Funko - Pennywise – the many faces of Derry’s monster, from vintage grin to spider-limbed nightmare

By Mulder, 23 october 2025

If you collect horror on your shelves, you already know that Pennywise is a moving target. Funko has leaned into that shapeshifter DNA with a line that maps the character’s entire pop-culture life cycle—from the sharp-toothed TV menace embodied by Tim Curry to the old-world, Elizabethan-ruffed predator played by Bill Skarsgård. What’s striking when you line these figures up is how they quietly tell the story critics have traced for decades: clowns start safe, then slide into the uncanny. The earliest box here—POP! Movies #55, branded IT: The Movie—channels the 1990 miniseries, rubbery grin and all, a wink to the approach special-effects artist Bart Mixon once described for Tim Curry’s look: seduce first, terrify second. The sculpt’s domed forehead, arched brows and saw-edge smile carry that charm-masking-evil energy scholars love to cite when they talk about why coulrophobia spikes whenever Pennywise resurfaces.

Jump to the modern run and the palette cools, the menace heats. POP! #472 Pennywise (With Boat is the thesis statement for Andy Muschietti’s films: fissured porcelain skin, lantern-yellow eyes, and that historically informed costume Janie Bryant built from Medieval through Victorian inspirations. The tiny paper boat in his hand isn’t just a prop; it’s a thesis about fear as an appetizer—Funko’s glossy mini recreates the innocent lure that makes the Losers’ Club story hurt. On #780 Pennywise With Balloon, the sculpt does something clever: the smile is wider, the brows press down, and the balloon—here adorably stamped I ♥ DERRY—lands like a private joke between reader and figure. It’s one of those micro-anecdotes you only get from handling the vinyl: the heart print pops as you rotate the pose, a cheery souvenir for a town that keeps forgetting its dead.

Where the shelf really snarls is with the transformations. POP! #542 Pennywise with Spider Legs makes literal the Lovecraft-tinged deadlights mythos everyone cites—the mouth widens into a lamprey ring and those slick, gore-washed limbs flare from the torso. In hand, the gradient paintwork on the talons sells the wet, bone-deep horror you remember from the Neibolt set pieces; the vinyl sheen even does a sneaky job of simulating coagulate. Park that beside #781 Pennywise Funhouse, whose outstretched hands, yawning maw and heavy tongue are a wry echo of the mirror-maze sequence; Funko exaggerates the posture into a pantomime of hunger, which feels right for a creature that feeds on fear before flesh. The quieter base body in #777 Pennywise completes the triptych; it’s the calm before the chomp, the posture kids trust for one fatal beat too long.

Collectors love lineage, and this line is unusually clean about it. The numbering alone sketches a timeline—#472 from the first film’s wave, #777/#780/#781 stamped Chapter Two—so you can shelf the arc like chapters. Even the boxes tell a story: the 1990-styled #55 arrives in that soft-gray frame with IT The Movie at the header, a design riff that mirrors how merchandise historically reframed the miniseries as a movie in home video cycles. You’ll also spot the inevitable corner dings and window scuffs that haunt long-traveled Pops; call it Derry weathering. Out of box, the stance engineering is better than you’d expect for top-heavy heads: the splayed ruff and the balloon staff give stabilizing points that keep face-plants at bay, which is more than a few early Funko horror sculpts can claim.

Then there’s POP! Conan #28 Conan as Pennywise, a delightful footnote born of the Conan O’Brien Comic-Con tradition. It’s a mash-up that weirdly clarifies why Pennywise became a meme engine in the first place. Put an entertainer’s coiffed pompadour on the shapeshifter and the grin reads late-night monologue until the iris-free eyes kick in; the joke lands because the character was always about performance. If you’ve ever picked up one of Conan O’Brien’s con-only Pops at SDCC, you know the appeal: same body language as the film figure, but the cultural context flips from sewer to stage, proving the point scholars keep making about Pennywise mirroring whatever a town—or a fandom—needs to see.

