Boy, have I got news for you. Now you can have your very own Good Guy doll. That’s right! You can have all the adventures we have on TV in your very own home. We even turn our heads and blink our eyes, right Chucky?
The Good Guys advertisement that ran during the fictional Good Guys cartoon in Child’s Play plays into one of the themes I’ll be discussing today. If you are old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, then you are old enough to remember the commercials that ran during those mornings of eating cereal on the couch in front of the television. The constant influx of ads for toys, merch, and McDonalds french fries that promised happiness and joy to children who relied on their parents’ money. The Child’s Play films, especially the first three, took this notion of rampant consumerism, wrapped it up in a bright yellow box, and told Andy Barclay it would be his best friend. His terrorizing, vengeful friend until the very end.
Child’s Play
In the first film, Andy’s disappointment when he opened his birthday gift only to find clothes inside that doll shaped box wrapped in happy yellow paper was evident on his angelic little face. What’s a mother to do except but a Good Guy doll off of a homeless person in a dark alley for an outrageous price. This is going to work out great!
The bright yellow packaging Chucky came in should have been a warning. A big flashing caution signal that warned Andy that his talking toy was possessed by Charles Lee Ray. The ironic “Good Guys” red logo on top of the yellow is a great example of the evil that lurks within that harmless looking doll. It even turns its head and blinks! Just like the TV promised. Oh, happy day.
Aunt Maggie warned them, though. She told Mommy Barclay that buying that toy was a bad idea. No one ever listens to common sense in horror movies. When Maggie, wearing a yellow sweater, is babysitting Andy whilst his mother works late, Maggie becomes Chucky’s first victim. Of course she does. She was the safety net that should have prevented Chucky ever finding Andy. Instead, she became an obstacle. She had to go… right out the kitchen window.
Enter Chris Sarandon as the sexy detective who believes Andy is responsible. This detective is reminiscent of the Giallo Italian horror movies of the 60s and 70s. He’s there to investigate but follows the clues to the wrong conclusion until the truth nearly kills him. For most of that first film, he believes that Andy is somehow responsible for everything Chucky is doing. After all, dolls don’t push people out of high-rise windows or blowup buildings or try to put their soul into the body of a small boy.
The following day, Andy wears a yellow shirt under a red button down. Yellow and red, together again. The yellow is his innocence, and the red is the danger he is in. He’s literally wrapped in it. His snowsuit is powder blue with a yellow star like his innocence is a celestial being. After Chucky convinces him to ditch school so the doll can kill one of his adversaries by blowing up a condemned building, Hot Detective Sarandon blames Andy and threatens to have him committed if he doesn’t stop blaming his doll. This is the beginning of Andy’s loss of innocence. Of trust in the toy that the television promised would be his friend. Of everything he holds dear. Poor celestial is about to fall from heaven, and no one will be there to catch him.
In the next scene, his mother discovers the bright yellow batteries are still in the bright yellow box. The doll has been talking for days without battery power. WARNING! Mommy Barclay tries to make Chucky talk by threatening to throw him in the fireplace and that is when he attacks her. Mommy is a believer now, but Hot Detective Sarandon still isn’t. Not yet. Not until Chucky attacks him in his own car with yellow jumper cables. The yellow here represents the mortal danger the detective is in as he dodges the blade of Chucky’s knife in his car and also the descent into doll sized madness Chucky is now experiencing. He’s getting closer to being a real boy – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Pinocchio metaphors aren’t mentioned until sequel.
Together, Mommy Barclay and Hot Detective follow the clues to a voodoo man who taught Charles Lee Ray how to put his soul into the doll. The building’s interior is covered in yellow and red murals – a warning that some things shouldn’t be messed with. When Chucky finds this voodoo man before the mom and detective, he uses the man’s magic against him and voodoo-dolls the guy to death. But not before Chucky realizes Andy is the first person he told of his situation so now Andy’s body is the one he needs to transfer into.
After an escape from a mental institution (yeah, they really did take Andy away from his mom for saying Chucky was talking), Andy heads home with Chucky giving chase. Mom and the Hot Detective arrive just in time to save him. Andy gets to light the match that sets the doll on fire, a small pleasure for the kid who had his heart broken by empty television promises. The fire only injures Chucky and makes him as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside. It takes a bullet to the heart to truly kill him. Or so we thought.
