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Oh my god HELLO and welcome to Season One of Screen Time with Sarah Ruthless,
where I am unpacking, contextualizing, and generally just ranting about the one genre I
have avoided all my life: HORROR.

Today we are looking into another cult classic that I spent the last 29 years of my life
thinking was a universally acknowledged “scary movie” only to nd out that - much like a
disturbing amount of the lms on my list - it’s actually SUPER FUCKING SILLY! I am of
course talking about none other than the 1988 pop culture phenomenon, Child’s Play.

Written by Don Mancini and Directed by Tom Holland, the IMDB synopsis is: “A single
mother gives her son a much sought-after doll for his birthday, only to discover that it is
possessed by the soul of a serial killer.”1 And yeah, actually, that’s pretty much the
whole thing. But before we dive all the way in, some trigger warnings for the lm and
this episode include: THE UNCANNY VALLEY EFFECT! Ronald Reagan! Gaslighting!
Internalized homophobia! Capitalism! Generational Trauma! Cabbage Patch Dolls! The
80s! And pediophobia, which is, of course, the not altogether unreasonable fear of dolls.
I have SO many thoughts and feelings and weird little rabbit holes to take you down for
this movie and I am actually really looking forward to it. You know what time it is… *It’s
time for some info-dumping, yeah!

So it’s becoming impossible to ignore how silly some of these movies are that I really
spent my whole life thinking were terrifying. As always, if I’d watched this as a kid, it
de nitely would’ve traumatized the living shit out of me, but to watch these for the rst
time as an adult has been so deeply amusing, because it’s like nally getting to look at
the boogey man, and then go backstage and meet the boogey man, and then like go
out for drinks with the boogey man and nd out he’s actually a really chill dude, and low
key hilarious. But what I’m always the most interested in is not just the “what” of the
story, but the “why” … and also the “who.” And the “when” is actually very important too.
Basically I just fucking love stories, and I think one of the crucial qualities of a truly

1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094862/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

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enduring story is that it means something a little different to everyone. That’s why it’s
lasted so long: because it nourishes more than one kind of hunger.

Upon my initial light research of the lm, I saw a lot of articles and interviews that
highlighted the capitalism angle of the story - I mean, if it weren’t for this well marketed
toy being constantly shoved in the face of little boy Andy, his poor struggling single mom
wouldn’t have been so desperate to get him the toy of his dreams that she’d be willing
to buy a clearly stolen version of the toy from a literal hobo in a back alley. Also, how the
fuck DID that struggling single mother afford that GIANT apartment in Chicago? I know
that’s literally the least important part of this whole movie, but I honestly could not get
over it. When there’s not a global pandemic happening, I live in Chicago, and I have
NEVER seen a bathroom that large in a Chicago apartment. It had two entrances!!!
There’s no fucking way! And BOTH bedrooms were wide enough for dual nightstands?!
NOT A CHANCE! And she’s like “oh I need to work an extra late shift to pay for my kid’s
toys” but she can afford this genuinely mythical piece of real estate? Also, WHAT KIND
OF MAKE UP COUNTER has a “late night shift???” Because Macy’s closes at 7pm
here too, so I don’t know what the fuck this 7-10pm shift nonsense is. And while I’m
bitching about Hollywood’s aggressively inaccurate depiction of Chicago, I have lived
there for 5+ years, in neighborhoods very close to tent villages where the homeless
congregate, and I swear to god I have never - not ONCE - seen a hobo gather around
the re coming out of an abandoned trash can. NOT A ONCE. I realize it’s like an
aesthetically understood trope that hobos light res in trash cans for warmth, and it
immediately tells the audience that these are hobos and it is winter, but I shitteth you not
- never once have I seen that happen

BUT I DIGRESS… Capitalism and panic buying and the pressures of single parenthood
and materialism are all things I want to talk about, but honestly the thing I kept seeing in
this movie, the thing that felt so much louder to me than the obvious criticism of “mass
consumerism,” was all the goddamn gaslighting, and I don’t think the writer meant to
make it a story about that, but it was ALL I could see.

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I’m still trying to come up with a name for the kind of meta observation I have on this,
but for now I’m calling it the “Russian Nesting Doll” concept, which I think is very clever.
What I mean by that is that Don Mancini, the writer, had this one idea: there’s a doll that
everyone wants, that people would almost kill each other for, and what would happen if
when we brought that doll home, we also brought the spirit of killing with it? So that was
his idea, that’s the biggest doll, the one you see rst. But when we open that up, there’s
something else in there: the fucking gaslighting.

To be honest, gaslighting might not actually be the right word, because technically that’s
when someone intentionally manipulates another person psychologically by making
them question their own sanity. I think to properly be “gaslighting,” the person who
doesn’t believe you has to be aware on some level of what they’re doing. So maybe the
more accurate word here is “underestimating” or “doubting.”