Context matters right now because Funko’s clown wave arrives as the mythology expands again on screen. HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry is rolling out with Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti and Jason Fuchs steering the prequel, Brad Caleb Kane co-running the room, and—crucially—Bill Skarsgård back in greasepaint. The series’ backward-stepping seasons that Andy Muschietti teased—1962 to 1935 to 1908—map neatly onto the antique silhouette Janie Bryant chased for the films, which is to say: expect the Pops we’re holding now to feel even more period correct in hindsight. If Funko keeps pace, we’ll likely see fresh vinyl pulling from those interludes: maybe a court-jester riff, maybe a Dust Bowl specter, maybe a church-basement apparition that plays into the town-as-co-conspirator angle critics like Tony Magistrale and Penny Crofts have written about for years.

What keeps these toys from being just another horror row is how well they encode the character’s mechanics. The spider-limb variant doesn’t only nod to a boss fight; it literalizes the novel’s final exam on horror idea that Stephen King described—one monster wearing all monsters. The balloon sculpt isn’t just merch candy; it’s the ritual bait that sells the rule Bill Skarsgård plays with on screen: eyes that drift, voice that warps, body that freezes into a 19th-century daguerreotype until the prey leans in. Even the cracked-porcelain forehead surface, a tiny paint decision on #777/#780/#781, reads like a visual metaphor for the deadlights trying to leak through. That’s the fun of this line: hold the vinyl, and the scholarship suddenly feels tactile.

There’s also a soft truth hiding between the boxes. Pennywise works because Derry looks away, and collecting these sculpts is a sneaky way of not looking away. You arrange #55 next to #542, and you’ve staged the whole cycle critics love to underline: the friendly façade, the communal silence, the explosion of violence, the forgetting, and then the return twenty-seven years later with a slightly different face. It’s why figures like Funhouse or With Boat sting more than a generic monster would; they recall exact moments of complicity. That’s a lot of weight for a four-inch toy, but horror fandom has always been good at smuggling serious ideas into playful objects.

Practical bit for fellow hunters: the I ♥ DERRY balloon reads beautifully in photos, the spider variant commands the shelf from two meters away, and the classic #55 is the conversation starter that bridges generations—someone always brings up Tim Curry, someone else counters with Bill Skarsgård, and suddenly you’re debating performance theory over a vinyl clown. If the HBO prequel lands the way it looks like it might, with Benjamin Wallfisch back to lace nerve endings and a cast led by Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, James Remar and Stephen Rider, expect renewed demand for the early numbers and a fresh wave of exclusives. Fear, like franchises, feeds in cycles.

So yes, these are toys. They’re also a tidy museum of how a single idea—an ancient thing wearing a party smile—keeps mutating to fit whatever era needs scaring. Funko’s Pennywise family doesn’t just celebrate a villain; it documents a culture’s pressure points, one tiny orange pom-pom at a time. And if you end up rearranging them more often than you’d admit, that’s fine. Objects float in Derry. Shelves do, too.

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Synopsis : 
Strange events unfold in the town of Derry in the 1960s involving Pennywise the clown, a mysterious character who haunts Derry.

It: Welcome to Derry
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Showrunners : Jason Fuchs, Brad Caleb Kane
Executive producers : Jason Fuchs, Brad Caleb Kane, Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, Shelley Meals, Roy Lee, Dan Lin, Bill Skarsgård
Producers : Lyn Lucibellon Sarah Rath
Written by Jason Fuchs, Austin Guzman, Guadalis Del Carmen, Gabe Hobson, Helen Shang, Brad Caleb Kane, Cord Jefferson, Brad Caleb Kane
Based on Characters by Stephen King
Developed by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, Jason Fuchs
Starring  Taylour Paige, Jovan Adepo, Blake Cameron James, Chris Chalk, James Remar, Stephen Rider, Madeleine Stowe, Rudy Mancuso, Clara Stack, Amanda Christine, Mikkal Karim-Fidler, Bill Skarsgård
Cinematography :  Rasmus Heise
Edited by Esther Sokolow, Glenn Garland, Matthew V. Colonna
edited by (as Matthew V. Ace Colonna) / (as Matthew Colonn
Music by  Benjamin Wallfisch
Production companies : HBO, Warner Bros. Television, Double Dream, FiveTen Productions
Release dates :  October 2, 2025 (United States), 
Running time : 8 episodes

Photos : Boris Colletier / Mulderville