Dangerous Toys

Screenwriter James Gunn's first novel illustrates the dangers of loving action figures more than people.

Toy collectors. They're geeks, right? Lonely single males with an immaturity complex and the bizarre need to work out all the fictional physics involved in a warp-core breach on board the starship Enterprise?

Yes and no. There certainly are large numbers of collectors who fit this description, as anyone who attends the monthly sci-fi and comic book conventions at the Shrine Auditorium can attest. And yet there's a growing segment of adults with more than a passing interest in toys. They hail from distinctly non-nerdy walks of life, and most of them grew up in the '70s and '80s, when movie and TV tie-in toys first began to take off in earnest, starting with the eight-inch superhero dolls made by Mego and hitting a fever pitch with the debut of the smaller-scale Star Wars figures in 1979, one full year after the movie's debut. Nowadays, it's common to find that someone raised in that era owns at least one action figure, and contemporary toys are even being actively marketed to older collectors (would a kid pay $150 for a 12-inch Toshiro Mifune samurai doll?). And yet, despite the widening demographic, a massive toy collection may still be an indication on some level of an inability to relate to the real world, even amongst those who have experienced life beyond Kirk and Spock. Such is the case with Jimmy, the protagonist of James Gunn's grimly comedic new novel on the subject, The Toy Collector.

A far cry from a bespectacled geek, Jimmy is a violent drunk who lives in New York and subsidizes his jones for vintage robots by stealing pharmaceuticals from the hospital where he works as an orderly, and reselling them to street junkies. Like so many collectors, he's forced to rely on a local dealer to obtain his toys, an overweight fellow named Charlie who wears tight T-shirts and marks up his prices astronomically based on their supposed value (think of the comic store owner on The Simpsons, or Wayne Knight's klepto collector in Toy Story 2). And Jimmy's not exactly unlucky in love, either: He's the classic abusive guy who can convince both a girl and himself that he really cares, only to lose interest (or chicken out) the morning after. He may not fit the classic profile, but he's not exactly a good poster boy for the hobby either.

If this were all we got of Jimmy, the story would quickly become tiresome. After all, he's not what you'd call a likable person. Fortunately, Gunn provides us with a simultaneous running narrative set in Jimmy's preteen past in St. Louis, when his love for toys began with a playset called "Scrunch 'Em, Grow 'Em Dinosaurs." We get involved in the often gruesomely violent battles reenacted by Jimmy and his friends with their toys, battles that include such weird juxtapositions as ROM: Spaceknight alongside Cher. We also see the beginning of Jimmy's violent streak, as he and his brother Tar frequently find themselves defending the honor of their weird friend Gary, a young eccentric given to speaking in a made-up language he refers to as "French." Given that we can see the present and the past, we know that something bad is coming for the kids: Tar and Jimmy barely speak to each other as adults, and Gary is nowhere to be seen.

Still, even the inevitable traumatic incident doesn't justify Jimmy's bad behavior in the present, or even explain it to any satisfactory degree; the seeds of violence and alcoholism are there even before tragedy hits. This is perhaps the weakest area of the novel; there are hints that Dad was an abusive drunk, but little is actually referred to directly, and it's hard to hate a father who's so truly pathetic in the present. In an ironic counterpoint to the whole toy-collecting theme, Dad's therapist has presented him with a baby doll that he now treats like a real child, representing his wounded inner self. That both Jimmy and his father are using their toys as substitutes for real relationships is implicit; Gunn never hammers the point home, and he doesn't have to. Anyone who at one point or another misguidedly valued material possessions over personal relationships knows the feeling all too well.

It's a feeling Gunn is probably well aware of, as his bio lists among his credits the as-yet unproduced screenplays for the big-screen adaptation of Hanna-Barbera's Scooby-Doo, and the Mad magazine spin-off Spy vs. Spy, both of which would ideally require a writer with a vocal inner child. He also penned, and appears in, the upcoming low-budget superhero spoof The Specials, in which spandex-clad misfits take exception to the action figures that have been based on them. The Toy Collector is his first novel, and it reveals more of a dark underbelly and sense of poignancy than has been displayed in his other notable produced works, the genuinely witty script for Troma Films' Tromeo and Juliet, and the book he cowrote with Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman, All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, which was extremely loosely adapted on-screen as Terror Firmer.

With The Toy Collector, Gunn has taken full advantage of the opportunity to create a character who risks being both nondynamic and unlikable (two big no-nos in the screenplay trade), but yet is made recognizable to anyone who has ever regretted the loss of a prized childhood toy. If you remember Mego and ROM: Spaceknight with any great fondness, this book is for you. If you don't, it won't necessarily help you understand their appeal, but it's a good read nonetheless.