There Was No Voodoo Or Serial Killer In The Original Script For Child's Play

As Gerard Johnstone's "M3GAN" continues to slay audiences at the box office, fans of the killer doll movie have compared it to the horror genre's most notorious deadly toy (and slasher icon) Chucky, who has been tiptoe-ing into our collective nightmares since the first "Child's Play" movie in 1988. Other than Chucky's lack of song-and-dance skills, the major difference between him and the blonde artificial intelligence prototype is that she is the product of tech advancement gone awry, whereas the Good Guy doll's origins lie in supernatural soul-swapping (and perhaps more). It wasn't always that way, though. In fact, Don Mancini's initial story had no killer's soul to swap at all.

In Jake Rossen's oral history of the film for Mental Floss, both director Tom Holland ("Fright Night") and writer Mancini confirm that the original story utilized the doll not as a host for a killer's rotten soul but, as Mancini puts it, "a manifestation of a little boy's unconscious rage." He elaborates on an early draft of what was then titled "Blood Brothers":

"If you played too rough with him, his latex skin would break and he'd bleed this red substance so you'd have to buy special bandages. So the boy, Andy, in a rite of brotherhood, cuts his thumb and mixes it with the doll's blood, and that's the catalyst that brings the doll to life. He starts acting out against the boy's enemies, which he might not even be able to express."

Like his Talky Tina forebear and modern-day menace M3GAN, Chucky would dispatch anyone he perceived as a threat to the boy, from a strict babysitter to bullies to a punishing schoolteacher. As fun as the ensuing body count could be, both Holland and producer David Kirschner felt that something emotional was needed to lighten the deadly doll tale.

Chucky as we know him is a revived serial killer, like his burnt cousin Freddy Krueger, Maniac Cop, and Horace Pinker of Wes Craven's "Shocker." Before its string of sequels and a 2019 reboot, Chucky was one Charles Lee Ray, a killer on the run when a bullet wound and a ticking clock prompted him to transfer his soul into the nearest thing: a life-size "Good Guy" doll. The voodoo ritual he used would invoke the sky god Damballa to grant immortality, giving him a new lease on life as a redheaded commodity. Neither Andy (Alex Vincent) nor his hardworking single mom Karen (Catherine Hicks) could have guessed that their latest addition to the toy chest was actually a dangerous grown man with warrants out for his arrest.

The original story, as Mancini wrote it, felt "more like a 'Twilight Zone' episode" to Holland, who tells Mental Floss, "The little boy fell asleep and the doll came to life. It didn't emotionally involve you." The doll's name in this early version was Buddy, not Chucky, and it was more ambiguous as to who was doing the nighttime killing. 

Speaking with William Bibbiani, Mancini credits longtime franchise producer David Kirschner with distilling the good vs evil dynamic down to something an audience could quickly digest. From the jump, it's clear who's dropping bodies in "Child's Play," though the idea of a 6-year-old pushing his babysitter to her death is just as unsettling as a battery-free toy trying to kill mom. 

Mancini goes on to guesstimate that 50% of his original script is in the final product, with the Charles Lee Ray mythology credited as a welcome Tom Holland addition. But with Mancini's "Chucky" series recently getting renewed for a third season, it seems that he and old Chuck will remain friends to the end.