With tears in his eyes, he speaks words of comfort and wraps his son in his coat. He holds him close, pats and rocks him, and whispers that everything is going to be okay. People often wonder how the parents of those who perform heinous acts can sit in court, shed tears, and defend them. I think it’s a complex issue. I’m sure that these parents know that their child has done something evil, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are still their baby. Your child is a piece of yourself formed into a whole new human being. Disowning them would be like cutting off a limb, no matter what they may have done. It doesn’t erase an evil act, far from it, but I can understand the pain of a parent in that situation. I think It’s Alive does an exceptional job placing its audience in that situation.
Despite the serious issues and ideas being examined in the film, It’s Alive is far from a dour affair. At heart, it is still a monster movie and filled with a sense of fun and a great deal of pitch-black humor. In one of its more memorable moments, a milkman is sucked into the rear compartment of his truck as red blood mingles with the white milk from smashed bottles leaking out the back of the truck and streaming down the street. Just after Frank agrees to join the hunt for his baby, the film cuts to the back of an ice cream truck with the words “STOP CHILDREN” emblazoned on it. It’s a movie filled with great kills, a mutant baby—created by make-up effects master Rick Baker early in his career, and plenty of action—and all in a PG rated movie! I’m telling you, the ’70s were wild. It just also happens to have some thoughtful ideas behind it as well.
Which was Larry Cohen’s specialty. Cohen made all kinds of movies, but his most enduring have been his horror films and all of them tackle the social issues and fears of the time they were made. God Told Me To (1976), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), and The Stuff (1985) are all great examples of his socially aware, low-budget, exploitation filmmaking with a brain and It’s Alive certainly fits right in with that group. Cohen would go on to write and direct two sequels, It Lives Again (aka It’s Alive 2) in 1978 and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive in 1987 and is credited as a co-writer on the 2008 remake. All these films explore the ideas of parental responsibility in light of the various concerns of the times they were made including abortion rights and AIDS.
Fifty years after It’s Alive was initially released, it has only become more relevant in the ensuing years. Fears surrounding parenthood have been with us since the beginning of time but as the years pass the reasons for these fears only seem to become more and more profound. In today’s world the conversation of the fathers in the waiting room could be expanded to hormones and genetic modifications in food, terrorism, climate change, school and other mass shootings, and other threats that were unknown or at least less of a concern fifty years ago. Perhaps the fearmongering conspiracy theories about chemtrails and vaccines would be mentioned as well, though in a more satirical fashion, as fears some expectant parents encounter while endlessly doomscrolling Facebook or Twitter. Speaking for myself, despite the struggles, the fears, and the sadness that sometimes comes with having children, it’s been worth it. The joys ultimately outweigh all of that, but I understand the terror too. Becoming a parent is no easy choice, nor should it be. But as I look back, I can say that I’m glad we made the choice we did.
I wonder if Frank and Lenore can say the same thing.
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