All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Today's superhero movies are dark, adult affairs. So why the childish toys? *
Illustration: Matias Vigliano * In 1986, when DC released Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller's bleak, brutal reclamation of Batman's id, I had no use for revisionist superheroes and iconoclastic countermyth. I was 10 and doing some deconstructing of my own, putting my G.I. Joes through tortures that would make even Dick Cheney's atomic heart skip a beat. The Joe "team leader," Duke, with his corn-fed, all-American good looks, was an especially attractive target. (He was dishonorably discharged by a cluster of M-80s, if memory serves.) In some 3¾-inch alternate universe, I am a war criminal.
Flash forward a couple of decades. I no longer take out my misanthropy on action figures (that's what YouTube talkbacks are for). But the bilious, '80s po-mo funk pioneered by Miller and Alan Moore—cocreator of the ultimate post-superhero superhero story, Watchmen—has seeped into several "all-ages" comic book properties and various pop-culture salients, most notably the blockbuster film The Dark Knight. And Watchmen itself has gone mainstream: There's a movie coming out (see our article "Behind the Scenes of the Watchmen Movie,") that supposedly faithfully follows the original antiheroic exploits of Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, and their traumatized, Nietzsche-haunted, not-so superfriendly cohorts.
And like any movie that boasts men in latex, with its release come the action figures.
The trouble is, these new angsty comics flicks aren't for kids, so why are the toys they spawn? I mean, what could the savage 10-year-old me do to a Rorschach figurine that the beautiful lunatic hasn't already done to himself?
Toy manufacturers keep churning them out, however. Last Christmas, Wal-Mart hawked "unique, poseable action figures that bring home all the fun and excitement of The Dark Knight." (Whoever wrote that copy either never saw the film or lacks a functioning amygdala.) Yet astonishingly, in a year when the Caped Crusader broke box-office records, Bat baubles got trounced by sunnier licenses like perennial champ Star Wars.
The reason, besides the slim possibility that parents did some actual parenting and steered their kids away from The Dark Knight, might be psychological: Deeply damaged characters in figurine form deny youngsters those first tender forays into cruelty—that compulsive subconscious release so critical to the concept of "play"—by arriving already effed-up. Children are adept at defacing, even deconstructing, the fantasies McPackaged for them. Adults, on the other hand, need help. Maybe that's why the Watchmen wizards have cooked up a mobile game starring the Comedian, a shockingly unfunny US superpatriot and ultracynic modeled in part on G. Gordon Liddy: Playing as this "hero," you can grease waves of Vietcong with gleeful Rambosity.
Hardcore? Sure. But it's also therapeutic. Given the right toys, we adults can recapture our childlike barbarism—with a touch of sophistication. So allow me to propose the Damaged Goods Collection: an interactive Hulk doll we can pretend to befriend but then subtly torment by leveraging "body issues," or an insecure ThunderCat we can destroy by conducting a very public affair with Dynomutt.
As for me, the Butcher of Hasbro? I'm old-school (or maybe just middle-school). Yes, I'm stocking up on cherry bombs for the inevitable battalion of schwag soldiers deployed with this summer's G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Good Ol' Duke (played by hunky homunculus Channing Tatum) will still be begging for a bottle-rocket test flight, I suspect. But Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it seems, will be playing a different kind of fighter—a dude with serious baggage, sporting jet-black Rorschach blots of his own. Maybe there'll be one action figure out there for the kids who instinctively supply their own darkness and another for the adults who need the battery included.
Email scott_brown@wired.com.
Play Previous: Big-Shot Game Designer Crafts Interactive Art After Hours Legendary Comics Writer Alan Moore on Superheroes, The League, and Making Magic
From Batman to Incognito, Ed Brubaker Loves the Ultraviolence
Dark Knight Director Shuns Digital Effects For the Real Thing
Scott Brown on Why Hollywood Needs a New Model for Storytelling
