Nerding Day: Hook Action Figures

As a child I adored the 1991 film Hook. Its vision of Neverland, with its devilishly handsome Rufio and delicious-looking imaginary pastes, captivated me enough to watch it again and again. As an adult, I'm less forgiving of the film's structural flaws — you have to pay a hefty fun tax before Captain Hook shows up and starts chewing on the scenery — but as Spielburg family pictures go, I'll still take it over E.T.. None of the characters in Hook are wet salami monsters who want to know your school schedule, so it's got that going for it.

Somehow, despite loving the movie and the Super Nintendo game, I only just learned that there were Hook action figures. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The '90s Mighty Ducks cartoon about anthropomorphic alien ducks who fought crime with hockey got action figures. Snailiens existed. So of course there would be Hook toys. And if you thought maybe they were going to be well-articulated, accurate representations of the all-star cast of the film, you don't remember 1991 very well.

None of the Hook figures look much like the actors who portrayed them. Maybe they couldn't get the rights. Maybe it was a Scientology thing, like how they couldn't make Ethan Hunt look like Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible game. Then again, Dustin Hoffman didn't really look like Dustin Hoffman in the movie, either. Hey, did you know that the pirate who gets tortured in the "boo box" scene was actually portrayed by Glenn Close? David Crosby also appears as a background pirate, but sadly, neither of them got action figures. Neither did Phil Collins, who played the detective investigating the disappearance of Peter's children. We were fucking robbed, dude. We could have had a Phil Collins action figure with real dick-slurping action!

90s action figures were not about looking anything like the films or TV series they were based on. They were all about gimmicks. You couldn't just sell a plastic representation of Alan Grant from Jurassic Park, you had to give him a net launcher and a nuclear bomb. That holds for Hook, too. Take a look at the first wave Captain Hook figure, which seems like basically just a normal child-kidnapping pirate until you read that text that says "Grows taller!"

How? In the dumbest-looking way imaginable: his legs sort of just extend down like he got that incel surgery where they break your bones and stretch them out, thus fixing the only thing wrong with you and ensuring a steady stream of Stacy pussy in your future.

In addition to Hook, the first wave of figures included a basic "Swashbuckling" Peter Pan as well as one that "flies" using a big backpack attached to a string. But then there's some weird choices. Like, there's this guy named "Ace." And maybe it's just been too long since I saw it, but I don't remember Hook featuring a down-and-out Prince Adam who's known for his prowess at jacking off multiple dicks simultaneously.

I had to look him up. Here's the character he was based on. I think this might actually just have been an old He-Man they fucked up a little bit and tried to pass off as a jaunty boy.

Of course, the first wave of figures also included the most iconic character in the film: Rufio. I don't know about you, but the crush I had on Dante Basco in Hook as a child could have powered a small city. I mean, look at him.

The leader of the Lost Boys after Peter dips on Neverland, Rufio acts as a sort of rival figure that Peter has to overcome before he's ready to take on Captain Hook. He's insanely cool — he's got three mohawks — and his death is the emotional climax of the film. It's the moment things get real, when Hook crosses the line from cartoon figure to actual monster. And hey, thanks to the Hook action figures, children can recreate the moment when Neverland lost its innocence forever.

Here's the Rufio figure.

Why does he look like a baby was cursed by a spiteful witch to have the full-sized body of an adult man? Did they reuse a head sculpt from a shelved toy line of anxious toddlers? Did the underpaid toy designer who cranked this out have beef with Dante Basco? We may never know.

Despite their questionable quality, there was a second wave of Hook figures. And it's true that Mattel left a number of characters on the table in the first round, but it's not all new guys. No, there's a number of insane variants here, each less rooted in the source material than the last.

First, there's Captain Hook. You can tell the designers were a little embarrassed by their "gets taller, I guess" first take on him because they way overcompensated with his second version, "Swiss Army Hook."

This is the stuff of a Lost Boy's nightmares. It's a Hook stripped of all decorum and restraint, who has given himself over fully to a mechanized blood-frenzy. And he's been working on his core, too. He's fucking shredded, and he will absolutely shred timelost boy bodies with his various torture devices and doohickies.

But Swiss Army Hook isn't the craziest one they made. That honor is reserved for Skull Armor Hook.