Child’s Play 2
Play Pals Toys, the fictional company that makes Good Guy dolls in these films, have blamed Chucky’s behavior on a broken voice box after Mommy Barclay testified in court that Chucky was a rampaging murderer. After she was remanded to a mental institution (off screen, told through expositional dialogue), Play Pals Toys takes Chucky’s burnt corpse and remakes him into a new doll in pristine condition. Of course they did. This is the first time we see this corporation in the fictional reality of this series. Big yellow signage. Yellow delivery trucks. New automated factory and warehouse full of yellow boxes containing Good Guy dolls. Kids didn’t stand a chance against this marketing machine. They only care about their bottom line.
When that large yellow semi-truck leaves the factory, Andy is living in a group home not far away and is given to a new foster family. Andy’s foster parents almost hit the semi-truck as they drive home. It honks obnoxiously at their car. There’s that CAUTION warning again. Loud. Abrasive. YELLOW. Foreshadowed danger is coming and its name is Chucky.
That foreshadowing makes the sequel more anti-capitalism than the original. The promise of friendship and happiness made by the marketing of the Good Guy doll is totally betrayed when Chucky wreaks havoc Andy’s life. Death. Violence. Destruction. Every vengeful thing Charles Lee Ray stands for is a slap in the face to anyone who places blind trust in consumer products. Imagine Andy’s foster parents trying to get him to trust another one of those dolls. And imagine that Chucky finds him again just as Andy begins to trust a new doll. Poor kid didn’t stand a chance.
Andy goes to school with Chucky in tow and his teacher, wonderfully acted by Beth Grant, reads Pinocchio to her class. The real-doll metaphor here is great because it isn’t a gentle, lonely old man pulling the strings. It is a maniacal killer who will stop at nothing to get out of the doll’s body and into Andy’s. A twisted take on an already twisted children’s story. Later, when the teacher finds “Fuck You Bitch” written in red crayon on Andy’s assignment, she naturally blames Andy and takes Chucky away when Andy passes blame to him. She locks the doll in a closet full of yellow sweatshirts (warning) and then believes Andy has found a way in there when she hears a noise from within after the children have left for the day. She unlocks the closet and Chucky kills her with a yellow yardstick – an indication that Chucky’s mental state is far worse off now than before. The teacher wasn’t an obstacle, and he could have just escaped. Instead, he chose to beat her to death with a yardstick.
Meanwhile, Andy’s foster father tries to convince Andy that Chucky can’t talk by throwing the doll into the basement and forcing Andy to look down at him. Andy isn’t having any of it and Chucky comes to life and kills the father. Andy is blamed for causing the “accident” and the foster mother sends him back to the group home. She too winds up dead, found by teenage foster sister Kyle who is forced by Chucky to collect Andy from the group home. Chucky forces Andy to escape while Kyle is distracted. They end up at the factory (it’s near the group home, remember) which is more sinister at night.
Chucky knocks out Andy in the middle of the factory surrounded by pallets of Good Guy dolls in bright yellow boxes. It’s a full circle moment to the first film when Charles Lee Ray transferred his soul into the doll in the first film in the middle of a toy store. Those yellow boxes are a metaphor moral decay the of the corporation as a whole. The hubris of sending the toy back out on the market even after the body count of the first film. Good thing Play Pals Toys doesn’t genetically engineer dinosaurs.
Chucky does his voodoo and tries to transfer his soul into Andy. But it’s too late. Chucky is stuck in the doll permanently and he’ll never be a real boy. No fairy godmother to save him. In this scene, what little is left of Andy’s innocence is lost. Even when Kyle arrives to save him, there’s a shocked look in his eye that suggests he’s never going to get over his childhood trauma.
