Mancini credits his writing involvement on
Hannibal and
Channel Zero with sparking a desire to take a stab at bringing his beloved creation to the small screen.
"What Bryan Fuller was doing with [
Hannibal] felt like fan fiction made by experts, and I really love that aspect of it. So I feel like, in a way, we're doing that with Chucky now," he continues. "I'm working with all these really talented writers, all of whom are huge Chucky fans, many of whom grew up on Chucky, and despite the fact that that's a painful reminder of my age, it's great to hear their ideas and just to start incorporating stuff into it that I might not have thought of."
A lot of the writers' room activity harkens back to Mancini's overall philosophy of keeping Chucky relevant for whatever decade he's released into. For the show, he wanted to explore how the murderous doll impacts the modern-day lifestyles of "a whole new group of kids."
"One thing I think I can probably safely say is that it's a look at what it means to be a kid today in the 21st century, as distinct from what it was like to be a kid in the 1980s, when we first showed up on the scene," the creator adds. "That's one thing I think people can look forward to and thinking about: 'How does Chucky operate in a world where kids spend so much of their time on social media?', for example. Playing video games, interacting with one another on social media as opposed to in a park, which is what we might have depicted 30 years ago. I think the prospect of seeing Chucky sharpen his skills and add to his toolbox, some of the technical goodies that we have at our disposal now, that's something I think people will find pretty interesting."
Moreover, "it's so important to give Chucky new weapons, new strategies, and new targets, new goals ... Chucky has a different goal in the TV show than he's ever had before, and it's specifically something that is designed to evoke something that's going on in the zeitgeist today."