#devil warriors

Imagine Lucio Fulci did Troma’s Toxic Crusaders back in the days, but worse, with even less budget. A little Naziploitation added, and the Devil Warriors would have been the outcome! Oh boy, my brain goes pop inside when I’m thinking about it. It would have turned out as one of the coolest TV shows ever! Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. The Devil Warriors ended up as shitty 99 cents toys - sold at gas stations, drug stores, and low-end retail markets. 

The line (most likely) featured six nameless characters: A skull dude, two melted face dudes (one with a helmet, and one with a bandana), a punk rocker, an exposed brain dude, and a werewolf. The sculpts are truly underworldish, bad in the best possible way! All figures feature the same body, which looks pretty much like a WW2 Wehrmacht uniform to me (hence the Naziploitation link). The body was also put to use for “Amicable Herculean”, another shitty 90s KO-wabunga toy line, that was probably made by the same company. (”Satyr Masters from Abyss” belong to the same family. But we’ll look into these later.)

Devil Warriors were only marked “China” or “Made in China”. The packagings don’t tell us much either. No. 618 “Made in China” is all we get. The back of the card is blank. We can’t even be sure about the year they were made in. We either can’t tell if there weren’t more figures in the line than just the confirmed six. (As if 80s / 90s KO manufacturers would have ever given a shit about what’s on the card, on what figures you were able to get, HAHA!) There are also rumors that Devil Warriors were sold as “P.O.W. - Prisoners of War” in the 90s, featuring the same artwork. I’ve never seen a carded sample of it though. But this would sorta place the figures in the “Vietploitation” genre, as well. That’s also where the artwork is heading.

Retrospectively, it’s hard to tell what particularly the Devil Warriors were knocking off. It’s a toxic, mind-blowing cocktail of all sorts of things. Zombieploitation, Naziploitation, Vietploitation, TMNT, Toxic Crusaders... You name it! Since we don’t have a company or year on the figures, we can only rely on the oral history-telling going on in the toy KOmmunity. Toys have a “zeitgeist”, too. Which means you can never seperate a toy from the historical period it was made in. If we sum things up (figure style, esthetics etc.), and take an additional look at the circumstances in Western politics throughout the 90s in particular, the Devil Warriors must have been released between the Gulf War in 1991 and Operation Desert Fox in 1998. With a new war emerging, it seems like these toys catched kids’ and people’s nightmares of that time right on point. That’s how another great, and also frightening piece of toy history has been made.