The factory itself has yellow machines designed to automate the making of the dolls. The whole room is colored in pastel yellows and pinks like a twisted amusement park. One machine pokes glass eyes into the doll heads as they go under on a conveyor. Andy and Kyle have to maneuver through it because why not? Another machine adds arms and legs to the dolls and yet another holds hot liquid latex. This pastel obstacle course is campier than the original film and ends with Kyle shoving a tube into Chucky’s mouth that fills him with liquid latex until he explodes. The remnants, yellow with hints of red, land on Kyle and Andy. The color of pus, of illness, rain down upon them. Regardless of the pseudo happy “we survived” ending, Andy carries the PTSD with him into the 1990s.
Child’s Play 3
The third film takes corporate greed to a whole new level starting with a board meeting during which members discuss the likelihood that another kid would take issue with their dolls and decide there is no time like 1991 to rerelease the Good Guy doll. Little do they know that Chucky was still in the old factory, melted and dusty on the concrete floor. Instead of throwing him into the trash receptacle, they melt him down and remake him. Every time they do this, Chucky gets a do-over. His voodoo starts over. He just has to find Andy again so he can transfer his soul.
Chucky gets his vengeance on the CEO, first though. Leaves him dead in his own office before settling in the man’s office chair to use the internet which, in all reality, wouldn’t have been much of a thing when the first film transpired. Chucky must have learned how to use it while he collected dust as a melted pile of latex on the factory floor. **side eyes television**
Anyhoo, plot holes aside, Chucky somehow finds Andy’s location on the World Wide Web and ships himself off in a big yellow box to the military academy where Andy is in attendance. Another kid befriends him instead. As in previous installments, Chucky manipulates everyone around Andy into believing that Andy is at fault for his mischief. Near the end, he puts real ammunition into guns that were supposed to be filled with blanks during a training exercise. Kids die. Adults die. It’s a whole bloody affair especially when the third act plays out in an actual amusement park this time. The finale plays out in a funhouse called Devil’s Lair. How metaphorical. The evil possessed doll chases Andy and his new friends around a funhouse surrounded by yellows and reds made to look like the fiery pit of hell – the very place Charles Lee Ray will likely end up in if his soul ever actually dies. The menace made by corporate greed has become the devil incarnate.
The most interesting part of the third film aligns with the themes I’ve been talking about. The kid that Chucky befriends won’t believe Andy when he tells the kid that Chucky is evil because it says Good Guys on his outfit. How could he be evil if his overalls say he is good? If his slogan suggests that the doll will always be his friend? It isn’t until Chucky pulls a knife taller than he is on the kid that he realizes who Chucky really is. This blind trust in what we buy, in what is being marketed to us, will be our undoing.
Bride of Chucky & Seed of Chucky
I’ll offer up these two campy films here just to say that they exist. The yellow box? Not seen at all. The corporate greed resurrections? Gone. What’s left is Jennifer Tilly pining away for Charles Lee Ray so she pays a police officer to get Chucky’s remains out of an evidence locker so she can have a chance to bring him back to life. The only use of yellow pertaining to the actual overall narrative at all is the dyed sand she uses for her voodoo ritual and the playpen she locks Chucky in. These uses signify her mental derangement that caused her to get the doll in the first place.
Ironically, these two films are more of a real world version of corporate greed. They are pointless films that have very little to add to the series except to bring in money for the studio. I’m not saying the first three films are award winning fare by any means, but the last two do away with anything related to the original narrative. Visit Spirit Halloween and you’ll find Chucky replicas from these two films. I even own one and it speaks lines from the movie. Fortunately, it hasn’t ever come to life, but rewatching the last two films this year really shows how just making mediocre and pointless sequels just so they can make money off of the toy tie-ins is where the film industry has gone in many ways. The studio didn’t learn the lessons of its own films.
Long story short, don’t trust talking toys in yellow boxes. Don’t listen to adults when they say you’re crazy. Don’t trust greedy corporations or their marketing. Don’t do voodoo unless you know the consequences. Don’t trust Jennifer Tilly regardless of how great her tits look. And don’t assume the possessed doll voiced by Brad Dourif is dead just because you burned it, shot it, filled it with hot latex until it exploded, or threw it into a giant fan. You know what they say, you just can’t keep a good guy down. Hidey-ho! Ha ha ha
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Becky Tyler Art and Photography 
Chapter 11
Boy, have I got news for you. Now you can have your very own Good Guy doll. That’s right! You can have all the adventures we have on TV in your very own home. We even turn our heads and blink our eyes, right Chucky?
