Not Quite Santa’s workshop — Dan Polydoris is making some of the funniest, sickest toys around. Therapy not included
A few skips off a busy road in Niles, inside one of those modest brown apartment complexes that wallpapers the suburbs, there’s a toy workshop so magical that its owner, when the mood hits, puts nothing but thin air inside a toy box and sells it for $20 a pop. In fact, he sells hundreds.
Dan Polydoris created his workshop, which he calls Death by Toys, five years ago. Mostly, he makes action figures, but sometimes lunch boxes, and other times body bags for his action figures. Sometimes his lunch boxes look like an ordinary 1982 lunch box with Garfield on the side, but instead of Garfield saying “I love lasagna,” Garfield is saying “Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself.”
It’s a magical place.
One of his best-sellers is a Deadbeat Dad action figure.
Twenty bucks will buy you the packaging. Deadbeat Dad not included.
Polydoris is a toy maker, but not really a toy maker. He doesn’t traffic in toys so much as the idea of “toys.” He’s far from the only guy with a successful independent action-figure business; he’s not even the most successful one in the greater Chicago area: Pete Goral of Rockford, who sells his own action figures as Killer Bootlegs, has a client list that includes Millie Bobby Brown, Jerry Seinfeld and the Wu-Tang Clan. But Polydoris’ own circle — “The Tonight Show,” Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, rock stars, movie studios — is not far behind, and whereas other toy designers are about craftsmanship, a typical Polydoris toy is closer to a gag gift. Was 2020 a dumpster fire for you, too? Polydoris made a 2020 dumpster fire. Like most of his toys, it sold out fast.
The other day I stopped by his workshop.
On his workbench sat a pile of coronaviruses. Or rather, a pile of the readymade yellow pom-poms Polydoris has been throwing into a rectangular plastic bubble, attaching a sheet of traditional action-figure cardboard backing and selling for $30. (“Recreate the classic global pandemic!”) Above his workbench, tacked to the wall: An action figure of the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head during the vice-presidential debate ($25), a “Male Ego” action figure (which is actually just shards of shattered plastic), a couple of action figures based on obscure horror movie characters and “All the Babies Your (Expletive) Friends Keep Having,” which is a container of small identical plastic children bundled inside of a palatial pink, blue and white checkerboard packaging scheme.
No child would play with the toys Dan Polydoris creates.
No child should.
And yet, it’s also too easy to dismiss these toys as mere gag gifts. Sold only at his website, they walk the line between cold product and personal expression, conceptual art and novelty prank. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, some are so cringy the joke catches in your throat. For Mother’s Day this year, a few months after his own mother died, Polydoris slapped the image of a gravestone onto cardboard backing, left the plastic action-figure bubble empty and sold it as a “Dead Mom” action figure. (Yes, that sold-out, too.) There’s an air of self-examination in his work, alongside irony and darkness. One of his latest “playsets” is titled “Dig Your Own Grave.” It includes a small plastic shovel for, as Polydoris explains, any action figures who “may have given up on life.”
As with other independent action-figure makers, he takes the cheap plastic of Christmas mornings and rethinks it as autobiography. One frequent theme is the chasm between promise and reality, childhood and adulthood — what you wish for inside a package and what you get. (Indeed, many of his best toys are little more than cardboard packaging.)
Polydoris himself calls his action figures as “anti-figures.”
“I find making these things therapeutic,” he said. “I also just think there’s something funny about taking an action figure — this thing that a lot of times sells movie franchises and pop culture stuff — and suggesting a toy nobody would ever want. Nobody wants coronavirus action figures. I made a fork lift driver — nobody needs that. And yet, nobody wanted secondary characters from ‘Waterworld’ to become action figures, but they were! The original ‘Star Wars’ line from Kenner — Darth Vader, Luke, Leia, Chewie — was incredible, but then they’re like ‘And here’s Yakface!’ Wait, who? The funny thing is, nobody is asking for it, but this stuff gets valuable to someone out there.”
