The promotional items for IT: Welcome to Derry may have spoiled a key plot and character details for HBO Max’s upcoming prequel series. As is now standard with big fandom franchises, the tie-in line of collectibles has revealed a take on a key character that fans haven’t really seen before. While there has been some initial confusion about the figure, a quick and deeper analysis of the toy hints at an important story detail that Welcome to Derry will reveal to viewers.
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Director Andy Muschietti’s two IT movies gave viewers brushstrokes of Pennywise the Clown’s backstory, as well as how long he’s been stalking the streets of Derry, Maine. However, thanks to the new line of Welcome to Derry figures being released by McFarlane Toys, we now know that the TV series will indeed be digging into the real-life figure whose form the Pennywise entity copies in order to hunt for young souls.
The product description reads, “Pennywise™ (Flashback) 6” scale posed figure based on the upcoming HBO and HBO Max Series, It: Welcome to Derry, is available NOW”. However, it’s the design of the figure that caught fans’ eyes immediately: specifically, the headpiece, which threw many fans by depicting Pennywise as wearing a clown’s wig, instead of having the orange hair growing out of his head like in the movies. So why the change, and what is the significance of the “flashback” mentioned in the toy’s description?
Welcome to Derry Could Finally Confirm A Major Theory About Pennywise the Clown’s Origin
Author Stephen King intentionally made Pennywise an entity that is not actually “human” in any sense. However, subterfuge is key to Pennywise’s mode of hunting and harvesting what he needs from his young victims, and so adopting human personas – like a clown – is how he does it. Both the novel and the sequel film IT: Chapter Two include a section where the grown-up Beverly Marsh meets “Mrs. Kersh,” the old, widowed lady who now lives in Beverly’s old home. Kersh regales Beverly with a story about her father, a circus performer named “Bob Gray”; when Beverly spots an old photo of “Bob,” she realizes to her horror that it is Pennywise, and that she is once again caught in the web of the entity’s nightmare hallucinations.
A lot of viewers/readers came away from that scene with Mrs. Kersh with one big question: was Mrs. Kersh’s story real? Or just another one of Pennywise’s mind-games designed to harvest more terror from Beverly?
That’s why this new figure from Welcome to Derry may be more pivotal than you think: It could be taken as soft confirmation that we will meet Bob Gray, the actual human being. A lot of fans have long theorized that Bob Gray was one of Pennywise’s first victims in Derry, and that the entity stole his form as its disguise, so that it could move about freely in the town. The theory goes on that Gray and his entire family may get consumed by Pennywise, which is why the entity is able to create a copy of Mrs. Kersh as a secondary form, as she is still one of the souls trapped inside the monster.
It would make a certain amount of sense for Welcome to Derry to go this route: After all, getting actor Bill Skarsgård more screentime in a “human appearance” without the need for extensive makeup would be smart for a long-form format like TV. It would also create great dramatic irony to have the audience see the shark lurking in plain sight, while the other characters have no idea how much peril they are in, scene-to-scene.
IT: Welcome to Derry is set to premiere in October (day TBA) on HBO platforms.
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