The Good Guys advertisement that ran during the fictional Good Guys cartoon in Child’s Play plays into one of the themes I’ll be discussing today. If you are old enough to remember Saturday morning cartoons, then you are old enough to remember the commercials that ran during those mornings of eating cereal on the couch in front of the television. The constant influx of ads for toys, merch, and McDonalds french fries that promised happiness and joy to children who relied on their parents’ money. The Child’s Play films, especially the first three, took this notion of rampant consumerism, wrapped it up in a bright yellow box, and told Andy Barclay it would be his best friend. His terrorizing, vengeful friend until the very end.
Child’s Play
In the first film, Andy’s disappointment when he opened his birthday gift only to find clothes inside that doll shaped box wrapped in happy yellow paper was evident on his angelic little face. What’s a mother to do except but a Good Guy doll off of a homeless person in a dark alley for an outrageous price. This is going to work out great!
The bright yellow packaging Chucky came in should have been a warning. A big flashing caution signal that warned Andy that his talking toy was possessed by Charles Lee Ray. The ironic “Good Guys” red logo on top of the yellow is a great example of the evil that lurks within that harmless looking doll. It even turns its head and blinks! Just like the TV promised. Oh, happy day.
Aunt Maggie warned them, though. She told Mommy Barclay that buying that toy was a bad idea. No one ever listens to common sense in horror movies. When Maggie, wearing a yellow sweater, is babysitting Andy whilst his mother works late, Maggie becomes Chucky’s first victim. Of course she does. She was the safety net that should have prevented Chucky ever finding Andy. Instead, she became an obstacle. She had to go… right out the kitchen window.
Enter Chris Sarandon as the sexy detective who believes Andy is responsible. This detective is reminiscent of the Giallo Italian horror movies of the 60s and 70s. He’s there to investigate but follows the clues to the wrong conclusion until the truth nearly kills him. For most of that first film, he believes that Andy is somehow responsible for everything Chucky is doing. After all, dolls don’t push people out of high-rise windows or blowup buildings or try to put their soul into the body of a small boy.
The following day, Andy wears a yellow shirt under a red button down. Yellow and red, together again. The yellow is his innocence, and the red is the danger he is in. He’s literally wrapped in it. His snowsuit is powder blue with a yellow star like his innocence is a celestial being. After Chucky convinces him to ditch school so the doll can kill one of his adversaries by blowing up a condemned building, Hot Detective Sarandon blames Andy and threatens to have him committed if he doesn’t stop blaming his doll. This is the beginning of Andy’s loss of innocence. Of trust in the toy that the television promised would be his friend. Of everything he holds dear. Poor celestial is about to fall from heaven, and no one will be there to catch him.
In the next scene, his mother discovers the bright yellow batteries are still in the bright yellow box. The doll has been talking for days without battery power. WARNING! Mommy Barclay tries to make Chucky talk by threatening to throw him in the fireplace and that is when he attacks her. Mommy is a believer now, but Hot Detective Sarandon still isn’t. Not yet. Not until Chucky attacks him in his own car with yellow jumper cables. The yellow here represents the mortal danger the detective is in as he dodges the blade of Chucky’s knife in his car and also the descent into doll sized madness Chucky is now experiencing. He’s getting closer to being a real boy – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Pinocchio metaphors aren’t mentioned until sequel.
Together, Mommy Barclay and Hot Detective follow the clues to a voodoo man who taught Charles Lee Ray how to put his soul into the doll. The building’s interior is covered in yellow and red murals – a warning that some things shouldn’t be messed with. When Chucky finds this voodoo man before the mom and detective, he uses the man’s magic against him and voodoo-dolls the guy to death. But not before Chucky realizes Andy is the first person he told of his situation so now Andy’s body is the one he needs to transfer into.