The morning I visited, Polydoris was knee-deep in a major commission.
He was hired by a very famous couple to make action figures of 140 of their family members and friends, to be given as Christmas gifts, and though I wish I could say more, he asked to keep their identity a secret. Which is fair, and understandable — he’ll earn more on this one job than many Americans will make in a year. Still, he seemed eager to get back to the day-to-day business of riffing, making small commentaries on his world. One of his latest bestsellers is a package that contains “100 Percent Genuine Thoughts and Prayers.” (“I’ve personally spoken countless thoughts and prayers directly into each bubble, then labeled them accordingly.”) For Election Day he came up with a playset containing a bottle of pills and a (real) mini-bottle of tequila.
He opted not to sell it.
One likes to imagine toymakers as jolly eccentrics hammering away at antique workbenches, but other than the workbench, Polydoris is thin and tired looking. He has a thick head of graying curls and looks somewhat like an action-figure rendering of Gabe Kaplan in “Welcome Back Kotter” — which is to say, he looks vaguely like Gabe Kaplan did in 1975. The guy has had a rough few years. Both of his parents died in the past 12 months. He got divorced. He quit a longtime job as a copywriter for Crate & Barrel to make his action figures full time. When I stopped in, he was worried about the virtual learning of his two kids. Also, he turned 40. To celebrate, he created (for himself, not for sale) a faux-Atari cartridge titled “You Piece of ...” OK, so I can’t use the full title, so let’s just say it’s self-deprecating. “It’s how I felt turning 40,” he told me. “I’m proud of what I do but part of me asks why celebrate limping through life surrounded by toys.”
This is how he copes: As his mother was dying, he took an action figure of a generic white male in a sports jacket, placed it backwards in packaging, facing an image of a beach, and called it “Me Giving Up and Walking into the Ocean With All My Clothes On.”
Polydoris grew up in Wilmette and studied English and creative writing at Bradley University in Peoria. Like other small-batch action-figure makers, he was an obsessive collector as a kid, and as an adult, and his first custom action figures were daydreams of sorts — toys that he wished had been made once. His initial palate was relatively predictable for the world of custom figures. He created figures of old video game characters and cult film nobodies. He started to draw a following, but the first time “I made a kind of absurdist joke as an action figure, I really didn’t expect anyone to take it so well.” He made action figures of the Fog from the 1980 John Carpenter classic “The Fog.” Which is to say, he sold cotton balls for $40 and called it a Fog action figure — still, to date, he’s sold hundreds of them.
Conceptual gags — often relayed initially on Instagram — became a specialty.
Yet as he began pulling fans and significant commissions — including Netflix, Patton Oswalt and directors such as Edgar Wright, Eli Roth and James Wan (“The Conjuring”) — he was overwhelmed with orders. “I’m just one person doing everything, and I was selling dozens of what could have been hundreds.” So, last winter, Death by Toys became a full-time business, a 24/7 purveyor of objects you absolutely don’t need. Like “Thanksgiving Smallpox Blankets” ($30), a “Soiled Baby Yoda Diaper” ($40) or a “Carole Baskin’s Husband” action figure ($50). (The latter is just a small plastic tiger in a bloodied plastic blister. Husband not included.)
Like the rest of us, Polydoris lives and works these days in a home full of artifacts.
The difference is, Polydoris has cocooned himself with decades of vintage space ships and dusty video games; there’s a bathroom dedicated to decades of Batman toys and, should any museum require one, a very cool small exhibit worth of 1980s E.T. merchandising and doodads.
He works all day and night at a small desk covered in contact-lens cases, in which he mixes paints. Beside him are large plastic tubs full of plastic body parts, taken from action figures he buys off collectors, chops into bits then separates out — all heads into one bin, all torsos into another, etc.
He said, “I like my kids and my girlfriend and a few other people but, the truth is, I prefer toys to people. Toys are more reliable, they’re less maintenance and they have been a great comfort.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
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