In Child’s Play, it starts out with Karen, Andy’s mom, not believing him when he says the
doll is really alive, and responsible for pushing her best friend Maggie out a window. But
then Karen witnesses Chucky come to life, and she tells the cops - namely the guy I’ll
be referring to as Detective Humperdink - and HE doesn’t believe her. Not only that, he
starts really aggressively telling her she’s fucking bonkers. But then Humperdink
witnesses Chucky come to life, and with the irrefutable proof of personal experience, he
has no choice but to believe her. What REALLY bothers me about this plot execution is
that we literally NEVER get to see Detective Humperdink admit that she was right. Like
he’s driving Karen home after she’s tried to confront the hobo who sold her the evil
Chucky doll, and he’s like “you’ve got to let it go, woman, you’re losing your mind!” and
then dumps her on the side of the road and drives off and then Chucky attacks him in
his car, and he gets into a wreck, and shoots Chucky, who stumbles off, and then the
next scene is just like Detective Humperdink casually chatting with Karen like “yeah so
then I saw the doll run away towards some abandoned buildings, we should go check it
out” and Karen’s like “yeah sure no problem.” First of all, WHY ARE YOU INVOLVING A
CIVILIAN? And second of all, I THINK YOU OWE THAT WOMAN A FUCKING



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APOLOGY? It feels like a full scene got cut there, but if I’m being honest, I highly doubt
that scene was ever written.

So that’s the next two nesting dolls: rst Karen underestimates the honesty and
intelligence of her son, then Detective Humperdink underestimates Karen. And the third
nesting doll is that everyone, including the audience, has underestimated the power of
Charles Lee Ray, the serial killer who escapes prison and before dying, uses his secret
VooDoo magic that he stole from a Black man (yes we will be discussing that in a
moment) to transport his soul into the body of a Chucky doll. Fun fact, the name Charles
Lee Ray was constructed from three famous murderers: notorious cult leader - Charles
Manson, the man who assassinated JFK - Lee Harvey Oswald, and the man who
assassinated Martin Luther King - James Earl Ray

The point is, this movie is built around the powerful consequences of underestimating
others. Chucky gets away with literal murder because no one suspects him capable of
it; and Det. Humperdink puts an innocent woman’s life at risk because he
underestimates that women tell the truth; and poor little Andy ends up in the world’s
fucking scariest “children’s psych ward” - what the hell was up with that?? - because all
the adults around him underestimated his perspective and didn’t value his experience.
Also just a quick sidebar: the Oscar goes to Alex fucking Vincent for some genuinely top
notch child acting. Some of his dialogue is a little choppy, but the scene where he’s
crying in his CELL that Chucky is coming for him and the doctor doesn’t believe him?!
Oh my GOD that poor BEBE! They just don’t make child acting laws like they used to,
thank god.

The reason I’m hammering this all home so hard is because of the giant fucking
lightbulb that went off over my head when I found out that Don Mancini, the original
story creator and screenwriter of every Chucky movie ever - was one of the rst openly
gay writers in Hollywood, or at least certainly one of the rst in the horror genre. And
THAT is the last little nugget, the last little Russian Nesting Doll. If you recall the
possibly too in depth take I had last week on Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, I for one have a



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hard time separating the queer artist from the art - and as it turns out, I’m not the only
one:

“During Shudder's "Horror is Queer" panel at San Diego Comic Con 2020, Don Mancini
spoke on his horror franchise Child's Play and its queer subtext that transformed over
time. Mancini is one of few openly gay writers and directors of a lm within the slasher
sub-genre. While this may not be overtly apparent in his earlier works, it has become a
key factor for the Child's Play franchise overall, and more so in the rst movie as it has
aged.

…Mancini stated that when he looks back on the lm, the fact that he made Karen a
single mother—and left Andy without a father—was his subconscious inclusion of his
own experience as a gay man, and the complex relationship he had with his own father.
By not giving Andy a father gure, Mancini wrote in a narrative of loneliness and the
desire to have someone to relate to when an individual is rejected by a family member
for something like being gay.”2 I also speculate that subconsciously, the whole idea in
the lm of being underestimated was probably emblematic of Mancini’s experience as a
gay writer in Hollywood, trying to be taken seriously as a writer worth paying attention
to.

And for better or for worse, we might be seeing more of that queer-coded horror in the
SyFy channel’s SERIES REMAKE of Child’s Play, which will be bringing back Brad
Dourif as the rightful voice of Chucky, and Mancini will be the show runner.

"We plug [Chucky] in as a different metaphor depending on the era that we're in,"
Mancini explains, discussing how the character has gone from being a symbol of
"consumerism run amok" to becoming "a symbol for LGBTQ rights.” …“We’ve sort of
embraced, over the years, a kind of speci c gay identity for the franchise," he says. "I
think it's just being attentive to what is going on in the culture and what is going in the

2 Phillips, Marian.


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zeitgeist at any given time, and then using Chucky to get at those issues in an
interesting, fun way."3 Well in my humble queer opinion, it’s 2021, everyone is gay now,
and you know what, I wish him my best. Make it the funniest, silliest, campiest, gayest
horror TV show you possibly can, and I might actually just watch it.

So that’s my little Russian Nesting Doll take on the who and why of Child’s Play, but we
still have to tackle the what and the when. Let’s start with the what: creepy ass dolls!
Why are dolls so creepy?! I touched on this back in the episode on Stephen King’s It -
the Uncanny Valley Effect - but there’s a lot more to discuss about the history of dolls
speci cally. To quickly recap: the Uncanny Valley Effect is a concept that was identi ed
by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, and is essentially the idea that if something we
know is arti cial looks too human, it becomes upsetting, because we know that it isn’t
real, but it looks real, and that makes it creepy. There’s a couple of reasons for this: one
is that it’s part of a survival mechanism in our brains, an instinct we’ve developed to
protect ourselves from possible threats. The other theory is a little more doll-speci c:
they look human in all physical aspects, except for one - they lack emotion.