After an escape from a mental institution (yeah, they really did take Andy away from his mom for saying Chucky was talking), Andy heads home with Chucky giving chase. Mom and the Hot Detective arrive just in time to save him. Andy gets to light the match that sets the doll on fire, a small pleasure for the kid who had his heart broken by empty television promises. The fire only injures Chucky and makes him as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside. It takes a bullet to the heart to truly kill him. Or so we thought.
Child’s Play 2
Play Pals Toys, the fictional company that makes Good Guy dolls in these films, have blamed Chucky’s behavior on a broken voice box after Mommy Barclay testified in court that Chucky was a rampaging murderer. After she was remanded to a mental institution (off screen, told through expositional dialogue), Play Pals Toys takes Chucky’s burnt corpse and remakes him into a new doll in pristine condition. Of course they did. This is the first time we see this corporation in the fictional reality of this series. Big yellow signage. Yellow delivery trucks. New automated factory and warehouse full of yellow boxes containing Good Guy dolls. Kids didn’t stand a chance against this marketing machine. They only care about their bottom line.
When that large yellow semi-truck leaves the factory, Andy is living in a group home not far away and is given to a new foster family. Andy’s foster parents almost hit the semi-truck as they drive home. It honks obnoxiously at their car. There’s that CAUTION warning again. Loud. Abrasive. YELLOW. Foreshadowed danger is coming and its name is Chucky.
That foreshadowing makes the sequel more anti-capitalism than the original. The promise of friendship and happiness made by the marketing of the Good Guy doll is totally betrayed when Chucky wreaks havoc Andy’s life. Death. Violence. Destruction. Every vengeful thing Charles Lee Ray stands for is a slap in the face to anyone who places blind trust in consumer products. Imagine Andy’s foster parents trying to get him to trust another one of those dolls. And imagine that Chucky finds him again just as Andy begins to trust a new doll. Poor kid didn’t stand a chance.
Andy goes to school with Chucky in tow and his teacher, wonderfully acted by Beth Grant, reads Pinocchio to her class. The real-doll metaphor here is great because it isn’t a gentle, lonely old man pulling the strings. It is a maniacal killer who will stop at nothing to get out of the doll’s body and into Andy’s. A twisted take on an already twisted children’s story. Later, when the teacher finds “Fuck You Bitch” written in red crayon on Andy’s assignment, she naturally blames Andy and takes Chucky away when Andy passes blame to him. She locks the doll in a closet full of yellow sweatshirts (warning) and then believes Andy has found a way in there when she hears a noise from within after the children have left for the day. She unlocks the closet and Chucky kills her with a yellow yardstick – an indication that Chucky’s mental state is far worse off now than before. The teacher wasn’t an obstacle, and he could have just escaped. Instead, he chose to beat her to death with a yardstick.
Meanwhile, Andy’s foster father tries to convince Andy that Chucky can’t talk by throwing the doll into the basement and forcing Andy to look down at him. Andy isn’t having any of it and Chucky comes to life and kills the father. Andy is blamed for causing the “accident” and the foster mother sends him back to the group home. She too winds up dead, found by teenage foster sister Kyle who is forced by Chucky to collect Andy from the group home. Chucky forces Andy to escape while Kyle is distracted. They end up at the factory (it’s near the group home, remember) which is more sinister at night.
Chucky knocks out Andy in the middle of the factory surrounded by pallets of Good Guy dolls in bright yellow boxes. It’s a full circle moment to the first film when Charles Lee Ray transferred his soul into the doll in the first film in the middle of a toy store. Those yellow boxes are a metaphor moral decay the of the corporation as a whole. The hubris of sending the toy back out on the market even after the body count of the first film. Good thing Play Pals Toys doesn’t genetically engineer dinosaurs.
Chucky does his voodoo and tries to transfer his soul into Andy. But it’s too late. Chucky is stuck in the doll permanently and he’ll never be a real boy. No fairy godmother to save him. In this scene, what little is left of Andy’s innocence is lost. Even when Kyle arrives to save him, there’s a shocked look in his eye that suggests he’s never going to get over his childhood trauma.
