It’s been over 30 years since the character Chucky was first introduced to the world in Child’s Play. A film which follows one family after coming in contact with a “Good Guy” doll that turns out to be possessed by a soul of a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray.
After the 1988 film spawned a franchise over the years which consisted of six sequels, a remake and an upcoming television series among other things, fans of the cult classic are now able to view the origin story of Lee Ray’s character.
The show entitled Chucky, will bring the doll full circle with many people he has encountered throughout the franchise including his antagonist Andy Barclay, Nica Pierce, and Barclay’s foster sister named Kyle. Alex Vincent, who portrayed Barclay in Child’s Play 1 and 2 as well as Curse of Chucky and Cult of Chucky, will reprise his role in the series.
While promoting Chucky, the series creator Don Mancini revealed during a discussion panel why he felt now was a great time to tell Lee Ray’s origin story. Mancini said:
“Exploring Charles Lee Ray’s origins has been something that the fans have wanted to see and have been asking for literally for decades now and one of the reasons I was excited about taking the franchise into the medium of television was because having so much storytelling real estate, eight hours of Chucky, that provided such a great opportunity for exploring that stuff, among other stuff. But, yeah, so one of the things I was most excited about doing with the show was exploring Charles Lee Ray’s origin.”
Despite changing one aspect in the franchise for the series, Mancini admitted that certain things that people loved about Chucky and the films including the doll’s vulgar language has stayed put.
“One of the things that was important to me, that we’d be able to retain all of the aspects of the franchise that the fans love, one of which is the gore, the other of which, of course, is Chucky’s propensity for dropping f‑bombs. We also have a habit of bringing actors back in different roles from movie to movie. We were doing that before Ryan Murphy started doing that with the repertoire company he put together on American Horror Story. So even if someone dies, they can come back in another role.”
Chucky, the 8 part series event is set to air on USA and Syfy on October 12th.