In the delightful Smithsonian article “The History of Creepy Dolls,” Linda Rodriguez
McRobbie writes

“Research into why we think things are creepy and what potential use that might have is
somewhat limited, but it does exist. In 2013, Frank McAndrew, a psychologist at Knox
College in Illinois, and Sara Koehnke, a graduate student, put out a small paper on their
working hypothesis about what “creepiness” means; the paper was based on the results
of a survey of more than 1,300 people investigating what “creeped” them out (collecting
dolls was named as one of the creepiest hobbies)

Creepiness, McAndrew says, comes down to uncertainty. “You’re getting mixed

messages. If something is clearly frightening, you scream, you run away. If something is

3 https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/don-mancini-childs-play-watch-party-chucky-tv-show


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disgusting, you know how to act,” he explains. “But if something is creepy… it might be
dangerous but you’re not sure it is… there’s an ambivalence.” If someone is acting
outside of accepted social norms – standing too close, or staring, say – we become
suspicious of their intentions. But in the absence of real evidence of a threat, we wait
and in the meantime, call them creepy. The upshot, McAndrew says, is that being in a
state of “creeped out” makes you “hyper-vigilant”. “It really focuses your attention and
helps you process any relevant information to help you decide whether there is
something to be afraid of or not. I really think creepiness is where we respond in
situations where we don’t know have enough information to respond, but we have
enough to put us on our guard.”

Human survival over countless generations depended on the avoidance of threats; at

the same time, humans thrived in groups. The creeped out response, McAndrew
theorized, is shaped by the twin forces of being attuned to potential threats, and
therefore out-of-the-ordinary behavior, and of being wary of rocking the social boat.
“From an evolutionary perspective, people who responded with this creeped out
response did better in the long run.

…Dolls inhabit this area of uncertainty largely because they look human but we know
they are not. Our brains are designed to read faces for important information about
intentions, emotions and potential threats; indeed, we’re so primed to see faces and
respond to them that we see them everywhere… However much we know that a doll is
(likely) not a threat, seeing a face that looks human but isn’t unsettles our most basic
human instincts

“We shouldn’t be afraid of a little piece of plastic, but it’s sending out social signals,”
says McAndrew, noting too that depending on the doll, these signals could just as easily
trigger a positive response, such as protectiveness. “They look like people but aren’t
people, so we don’t know how to respond to it, just like we don’t know how to respond
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…[Famous doll-centered horror lm] Anabelle director, John Leonetti, told the Huf ngton
Post that dolls made exceptional vehicles for horror lms. “If you think about them, most
dolls are emulating a human gure,” said Leonetti. “But they’re missing one big thing,
which is emotion. So they’re shells. It’s a natural psychological and justi able vehicle for
demons to take it over. If you look at a doll in its eyes, it just stares. That’s creepy.
They’re hollow inside. That space needs to be lled.”4

It bears mentioning that Child’s Play wasn’t actually the rst “evil doll” story: before
Chucky, there was the infamous “Talky Tina” episode on The Twilight Show in 1963, and
way before that was the 1936 lm The Devil’s Doll, starring Lionel Barrymore as a
wrongly accused convict who escapes prison with a scientist attempting to shrink
people to save the world’s waning resources; the scientist dies, Barrymore shacks up
with his widow, and then dresses up like a woman to sell dolls with the intention of using
the shrinking technology on the men who framed him. Honestly, I should’ve fucking
watched that movie, that sounds amazing. And also, 1936 and people were already
cognizant and anxious about, like, climate change and the inevitable decline of natural
resources? Shit. Also yes, that Barrymore, as in Drew’s grandfather. Or great-
grandfather. Whatever. Anyway.

The point is, creepy, possessed, or demonic dolls or children’s toys aren’t exactly a new
idea. Don Mancini admitted to being heavily inspired by Talky Tina, but he was also
aware that an evil doll movie hadn’t been made in awhile - and certainly not with the
technology in puppetry and animatronics that were available to him in the late 80s.
That’s probably one of my favorite details of Child’s Play - I’ve said this before and I’ll
say it again - fuck CGI Yoda, I want puppet Yoda! I want more puppets! (And that’s
actually something that’s been promised for the Child’s Play television reboot, and that
makes me very excited for it.) There’s something just extra unsettling about the
mechanics of how Chucky moves. And as much as this lm is undeniably and
intentionally campy, I will admit that while I never screamed aloud while watching, I

4 McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez.



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de nitely shuddered more than any other horror movie I’ve watched so far. I’ve actually
thought about this before, but I 100% nd little things to be so much scarier than big
things. Like I would 100% rather be chased by Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees than
be chased by Chucky. I realize that’s a little counter-intuitive, because theoretically, you
should be able to physically outweigh a child-size doll, even if he is possessed with the
soul of a deranged psychopath, but I just think the idea of something that only comes to
my knees is WAY fucking scarier. I could hide from a big brute - but how do you hide
from something smaller than you? And if it was strong, like as strong as you are, then it
would almost be more dif cult to wrestle, because, like, there’s less surface area. And
he’d be so wiggly

So there’s plenty of compelling evidence for why we nd dolls creepy: they lack feeling
or empathy, they look like something human but they’re not, and of course the
fundamental trope that things that are supposed to be innocent and pure that turn out to
be evil are always substantially more upsetting than things that you kind of expect to be
evil turning out to be evil. Not that I, like, expect all men to be evil, but like yeah, a
gigantic 7ft tall child murderer who escaped from the psych ward on the anniversary of
the day he murdered his sister to murder again is at the very least, less of a surprise to
me than a doll or a toy or a child turning out to be evil. Like Baby Michael Myers is
substantially scarier to me than adult Michael Myers.