The factory itself has yellow machines designed to automate the making of the dolls. The whole room is colored in pastel yellows and pinks like a twisted amusement park. One machine pokes glass eyes into the doll heads as they go under on a conveyor. Andy and Kyle have to maneuver through it because why not? Another machine adds arms and legs to the dolls and yet another holds hot liquid latex. This pastel obstacle course is campier than the original film and ends with Kyle shoving a tube into Chucky’s mouth that fills him with liquid latex until he explodes. The remnants, yellow with hints of red, land on Kyle and Andy. The color of pus, of illness, rain down upon them. Regardless of the pseudo happy “we survived” ending, Andy carries the PTSD with him into the 1990s.
Child’s Play 3
The third film takes corporate greed to a whole new level starting with a board meeting during which members discuss the likelihood that another kid would take issue with their dolls and decide there is no time like 1991 to rerelease the Good Guy doll. Little do they know that Chucky was still in the old factory, melted and dusty on the concrete floor. Instead of throwing him into the trash receptacle, they melt him down and remake him. Every time they do this, Chucky gets a do-over. His voodoo starts over. He just has to find Andy again so he can transfer his soul.
Chucky gets his vengeance on the CEO, first though. Leaves him dead in his own office before settling in the man’s office chair to use the internet which, in all reality, wouldn’t have been much of a thing when the first film transpired. Chucky must have learned how to use it while he collected dust as a melted pile of latex on the factory floor. **side eyes television**
Anyhoo, plot holes aside, Chucky somehow finds Andy’s location on the World Wide Web and ships himself off in a big yellow box to the military academy where Andy is in attendance. Another kid befriends him instead. As in previous installments, Chucky manipulates everyone around Andy into believing that Andy is at fault for his mischief. Near the end, he puts real ammunition into guns that were supposed to be filled with blanks during a training exercise. Kids die. Adults die. It’s a whole bloody affair especially when the third act plays out in an actual amusement park this time. The finale plays out in a funhouse called Devil’s Lair. How metaphorical. The evil possessed doll chases Andy and his new friends around a funhouse surrounded by yellows and reds made to look like the fiery pit of hell – the very place Charles Lee Ray will likely end up in if his soul ever actually dies. The menace made by corporate greed has become the devil incarnate.
The most interesting part of the third film aligns with the themes I’ve been talking about. The kid that Chucky befriends won’t believe Andy when he tells the kid that Chucky is evil because it says Good Guys on his outfit. How could he be evil if his overalls say he is good? If his slogan suggests that the doll will always be his friend? It isn’t until Chucky pulls a knife taller than he is on the kid that he realizes who Chucky really is. This blind trust in what we buy, in what is being marketed to us, will be our undoing.
Bride of Chucky & Seed of Chucky
I’ll offer up these two campy films here just to say that they exist. The yellow box? Not seen at all. The corporate greed resurrections? Gone. What’s left is Jennifer Tilly pining away for Charles Lee Ray so she pays a police officer to get Chucky’s remains out of an evidence locker so she can have a chance to bring him back to life. The only use of yellow pertaining to the actual overall narrative at all is the dyed sand she uses for her voodoo ritual and the playpen she locks Chucky in. These uses signify her mental derangement that caused her to get the doll in the first place.
Ironically, these two films are more of a real world version of corporate greed. They are pointless films that have very little to add to the series except to bring in money for the studio. I’m not saying the first three films are award winning fare by any means, but the last two do away with anything related to the original narrative. Visit Spirit Halloween and you’ll find Chucky replicas from these two films. I even own one and it speaks lines from the movie. Fortunately, it hasn’t ever come to life, but rewatching the last two films this year really shows how just making mediocre and pointless sequels just so they can make money off of the toy tie-ins is where the film industry has gone in many ways. The studio didn’t learn the lessons of its own films.
Long story short, don’t trust talking toys in yellow boxes. Don’t listen to adults when they say you’re crazy. Don’t trust greedy corporations or their marketing. Don’t do voodoo unless you know the consequences. Don’t trust Jennifer Tilly regardless of how great her tits look. And don’t assume the possessed doll voiced by Brad Dourif is dead just because you burned it, shot it, filled it with hot latex until it exploded, or threw it into a giant fan. You know what they say, you just can’t keep a good guy down. Hidey-ho! Ha ha ha
Discover more from Becky Tyler Art and Photography
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