Todd McFarlane Interview

Armchair Empire (AE): Why is it that copious amounts of blood and gore, and graphic depictions of torture are okay for an action figure but nudity is not?

Todd McFarlane (TM): You know what, we live in an odd society, that is true. We’ll let our 12 year old kids watch action movies with Schwarzenegger shooting a whole army of people, but you bare a breast and we all sort of twitch a little bit. The answer is it’s just the culture we’ve developed over the centuries. If you go to other countries they’re actually quite the opposite. The body is not something that is necessarily seen as taboo and because it is out in the open nobody gets crazy about it. In a lot of countries most of the beaches are clothing optional or tops option, but if you show a gunfight that’s when they get a little bit nervous. You could argue whether one is better or worse. I think that we, in this country, have a tendency to want to protect our kids from potentially being promiscuous because we probably start reflecting back to when we were young – knowing that we started liking the opposite sex at a much earlier age than we’d like to admit. Our kids, we’re looking at them thinking, "Gasp! They’re 13! That’s when we started too!" < Laughs > So, I think we get nervous and we try and protect our kids from it – where as we didn’t go on shooting sprees, so we don’t know how to relate to that.

AE: Recently Electronic Arts cancelled Ultima Online 2. What’s going to happen to the UO2 action figures?

AE: What other video and computer game licenses would you like to get your hands on?

TM: I would say that most of the obvious ones have already been done, so you can’t really go back. You can’t say, "Ah, it’s too bad we didn’t do Final Fantasy, we should go do that," because somebody has already done that. I would say that videogames are not that much different than picking movies to do toys with. So right now, what movies are we going to do toys with next year? I don’t know, because I need someone to tell me what all the movies will be and I’ll tell somebody if I’m interested in any of them. I think videogames have a lot of the same risk factor. You keep your ear to the ground and talk to your contacts. Then as soon as they’re developing a game decide if it’s going to be big and try to catch lightening in a bottle in advance of anybody knowing what it was. Then when it comes out and you’re right there with the product. I would say that the ones that we want to do in the future are the ones we don’t know about today.

AE: Besides Jason Wynn, what Collector’s Club figures can we expect this year? What about "fish tank" figures and re-sculpts?

TM: We’ve got a pretty ambitious one called Urizen who was in some Spawn comics about issues 96 -100. He’s by far the biggest one we’ve done for the club so far and he comes with a big base, because he’s a giant. We’ve got a line coming out called Samurai Wars, which is Spawn series 19. There are 6 figures in that one that will go to mass merchants and normal retailers, but then there’s a seventh that you can 

get in the  Collector’s Club. There’s one I saw the other day that I think is for the club – one of those warrior biker chicks, if you will, from this comic we do called Hell Spawn. I think between those that takes care of us for about a year.

AE: How involved are you in the actual designing/sculpting of the figures are you?

TM: I used to be a lot more involved in the beginning when we were trying to create the process, but every toy still has my fingerprint on it. To give you an example, I have a video conference hook-up in my office that hooks up to all my other offices and the one I use the most is the design studio (I’m in Phoenix and they’re in New Jersey). We were just on the video conferencing yesterday for probably 4 hours going over 8 or 10 sculpts. It’s too great of a risk to just send me the sculpts, especially when they’re in the soft clay because we have different stages. So I go over all the toys. Not only do I have to sign off on some of the design work or re-fix it myself, but then once we have the designs we want, I have to see it in the soft clay to make sure that we don’t get too far through the process before I make a correction – then it becomes hard work. Yesterday I was looking at about a dozen figures that were in soft, saying, "The anatomy isn’t right there, I don’t like the way the stomach muscles look, that guy needs to be taller, another guy needs to be bent, the hockey player guy is too ridged, we need to bend his ankle a little bit, bring his knee up, and blah, blah, blah, his pants are too fat, dada, dada, dada." It’s on-going. Literally there isn’t one toy that goes out that somewhere along the line I don’t look at least three or four times along the way.

AE: Are there any superheroes in your files that have yet to see the light of day?

TM: Yeah, sure. I made up a bunch of them when I was a kid. Some of them come out. Some of the early ones were Spawn. Tremor was based on a character I made a long time ago. When I was younger, before I broke into comic books, I was creating characters going, "Oh, here’s my super dude, my super gal, and my villain" and stuff. But a lot of them are being put into forms in either the comic books or the toys, so they’re coming out somehow. You could say that all the toys that haven’t appeared in the comics could be used for the inspiration for another character.