So that all makes sense to me, but what I’m more intrigued about is the weird history of
dolls. Despite our more recent deviation into assigning them the role of villain, humans
have been making, keeping, and playing with dolls since pretty much the dawn of time.

“Dolls have been a part of human play for thousands of years – in 2004, a 4,000-year-
old stone doll was unearthed in an archeological dig on the Mediterranean island of
Pantelleria; the British Museum has several examples of ancient Egyptian rag dolls,
made of papyrus-stuffed linen. Over millennia, toy dolls crossed continents and social
strata, were made from sticks and rags, porcelain and vinyl, and have been found in the
hands of children everywhere. And by virtue of the fact that dolls are people in

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miniature, unanimated by their own emotions, it’s easy for a society to project whatever
it wanted on to them: Just as much as they could be made out of anything, they could
be made into anything

“I think there is quite a tradition of using dolls to re ect cultural values and how we see
children or who we wish them to be,” says Patricia Hogan, curator at The Strong
National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. For example, she says, by the end of
the 19th century, many parents no longer saw their children as un nished adults, but
rather regarded childhood as a time of innocence that ought to be protected. In turn,
dolls’ faces took on a more cherubic, angelic look. Dolls also have an instructional
function, often reinforcing gender norms and social behavior: Through the 18th and
19th century, dressing up dolls gave little girls the opportunity to learn to sew or knit;
Hogan says girls also used to act out social interactions with their dolls, not only the
classic tea parties, but also more complicated social rituals such as funerals as well. In
the early 20th century, right around the time that women were increasingly leaving the
home and entering the workplace, infant dolls became more popular, inducting young
girls into a cult of maternal domesticity. In the second half of the 20th century, Barbie
and her myriad career (and sartorial) options provided girls with alternative aspirations,
while action gures offered boys a socially acceptable way to play with dolls. The recent
glut of boy-crazy, bizarrely proportioned, hyper-consumerist girl dolls (think Bratz,
Monster High) says something [else entirely] about both how society sees girls”5 today,
but I hardly have time to go into that now

I literally never knew until researching for this episode that baby dolls were a somewhat
new phenomenon, and how that related culturally to our progression as a society. Like it
really wasn’t until the later 1800s that people even began to think of children as kids, not
just as tiny idiots who were too short to work in a factory yet. It wasn’t until the year
1944 that we even invented the word “teenager!” The entire concept of “childhood” and

5 McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez.



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thinking that kids should maybe have “a good one” is, in the scope of human history,
basically a brand new idea.

I want to circle back to this concept of childhood because - GUESS WHAT I’M GONNA
TALK ABOUT! THAT’S RIGHT, TRAUMA! - but before I dive into my second favorite
topic, there’s a couple more things I want to unpack with our Creepy Doll segment. We
know that dolls have existed for centuries across cultures and continents, but what I nd
super interesting - and relevant to the Child’s Play universe - is that while dolls have
sometimes been used as children’s toys, they also have a rich history in spiritual and
magical practices… and there is no discernible line between which kind of doll is for
what.

“In some cultures dolls that had been used in rituals were given to children. They were
also used in children's education and as carriers of cultural heritage. But in other
cultures, dolls were considered too laden with magical powers to allow children to play
with them.”6 We’re all familiar with the concept of a VooDoo doll, but I actually did not
know until researching this that VooDoo dolls have NOTHING to do with African Hoodoo
folk magic or the Haitian Vodou religion - we’ve only made that association because of
Western pop culture. The traditional Vodou religion (and that’s spelled V-O-D-O-U) is
actually pretty chill - it’s a blend of Western African folkloric spiritualism and Catholicism,
surprisingly. It’s polytheistic, community-centered, and has no single canon, creed, or
leader.

So where did the idea of VooDoo dolls as we know them actually originate from?
FUCKING EUROPE. The use of ef gies to perform spells on people have been
documented in African and Native American cultures too, but it was predominately the
European “poppet” that served as the inspiration for what we now think of as a VooDoo
doll. In folk magic and witchcraft, however, the dolls are almost always created to help

6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doll


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the person they represent, not punish or hurt them. According to folklore, this happens
through something called “sympathetic magic.”

But before I can talk about how cool sympathetic magic is, we need to address the
Black magic in the room: and by that I mean the long-lasting and huge bummer of a
Hollywood tradition wherein BIPOC characters are associated with magic, and it’s
usually not in a great way. Before iconic lmmaker Spike Lee coined the term as “the
magical Negro” in 2001, the trope used to be called, “the noble savage.” It’s Hollywood’s
supporting stock character who swoops in to save the white protagonist with their
magical powers. They are almost always one-dimensional, without any apparent past or
background, they’re often disabled or constrained in some way, either economically or
socially, and most troubling of all - they were fucking invented by white people.
Jamaican-born journalist Christopher John Farley wrote: “[The Magical African American
Friend characters] exist because most Hollywood screenwriters don't know much about
Black people other than what they hear on records by white hip-hop star Eminem. So
instead of getting life histories or love interests, Black characters get magical powers.”7

