“Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil… prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon…” -Terry Pratchett

Truer words have never been spoken.  I’m sure you all know about Doom, ID Software’s followup to Wolfenstein 3D, which became one of the biggest PC games in history.  It’s a franchise now, and Bethesda is currently developing it.  For years, there were no Doom toys.  Now, we have plushies, Funko POPs, Mystery Minis, and some other oddities – still no proper action figures, but today’s review is of one of the best things available.

 

The Cacodemon Vinyl Bank.  Seeeeriously.  For anybody who hasn’t played Doom, a “cacodemon” is the proper name of a “demon” as an evil spirit, as opposed to simply a “daemon” – i.e., a spirit.  It’s Greek.  We just made demon the generic term for cacodemons.  In Doom, a Cacodemon is a floating cyclopaean head which spews balls of lightning at you and takes a surprising amount of punishment to kill.  It also is plagiarized from the cover of the Dungeons & Dragons Manual of the Planes.

 

Seriously.  And nobody has ever gotten in trouble for this.  Now, Cacodemons have been redesigned in recent games, but so has everybody else.  The new Cacodemons look a lot like D&D Eyes of the Deep, anyway.  And this piece of merchandise is based on their original sprite art, so if there were legal issues, we’d have heard of it by now.  Crazy how blatant that is, especially considering that the one-eyed Astral Dreadnought is still a D&D monster.

 

The Cacodemon bank, produced by USAopoly, is available pretty much everywhere online – Amazon and ThinkGeek seem tobe the best bets, at about $20.  It’s pretty big, too.  Not life-size, as that would be ginormous, but roughly the size of a human skull.

 

The coin slot is in the back, which admittedly takes away from its otherwise-accurate sculpt.

 

The plug is on the bottom, of course.  No problem there.

 

The detailing is really great on this guy, though if you stare hard enough, you’ll note that he’s missing the “beard loops” on the original – but they were hard to see on the sprite, so it’s no biggie.

 

The horns are separate pieces glued in, so there’s no worry about paint scuffing – they’re white vinyl!  Anything to boost durability is a plus in my book.

 

The Cacodemon is actully comparable in scale to World of Nintendo’s Metroid, if that helps.  It’s great, since they are both pretty much the same thing – a vinyl toy of a video game monster that should have been made a long time ago.

 

Of course, this does make it hard to integrate with your other toys.  We still need some smaller Cacodemons!  And, uh, everything else from Doom.  Everything.  But that said, this one is  up there with the Metroid as one of my favorite monstery additions of 2016.  If  you have any fond memories of Doom, you owe it to yourself.  Or you can just re-enact Hamlet’s Yorick speech, like I did.