The way the rules were, we gradually come to understand that because Chucky is the embodiment of Andy’s unconscious he decides if he kills the kid then Andy will be asleep forever and he’ll be alive forever.”Įnter David Kirschner, who was producing the animated fable An American Tail for Amblin Entertainment and had created the Rose Petal Place toys, books and movies on top of work for Strawberry Shortcake and Jim Henson children’s products. “In the Blood Buddy script, Chucky only comes alive when Andy’s asleep. “Chucky was like an expression of the kid’s unconscious rage,” he says. Mancini’s original storyline gave the murders a more psychological association, with the doll chasing down the boy’s various enemies out of vengeance. … So the way that the doll came to life was that because Andy is a lonely kid - no dad around, his mom is a busy working mother - in that classic rite of brotherhood he cuts his own thumb and the doll’s thumb so they’ll be best friends forever - ‘friends ’til the end’ - and after that the murders start.” “And since we were doing a satire on marketing, the idea was that when you’re playing with the doll, if you played too rough with it the latex skin would break and then this blood would start to seep out, so you had to go out and buy official Good Guy band-aids to put on. “One of the features the Good Guy dolls had was fake blood in them, because I was inspired by my sisters’ dolls - they peed, you could make their hair grow - and I thought in the context of a horror movie, how awesome to have a doll that would bleed,” Mancini says. That plot catalyst tied into the script’s new title, Blood Buddy. Instead, in my script, the supernatural inciting incident was different.” “In the original premise, Chucky - or Buddy as he was called then - was not possessed by a serial killer. Nobody believes him, the mom and the authorities are concerned that the kid is a budding psychopath, and ultimately the doll goes after the mom and the boy himself,” Mancini tells The Hollywood Reporter. While still at UCLA, Mancini assembled his ideas for a script called Batteries Not Included (prior to the 1987 release of the Steven Spielberg-produced film of the same name): “It was always a body-count movie structured with these murders happening in this kid’s life the kid is crying wolf and he’s insisting the doll did it. The idea was always to have this story about a little boy crying wolf about his doll, and that doll becomes this f-bomb-dropping, wisecracking terror.” Fascinated by animatronics, he was eager to test the boundaries of what a mechanized character could do onscreen: “I recognized post- Gremlins that they were sophisticated enough now that the doll could convey emotions and a characterization, and you could give him dialogue, stuff that really hadn’t been done that much before. Strongly influenced by Trilogy of Terror (the segment with the Zuni fetish doll that chases Karen Black), the creepy dummy in Magic and the “Living Doll” episode of TheTwilight Zone with Talky Tina, Mancini had a well versed knowledge of the killer doll trope that existed in the horror world and saw an opening to “treat the doll as a full-fledged character” with satirical shades. “I thought this was a fertile subject and right for a genre prism that hadn’t really been dealt with much,” says Mancini, who grew to recognize the coercive nature of selling children’s products at an early age thanks to his father, an agent of the advertising industry. Three years later, Child’s Play hit theaters on November 9, 1988, winning the weekend at the box office and jolting the horror genre by unwittingly launching what has become one of the most enduring and consistent horror franchises of all time.
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