They gave a child murderer dual cannons mounted on a mirrored armor rig. They made this preening, suicidal, kid-killing pirate into a fucking Glitter Boy from Rifts. And don't get it twisted, he fully intends to use those cannons to knock out Peter Pan's innards and smash Tinkerbell's tiny beautiful '90s Julia Roberts body.

Like I said, the second wave of Hook figures also gave us a few that probably should have been in the first round. They rectified the lack of Thudbutt, whom Hook-heads will remember as the Lost Boy who became the new Pan when Peter decided to leave Neverland forever after rescuing his kids.

It isn't an amazing likeness of actor Raushan Hammond, but it does at least come with the Thudbutt cheese, which is a nice touch.

You don't know about the Thudbutt cheese? Oh, sorry, are you not a real Hooker? That's what we actually call each other, by the way. "Hook-head" was a trap to reveal the fake fans in the audience.

It's the second-strangest Thudbutt-related prop in Hook. The first? That's the spherical version they made of him in the scene where he rolls down a ramp to knock out a bunch of pirates. You didn't think they actually made Raushan Hammond do that, did you?

In the movie Thudbutt got some sweet armor for the storming of Hook's ship, but when it came time to make the figures they decided to just make that into yet another Peter Pan variant. They also gave him what appears to be a cartoon fish skeleton flail, because who cares. It's 1991 and video games won't be good for at least another few years. Fuck them kids. It's play with this or kick rocks in the old quarry.

All in all, fully 38% of the figures in the Hook line were different versions of Peter Pan. Seriously, this guy rivaled Batman in terms of the number of goddamn suits he got. I half expected to find out that they'd made a Lawyer Peter Banning with Real Bad Back Action or a Slingshot Suit Peter from the scene where the Lost Boys are trying to get him flying again. Can you imagine?

The Hook toys were speedrunning the history of the Ninja Turtles. By 1993 it was impossible to find a version of Michelangelo on store shelves that was just a normal mutant ninja turtle instead of a rapping astronaut or a karate plumber. But nearly as soon as the Hook figures came out, the closest thing to a movie-accurate Peter Pan had been buried beneath a deluge of dorky-looking nondescript brunette guys wielding increasingly stupid implements.

Wave two of the Hook figures did give us another pirate, though. They had some dipshit named Bill Jukes in the first wave, but the second round brought the world Bob Hoskins himself in badly-molded plastic form.

That got me wondering— how many action figures based on characters portrayed by BAFTA and Golden Globe award-winning actor Bob Hoskins are there? Well, there was a line of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? toys produced by LJN, the very same company that published the legendarily-terrible NES game based on the film. You all know about that one, right? It instructed players to call Jessica Rabbit's phone number at one point. It was a real phone number you could call to get hints on the game — only it was disconnected almost immediately and later reassigned to a sex hotline.

Then Super Mario Bros. came out, and there were figures based on that, too. I never saw the movie until I was in my 20s, but I inexplicably owned a John Leguizamo Luigi figure as a child, complete with the rocket boots he receives at the film's climax from a violent woman with intense cleavage who is meant to represent a cartoon fish from the games. Now that I think about it, that was kind of a weird picture.

Sadly, there was never any Mona Lisa playset or Mermaids line of dolls, but there was a KFC toy of Boris Goosinoff from Balto. I think that counts despite being an animated film because they gave this talking goose Bob Hoskins' distinctive dark eyebrows and tired, knowing eyes that have seen countless examples of man's inhumanity to man. Cartoon goose's inhumanity to goose.

What was I talking about? Right, Hook toys. There were a couple of vehicles. You had to have vehicles in the '90s. This is the decade that gave Spider-Man a dragster. Weirdly, neither of the Hook vehicles appears to have been a repurposed Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves battering ram, itself repurposed from an Ewok Battle Wagon. I guess that was Kenner, anyway. Mattel just said fuck it, Rufio gets a boxing glove tank.

In addition to the action figures, Mattel made what we in the biz call "roleplay" toys. The most famous example of this sort of thing from the era is probably the Ghostbusters proton pack, which convinced a substantial percentage of elder millennial and young Gen X men that being obsessed with Bill Murray counted as a personality. I don't know what kind of psychological effects playing with the Hook roleplay toys would have had on children, but I have to imagine that the kind of kid who was psyched to dress up as Captain Hook (Hook sold separately) grew up to be a Hannibal-esque serial killer.

As for the kid who just got the hook, no costume?

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, who owns every variant of Peter Pan ever made and is still mad they never released a Phil Collins with Real Detective Action.

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