It bears mentioning that this trope isn’t used in its entire cringey fulness in Child’s Play
because technically, Dr. Death (played by Ray Oliver) is actually revealed to be deeply
opposed to what Charles Lee Ray has done with magic. When he rst sees what the
escaped murderer has become, he says: “…You’re an abomination. An outrage against
nature! You've perverted everything I've taught you and used it for evil! And you have to
be stopped!”8 I don’t know about you, when I hear those words - particularly
“abomination” - I can’t help putting this back in context with what we know about Don
Mancini. That line - and those words - could just as easily have been applied to a
disappointed Christian father nding out his only son is gay. And while ideally I would
like to never cast judgment on how a queer artist interprets and channels their queer
experience into art, it is admittedly a bummer that the ONE Black guy is also the ONE

7 Hicks, Heather.
8 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094862/characters/nm0646969?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t12


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magic guy who’s also the kind of origin story of the bad guy’s source of power. Even
though Dr. Death (also like what the fuck is up with that name?) obviously he wasn’t
pro-Chucky, but in this universe, in this metaphor, he’s not only ful lling the Magical
Black Guy trope he’s also like the Failed Ancestor or Failed Teacher trope. He’s the Obi-
Wan, and come on - no one’s ever really rooting for Obi-Wan. I dunno, I just think he
deserved better. …Also, like, this story takes place in fucking CHICAGO? Did anyone
who worked on this movie actually visit Chicago before lming this? I don’t think they
did. Because I promise you, there is more than just ONE BLACK MAN IN CHICAGO. I
actually paused the movie at 49 minutes in because it was the rst time I had even
SEEN a Black character in the background - FORTY NINE MINUTES IN TO A MOVIE
THAT TAKES PLACE IN CHICAGO ILLINOIS - and guess who the fuck it was? One of
the goddamn hobos. Not cool, guys. Goddammit.

All of this is made into an even bigger bummer when you nd out that in Mancini’s
original plot for the story was to have life-like “Good Guy” dolls that had blood and latex
skin, so the doll could get a realistic “boo boo” and go buy “Good Guy” bandages and
First Aid Kits. And then, in a blood-brother pact, little baby Andy cuts his own hand and
mixes it with Chucky’s blood, and THAT’S what causes him to come alive and become
human. The doll was going to be called Buddy instead of Chucky, and the original title
was Blood Buddy. …I don’t know, I just think that’s so fucking creepy and gross and
amazing, and I low key wish they’d gone that direction instead. Anyway…

TL;DR: white people are trash, and we’ve GOT to do better! Thank god Jordan Peele is
here now, but still. Come on.

…Now for Sympathetic magic. It’s a type of magic based on imitation or

correspondence. Sir James George Frazer - renowned Scottish anthropologist and
folklorist - coined the term “sympathetic magic” and sub-categorized it into two varieties:
one relying on similarity, and the other relying on contact or "contagion.” In his book
Golden Boughs he wrote:




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“If we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be
found to resolve themselves into two: rst, that like produces like, or that an effect
resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with
each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has
been severed.”

So in the rst type, “Similarity,” things have a magical connection if they look alike.
That’s where we get the idea of poppets, ef gies, and VooDoo dolls. But it’s the second
type, “Correspondence,” that I think is really neat, and perhaps more enduring in folklore
and magic realism. We see this type used in Sauron’s connection with the ring in Lord of
the Rings, or Voldemort and his Horcruxes in Harry Potter. I think Charles Lee Ray
putting his soul in the physical body of a Chucky doll is more of a traditional
“possession,” but I’d still totally say it quali es.

I’m sharing all this partly because it’s super interesting to me, but also because it serves
the larger theme of this episode - sometimes stories are bigger than they seem.
Sometimes things get connected - by association, by resemblance, by correspondence,
or by good old fashioned magic - and become much more powerful, in a way that de es
all prediction or logic.

And here’s the nal FINAL Russian Nesting Doll of my analysis on Child’s Play:
RONALD REAGAN IS RESPONSIBLE FOR CHUCKY AND I CAN PROVE IT
MATHEMATICALLY.

Okay, not really with math, but bear with me, because this is possibly the weirdest rabbit
hole I’ve fallen down since I speculated that the Blair Witch is really just Rumpelstiltskin.

Okay. So. Mancini has cited that his primary inspiration for the whole Chucky franchise
started with Cabbage Patch Kids. “His father had worked in the advertising industry all
his life, and he knew how effective marketing could result in consumer bedlam. As a lm
student at UCLA in the mid-1980s, Mancini was amused by the hysteria surrounding the


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Cabbage Patch Kids, and that the ubiquitous, slightly homely dolls were disappearing
from toy shelves and prompting physical ghts between parents.”9

In an interview, Mancini said: “The original inspiration for Chucky was that I wanted to
write something about how marketing affected children. The advertising industry refers
to children as “consumer trainees.” And Cabbage Patch Dolls in the mid-80s were super
popular. So I liked the idea of taking all that and twisting it, and suggesting that inviting
this into your home actually can be the seed of something very dark.”10

So let’s talk about that Cabbage Patch Craze. I had never even heard of this until last
week, and since I wasn’t actually there when it happened, I’m going to read a chunk
from Stephanie Buck’s 2016 Timeline article The Weird, Rabid History of the Cabbage
Patch Craze

“The doll was in such rabid demand that shoppers camped overnight at toy stores,
stormed displays, and mobbed parking lots. One report from the time featured a Texas
woman gripping her doll tightly even as another shopper’s purse strap was wrapped
around her throat

