7 Action Figures That Managed to Ruin Great Characters


Sometimes, the writers of a show, movie, comic book or whatever will put a lot of effort into creating an enigmatic character with an air of mystery surrounding it ... only to have the marketing department kill all the mystique by putting out a stupid action figure.

This happens way more often than you'd think, like in ...

#7.The Blair Witch

Whether you think The Blair Witch Project is one the creepiest movies you've ever seen, or one of the most pointless (there's surprisingly little gray area on that scale), the one thing that made the movie stand out is that you never actually see the Witch herself. She doesn't appear anywhere in the 90ish minutes of the movie, nor the sequel, nor the piles of documentaries, video games and books that you never knew/cared about.



So when you really think about it, it's a bit creepier than, say, Jason or Freddy, because the likelihood of a sequel including a scene where she kills someone with a video game substantially decreases. It's a pretty solid movie monster premise -- each of us is forced to draw from the dark corners of our own psyche to imagine the horrific thing lurking in the woods. What could be scarier than that?

Except the marketing folks had to have an action figure.


So much for avoiding all the horror movie cliches. Fangs? Check. Claws? Check. Glowing red eyes? Check. Standard movie monster weapon? Check. Looks like the old lady that lives at your grandma's nursing home who always asks you to take care of her long-dead cats? Double check. To be fair, that's technically an "interpretation" of the Blair Witch designed by Spawn creator, Todd McFarlane, for his Movie Maniacs series. This was part of the fourth Movie Maniacs set, and that's clearly about the time he started running out of ideas.

Someone paid him to make the most boring, uninspired and disappointing representation of a horror icon ever. Maybe someone mentioned that, though, because he later released a second, even more WTF version.


Maybe the logic behind this one was that she could have been hiding in the background disguised as a tree the whole time, like Elmer Fudd or something. We also like the implication that this huge, monstrous tree-being goes around picking up twigs and leaving little signs on the ground to freak people out, as if she couldn't do that by just standing in front of them.