AE: It looks like another Spawn movie is on the way. Have you decided on any of the villains from the comic that will appear in it?

TM: Right now we’re writing the screenplay for it, and there really aren’t any. I should have taken all the comic books aspects out of it other than this boogie man that half the people don’t seem to believe or see as existing. If you look at the old black and white horror movies like Frankenstein – if Spawn is Frankenstein – then in that movie, everyone else is normal. Dr. Frankenstein is normal, Igor, although a little odd, the villagers that hate Frankenstein, the little girl that he accidentally hurts in the end. The whole movie revolves around one odd thing and the odd thing is Frankenstein. Whereas the first movie had Spawn and the Clown – and there’s Hell in there and a bunch of demons – there’s a lot of fantastic things in it, the writing goes back to the classic horror movies where Spawn is the only thing out of the ordinary. What’s more intriguing is Frankenstein himself. Why did the villagers get so worked up about him? So he’s more of a catalyst in the movie, centering around a story that’s based on a serial killing.

AE: I read that the film will center more on Sam and Twitch.

TM: Yeah, Sam and Twitch have most of the screen time by far.

AE: And Spawn is more of a shadowy character that influences everyone else?

TM: This may be sort of a bad comparison, but I use Jaws as an example. The movie was called "Jaws" like this movie will be called "Spawn". But Jaws wasn’t necessarily on screen as much as the people trying to hunt him down or some of the islanders. Jaws sure as heck didn’t speak very much, but what it meant was, Jaws, the actions that he took, led to a chain reaction of other things. It was more interesting to watch how people reacted to the actions of something that nobody saw. But at the end, with the climax, you get to see him, but it didn’t stop you from being spooked by him.

AE: Will there be any action figures based on the movie?

TM: You know, that’s actually a tough one. I don’t know if we’re actually going to get a big hook on them, but even if we do we’d only have one figure, unless I make Sam and Twitch or something, but guys in suits aren’t exactly cool things to buy. I’m not writing it, as silly as it may seem, to sell toys seeing as I’m a toy maker. I’m just trying to make a good spooky movie and not worry about some of the other businesses that I run.

AE: Do you find that you get treated differently when people find out that you’re Canadian?

TM: <Laughs> Yeah, you know, the Americans say, "Ah, that’s too bad" and the Canadians say, "Oh, that’s cool!" Not overtly though, they just go, "Okay, whatever." We’ve got all walks of life. It’s more when you run into another Canadian, it’s like, "Cool, you’re trying to push the limit down here too."

AE: As President of the McFarlane Empire do you often make strange demands of your employees or make rules that make no sense? Like making Wednesdays cross-dressing days, or demanding your assistant prove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is actually a complicated recipe for apple crumble?

TM: I would say that the biggest demands that I ask of them is to be flexible given that we got our fingers in so many different pies. What you’re doing and what seems to be a priority today might change dramatically tomorrow depending on the success or failure of one of our projects. Don’t expect that every day will come with the same set of problems. We have to reinvent ourselves potentially every 4 or 5 months.

AE: Is there any field of endeavor that haven’t tried, that you want to?

TM: < Pauses and ponders > Maybe design a videogame for Playstation 2 or Xbox or maybe take a crack at directing a movie or something.

AE: Do you think that Marvel is still banging their head saying, "We should have let him have his way!"

TM: No, I don’t think so. Marvel is big enough to survive the loss of any single person, or our case 7 that went out the door. Marvel is a big company that goes and moves. They’ve got a new group of people trying their best right now. They do what they do. Somewhere along the line when I left I stopped caring about what bugs them or what makes them happy. So, if they got 10 books that are selling really good or are in bankruptcy, which they were, it doesn’t really affect me on a day to day basis. It’s like, "That’s their problem. I’ve got my own problems."

AE: What was it like collecting all of those special baseballs?

TM: I was chasing things that everyone knew about. Then coming up with the winning bid to get most of them, then traveling them around. It’s still kind of an odd thing that out of everyone watching and looking for it, that some Canadian kid ended up with this American, "apple pie," piece of memorabilia. It’ll make for a chapter in my memoirs some day.

We'd like to thank Todd again for taking the time to do this interview.  If you want to get more info on what's going on in the McFarlane Empire, be sure to swing by the official site at www.spawn.com

While your at it checkout Omni's feature covering some of the highlights of what McFarlane has on tap for 2001.