It was the country’s rst instance of total consumer anarchy. Sure, malls had sold out of
items before — Etch-a-Sketch factory employees worked until noon on Christmas Eve
1960 to ful ll demand, and elusive Star Wars  gurines were all but urban legend in 1977
— but this year was different. A months-long marketing scheme, a nostalgic product,
and old-fashioned supply-and-demand climaxed into unprecedented holiday hysteria.
The Cabbage Patch frenzy became the blueprint for Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and Black
Friday marketing campaigns that we’re all so familiar with. It was engineered mania

9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Mancini
10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkI-dqBWjPg&t=114s


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By the 1950s the toy industry had discovered the purchasing power of kids and teens.
Eager to provide kids with what they couldn’t afford during the Great Depression,
American consumers scrambled for Lego, Rubik’s Cube, and Barbie. As technology
improved into the 1970s parents purchased Atari games and Walkmans. To have the
right toys was a status symbol — for both kid and parent. When Cabbage Patch arrived
in 1983, materialism had reached a new high. At the same time, people were becoming
fatigued by electronics. The Cabbage Patch doll promised a return to simplicity. It was
something you could just…hug

Of course, the genius wasn’t in the design — Cabbage Patch was described by many
as the ugliest doll in the world — it was in the messaging. Inspired by the folk art
movement of the late 1970s, 21-year-old art student Xavier Roberts began
experimenting with hand-stitching and quilting techniques to create fabric sculptures.
When he gave them human shapes in 1976, Roberts called them “Little People.”
Roberts toured craft shows around the country and ultimately offered his Little People
for sale at a converted medical clinic in Cleveland, Georgia, which he renamed
“Babyland General Hospital.

More a gallery than a retail shop, Roberts instructed salesclerks to dress in nurse’s
uniforms and interact with the dolls, who slept in incubators and cribs throughout the
space. Each doll came with a birth certi cate, adoption papers, and a name pulled from
1938 Georgia birth records. Roberts nally licensed the doll to toy manufacturer Coleco
in 1982. He changed the name to Cabbage Patch Kids, based on the childhood fable
that new babies were plucked from cabbage gardens. This “discovery legend” was
printed on every product

“Xavier Roberts was a ten-year-old boy who discovered the Cabbage Patch Kids by
following a BunnyBee behind a waterfall into a magical Cabbage Patch, where he found
the Cabbage Patch babies being born. To help them nd good homes he built
BabyLand General in Cleveland, Georgia where the Cabbage Patch Kids could live and
play until they were adopted.


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Until they were adopted. Genius marketing. Each Cabbage Patch Doll was totally
unique, ready to be brought home by a totally unique girl or boy. A special baby for a
special kid. It was perfect timing for such a doll. Manufacturing technology made it so
Cabbage Patch would be the rst postindustrial toy. No longer was there one mold for a
product. The recent computerization of the assembly line had introduced in nite
randomized customization. No two Cabbage Patch dolls were alike — they varied in
skin color, hair style, clothing, smile, freckles, and even dimple location. Only now the
dolls’ names were chosen by a computer, not curated from charming old birth records

In its press packet, Coleco included testimony from two child psychologists. They not
only endorsed the dolls but said Cabbage Patch Kids conjure a “releasing mechanism”
that plays on humans’ nurturing instincts. It’s the same chemical that makes people
want to pick up a baby from its crib and cuddle. Still, retailers did not predict the colossal
demand. With early Christmas shoppers buying an average three dolls each, stores had
massively under-ordered. By October 6, Coleco said all 2 million dolls it had
manufactured were gone. According to Newsweek, “By Thanksgiving what had been
sellouts became the great Cabbage Patch Panic.

Store managers tried to curb chaos by stocking the dolls in the front of the store. But as
soon as they paid, customers were afraid to face the throngs pushing through the doors,
spilling from the parking lots. People ripped boxes from strangers’ arms without a
second glance at the style of doll itself. One man even ew to London to buy a doll for
his ve-year-old daughter. Harrod’s had received 1,000 dolls but they were gone within
hours — “although the customers queued quietly, to be sure.” Scalpers were reselling
the $25 dolls for $150. At the same time, knockoffs called Flower Kids were pouring in
from overseas

The Cabbage Patch phenomenon nally exposed the envious underbelly of the
American adult. One psychologist even told Newsweek that the subversion of one’s
individuality to a “higher power” like Cabbage Patch sounded a lot like Nazism

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The Cabbage Patch phenomenon became a cultural touchstone. That year’s manic mall
shoppers inspired the 1996 movie Jingle All the Way, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It
preceded American Girl Dolls, which kids could customize to look like them. And just
this year, the current toy-of-the-season is the Hatchimal, a robotic bird that hatches from
its own egg after you cuddle it for 10 to 40 minutes. Their marketing line? “Every
Hatchimal is different and each hatching experience is unique…Hatchimals need you to
hatch and bring them to life!”

So here have two very prominent forms of what I can only describe as Sympathetic
Magic: imitation, and correspondence. Let’s start with the latter:

WHY Cabbage Patch Dolls, and why 1983? I was determined to gure it out, and
there’s some light projecting and speculating, but I think I might be onto something. In
1983, Ronald Reagan was nishing up his rst term, and thinking about re-election. If
you don’t know why Reagan’s presidency was an ENORMOUS deal in setting the
cultural landscape for where America is today, let me give it to you in as much of a
nutshell as my extremely excited neurodivergent brain can possibly muster:

I actually brie y touched on this in the Lost Boys episode, but a man named Jerry
Falwell is historically agreed as the lynch pin in Reagan’s 1980 election. He was a white
Southern Baptist mega-church preacher and televangelist - so many of my least favorite
things in one sentence - and he was the one responsible for rallying the white,
Evangelical, middle class in our country into making abortion and the Pro-Life
movement a singularly American focus, which directly put Reagan in the White House.
What’s curious is that there was a substantial lag between the legalization of abortion
with Roe v. Wade and the sudden interest that Evangelicals developed in making
abortion their #1 issue. Why is that? I am now going to be largely citing a 2014 article


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titled The Real Origins of the Religious Right11 by Randall Balmer, and bear with me,
because this is a fucking doozy

While today “Evangelicals make up the backbone of the pro-life movement, but it hasn’t
always been so. Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were
overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In
1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and
Christianity Today, the agship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize
abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as
justi cations for ending a pregnancy.

