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Dangerous Toys: Terrible film adaptations that are nothing more than child’s play

This Friday (February 10) sees the release of The Lego Batman Movie and, much like its predecessor The Lego Movie, it’s both “certified fresh” and currently holding steady at 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. In honor of this massive achievement, we’d figured flip the script of positivity and make a list of the worst movies based on toy lines ever. If anything, it'll show how far we’ve come in our toy line adaptations.

As you scan through the selections below, you might wonder where the The Care Bears and Garbage Pail Kids are, but we decided to stick to actual physical as opposed to those spun off of greeting card characters and trading cards. We had to draw the line somewhere, or the Ewoks would have wound up on this list. Sure enough, even when you exclude those disasterpieces, there’s still plenty of terrible to go around.

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Masters of the Universe [1987]

The Cannon Group, the epitome of the coke-snorting havoc-raising Hollywood of the 1980s, wanted this Saturday morning cartoon adaptation to be their Star Wars and be a crossover science fiction hit. That’s all well and good, but their approach to this movie was less A New Hope and more Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: They had the wonderful idea to cut costs by sending He-Man and Skeletor to our world to meet Courtney Cox for some dumb reason. That “fish out of water” nonsense really fucks up the flow of the film, and the goofy, dumb fun of the first 10 minutes is completely undermined by the ninety minutes of awful following it. Poor Dolph Lundgren, speaking less functional English than Schwarzenegger in Hercules in New York, followed up Rocky IV with this piece of shit, and somehow Frank Langella was roped into playing Skeletor, perhaps with the promise that he’d live on after he’d passed in the nightmares of children who’d seen his makeup in this movie. Do we really have to tell you Masters of the Universe flopped? Well, it did.

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