Oct 16, 2018
Have you ever been so disturbed by a toy that it actually made you look away? That’s what Clive Barker’s Tortured Souls figurines did to me when I worked at Suncoast many moons ago. And thanks to McFarlane Toys they’re coming back to "torture" us again.
At this year’s New York Comic Con artist and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane revealed that his toy company is going back to the basics by reviving not only his popular toy-line Movie Maniacs, but also Clive Barker’s classic toy series Tortured Souls.
While being interviewed by IGN McFarlane outlined his new game plan on how he’s going to bring these new toys to the consumer:
"We live in a brave new world now where you can go literally from production to the consumer, right? You can cut out all the middle men and we're seeing that with Kickstarters and people doing direct, you know, dot com," McFarlane said. "So what we're gonna do is, when we started McFarlane Toys twenty-plus years ago, we were built on the detailed stuff, doing all these cool monsters and all this sort of wicked stuff. Unfortunately, the stores we were selling to at that point, like Tower Records and Suncoast and Babbage's and KB Toys, and all these other ones, they've all fallen to the wayside."
McFarlane continued, "So we end up having to follow the game plan of the Fortune 500 companies and having to do big brands. But we're gonna just start selling more just direct to the consumer."
And that's when McFarlane dropped the big news about McFarlane Toys' game plan. "So we're gonna go back to our origins and we're gonna go, hey, for all you people who like Tortured Souls? There's gonna be more. For all you people who like some of the Movie Maniacs? There's gonna be more. But even the new -- the stuff we just created, like Dragons? More. Spawn? More. Twisted Tales? More."
The first series of Clive Barker's Tortured Souls was a toy-line consisting of six action figures that were designed by Clive Barker that also included a 32-page novelette that told the stories of all the characters that included:
Agonistes
Ludicque
Mongroid
The Scythe-Meister
Talisac
Venal Anatomica
A second series quickly followed with another six figures but minus the backstories for the characters:
Szalta
Zain
Suffering Bob
Feverish
Moribundi
Camille Noire
With this announcement let's hope this means that Clive will be apart of the creative process by helping with the designs of the new figures and creating back stories for them. The original series that came out in 2001 are some of the most beautifully, grotesque toy creations that I’ve ever seen, but the backstories by Barker are what gave them life beyond the plastic that they were made of. While series two contained some very well crafted figures, I didn't care as much for them because they didn't have backstories which made the first series so special. In fact, a film adaption based on the toy-line was going to happen at one point by Universal Pictures, but sadly the project fell into development hell.
As always we'll keep you updated as more news comes in, but in the meantime checkout all the figurines in this video provided by Youtube user Actionfigureexpert that shows off all the lavish detail that went into them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s38mBYxmtoE
Thanks to IGN and Actionfigureexpert for sharing.