…When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist
Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas—also
one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century—was pleased: “I have
always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother
that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to
me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.” Although a
few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the
ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular,
applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church
and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior.

So what then were the real origins of the religious right? It turns out that the movement
can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued

the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only [private schools] from
securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them
from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the

11 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133

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mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the

Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. [In 1970,] President Nixon ordered the
IRS to enact a new policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the
United States.”12

Then an asshole named Paul Weyrich, a conservative political activist, came into the
picture. In the mid-70s he wrote: ““The new political philosophy must be de ned by us
[conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition. When political power is achieved, the moral
majority will have the opportunity to re-create this great nation. …If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”

But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard around which to
rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own account, had been trying out different
issues, hoping one might pique evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the
proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled at a
conference in 1990.13

The court ruling that stripped segregated schools of their government funding was the
rst step. “It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially as the IRS began
sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation academies,” including Falwell’s
own Lynchburg Christian School, inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was
furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”

But there was one particularly backwoods school that ended up becoming their fucking
mascot: Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist college in Greenville, South Carolina.

12 Bramer, Randall.
13 Bramer, Randall.

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They were legitimately segregated, they did not accept Black students, and the IRS had
been hounding them for awhile. So Falwell and Weyrich got involved. What’s kind of
hilarious is that Bob Jones Jr, the guy who founded the school, was like “Yeah, no, I’m
racist, that’s why I don’t want Black people here, because the Bible says so.” And
Falwell and Weyrich were like “Shhhh shut up, shut the fuck up, he’s not RACIST guys,
he’s just really OPINIONATED. This isn’t about “RACE,” this is about RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM.” And there is nothing else that gets a bunch of fucking white middle class
God-fearin’, Bible-thumpin’ Americans more worked up than “it’s not about race, it’s
about religious freedom.” It’s like their fucking cat nip.

So this whole ght over Bob Jones University goes on for a couple of years, like well
into the 70s, with the IRS hounding them and threatening to take away their funding,
and Falwell and Weyrich riding in on their high white horses crying about their religious
freedom. And this fucking university, dude, oh my god - they would like “try” to placate
the IRS, and be like “hey, we let in a Black student, okay, leave us alone” but that one
Black student was like only allowed to take one class and then dropped out after a
month? WEIRD I WONDER WHY. Then they were hounded some more, and Bob Jones
was like “OKAY OKAY we’re letting in Black students…. on one condition. They have to
be married.” Why? BECAUSE HE DIDN’T FUCKING WANT INTERRACIAL DATING
ON HIS CAMPUS. BEAUSE RACISM!

Hang in there guys, we’re like halfway there. So even Falwell and Weyrich realized that
it was the 70s, and they probably couldn’t rally the entire nation around just blatant
racism, like even back then pro-segregation was still kind of an iffy subject to be excited
about. No, they needed a different issue to be their soap box.

“By the late 1970s, many Americans—not just [the religious]—were beginning to feel
uneasy about the spike in legal abortions following the 1973 Roe decision. The 1978


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Senate races demonstrated to Weyrich and others that abortion might motivate
conservatives where it hadn’t in the past.”14

What’s crazy is how you can actually trace back America’s “Christian white supremacy
problem” today to a 1978 election. Weyrich predicted even back then that galvanizing
Evangelical voters around the issue of abortion was going to bring them together in a
powerful way - powerful enough to swing an election. “By 1980, even though Carter had
sought, both as governor of Georgia and as president, to reduce the incidence of
abortion, his refusal to seek a constitutional amendment outlawing it was viewed by
politically conservative evangelicals as an unpardonable sin.” Meanwhile, Reagan held
a rally for 10,000 shortly before the election and centered his speech around protecting
religious freedom. Strangely, abortion never even came up - probably because when
Reagan was governor of California, he actually signed one of the more progressively
liberal abortion bills. It’s almost as if it was never about abortion to begin with. “…After
the election results came in [and Reagan was President], Falwell, never shy to claim
credit, was fond of quoting a poll that suggested Carter would have won the popular
vote by a margin of 1% had it not been for the machinations of the religious right. “I
knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I
had no idea that it would be this great.”15

So why am I telling you all this? What’s the point of this rabbit hole? SYMPATHETIC
MAGIC. It wasn’t about abortion - it wasn’t even really about segregation - it was about
control. Don’t get me wrong, Toxic Christianity is deeply racist and misogynistic, but
almost more than that? It’s deeply addicted to power. This was about two men who
wanted power and control so badly, they found this little idea for people to get really
fucking obsessed with. So for the rst time in America’s history, in the late 70s/early 80s,
suddenly being “a Christian” meant you had to be “pro-life.” It wasn’t really until then
that those ideas con ated. And if that sounds bonkers to you, look around at other

14 Bramer, Randall.
15 Bramer, Randall.


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countries. No other place in the world has made abortion a religious issue - just
America. Land of the colonists, home of the indoctrinated.

So it’s 1983, and Reagan is thinking about re-election. With the help of Falwell and
Weyrich, he has the support of the “moral majority,” and they all have something to be
pissed off at - which as we know, is really the quickest way to unify a group. And then
this little doll comes along: it’s simple, it’s actually kinda ugly, but it reminds us of a
simpler time. Heck, it’s whole origin story is that it grows from a magical, sex-less
garden. The cabbage patch was purity culture’s answered prayer to “where do babies
come from?” and the fucking adoption papers that came with it were the growing
Evangelical’s answered prayer to “how to prove to my kids, my neighbors, and myself
that I’m a good, Christian American.”

Controversial opinion, but I think Cabbage Patch Kids accidentally became the fairy
changelings of aborted babies. Mob psychology is weird like that. And to take it even
further, I don’t think it’s a stretch to infer from the history of dolls that each generation
kind of makes a new toy to make up for their own lost childhoods. I’m as shocked as
you are that it’s taken me until the very end of this episode to talk about TRAUMA, but
it’s true. There’s a reason why the 70s and 80s were so known for their decadence and
materialism: its because all the grown ups then were children during the Great
Depression. They remembered what it was like to have nothing, and desperately
wanted to prevent that for their children and grandchildren. And while I’m reticent to
defend a Boomer, that shit lingers. They knew what it was like to have family and friends
leave and not come back home. So the idea of this little precious, stupid, ugly doll that
reminds you of the farm and a time before all this new-fangled technology and maybe in
some latent sense even makes you feel like it might be helping save helpless unborn
fetuses - I can understand why that would invoke a deep, deep need, one that de es
logic. Because feelings aren’t always logical. Trauma isn’t logical. Some stories are
bigger than us, and have more lasting consequences than we can immediately see



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So there you have it, if it weren’t for a couple of Southern Preachers wanting to take
over the world through the distraction of women’s rights, Ronald fucking Reagan
would’ve never become president, we would’ve never have had the Cabbage Patch
Craze, which means Chucky wouldn’t exist, thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

…I would like to leave you with one last mildly ridiculous example of Sympathetic Magic:
so I feel like the whole Reagan-Cabbage-Patch thing ts pretty neatly into the category
of Correspondence, but what about the other one: Imitation? If we’re to believe, as
history has sadly proven, that Jerry Falwell’s “moral majority” led to Reagan’s election,
which consolidated and solidi ed the powerful middle-white-American-Evangelical
population in this country as a deeply troubling political force to be reckoned with, then
it’s really not hard to see how Reagan directly led to Trump. Like Reagan walked so that
Trump could RUN.

Let me simplify this: If we didn’t have Reagan, we wouldn’t have Chucky. And we
wouldn’t have had Trump if it weren’t for Reagan. Remember ef gies? Remember
poppets? Remember how folklore tells us there’s a magical link between things that
look alike? Chucky was just an evil, sadistic, stupid man, trapped in the body of a little
red-headed child. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?… Just a little red-headed child trapped in
the body of an evil, sadistic, stupid man. You heard it here rst: Trump is Reverse
Chucky. I have no further comments.

WELL FOLKS that was Child’s Play! I hope you had as much fun as I did, and if you
also have lots of thoughts and feelings, hit me up on Instagram
@screentimewithsarahruthless or Twitter @ruthlessscreen or check out the transcripts
to this episode and more on my website, www.sarahruthless.com. And, as ever, that is
Sarah with an H - spelled correctly. That is all folks, and I’ll see you next time.



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Sources Cited / Referenced

IMDB: Child’s Play: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094862/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_

Wikipedia: Consumer behavior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_behaviou

Wikipedia: Dolls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dol

Wikipedia: Don Mancini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Mancin

Wikipedia: Cabbage Patch Riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_Patch_riot

Don Mancini Chats Child’s Play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkI-

dqBWjPg&t=114

Phillips, Marian. “Child’s Play: How Don Mancini’s Personal Life Inspired the Movie
Franchise.” Screenrant.com. Jul. 26, 2020.
Link: https://screenrant.com/childs-play-movie-don-mancini-inspiration-explained

Hicks, Heather (September 1, 2003). "Hoodoo Economics: White Men's Work

and Black Men's Magic in Contemporary American Film.”

Weiss, Josh. “Don Mancini Teases Child’s Play Watch Party and Return to
“Straightforward Horror” for Chucky TV Show.” Syfy.com. May 20, 2020.
Link: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/don-mancini-childs-play-watch-party-chucky-tv-
show

Bruce Jones & David Steven, The New Politics of Strategic Resources: Energy and
Food Security Challenges in the 21st Century (eds. David Steven, Emily O'Brien &
Bruce D. Jone: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), p. 12

McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “History of Creepy Dolls.” SmithsonianMag.com. July 15,

2015
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-creepy-dolls-180955916

Yuen, Kum Fai; Wang, Xueqin; Ma, Fei; Li, Kevin X. (2020-05-18). "The Psychological
Causes of Panic Buying Following a Health Crisis

Friedrich,"The Strange Cabbage Patch Craze", Time Magazine (12 Dec 1983

Buck, Stephanie. “The weird, rabid history of the Cabbage Patch Craze.” Timeline.com.
Dec. 15, 2016. Link: https://timeline.com/cabbage-patch-craze-867ce8d076c

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