INTERVIEW: ‘The Prisoner’ characters return, this time as action figures
Photo: The Prisoner 1:12 Ultimate Edition action figures will soon be released from Wandering Planet Toys. Image courtesy of Wandering Planet Toys / Provided by Superfan Promotions with permission.
The good folks at Wandering Planet Toys have built a business out of action figures for devoted fans. Their offerings are a bit atypical, which makes them that much more interesting and collectible. They’ve brought Laurel & Hardy to life in action-figure form, and they also hold the license for Nancy Drew. Now they’re continuing their work on the beloved British series The Prisoner, with a new Kickstarter campaign for “Ultimate Edition” 6-inch figures.
For the unbeknownst, The Prisoner is set in the 1960s and follows an intelligence agent who wakes up and is trying to figure out where he is and what happened to him. The series stars Patrick McGoohan as Number 6 and Leo McKern as Number 2, and now fans can purchase Wandering Planet Toys’ action figure models of the two characters. In fact, if customers purchase the set, they can also opt in for a brand-new lunchbox from the TV show. This is the third wave of The Prisoner figures. The first two waves were 4-inch figures, and these are 2 inches higher (1:12). The new toys should ship in May 2026.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with Wandering Planet Toys’ two co-founders, Gavin Hignight and Chris “Doc” Wyatt, about all things The Prisoner. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
When did you first become a fan of The Prisoner?
WYATT: I was a big Doctor Who fan, watching as a kid on the Georgia PBS station in Atlanta. Our local PBS station was doing well with Doctor Who and Monty Python, so they wound up bringing in other British programming like Red Dwarf, Blake’s 7 and The Prisoner. From the first episode, this show captured my imagination and made me a lifelong fan. I finally got to visit Portmeirion a few years back.
HIGNIGHT: I actually became a fan much later in life. I am a huge classic television fan and watched so much different television growing up in Colorado, but somehow The Prisoner evaded me. About 10 or so years ago, I was working on an animated series, and the show runner was like, “You’ve never seen The Prisoner?! You have to see the opening!” And we ended up watching the entire “Arrival” episode. From that point on I was a fan, and I must say, revisiting the series over and over again as we work on these figures has only made me a bigger fan. It’s one of those rare shows that gets better with every viewing.
Why do you think this classic TV series is still beloved by fans?
HIGNIGHT: The Prisoner was way ahead of its time, and yet timeless. It’s deeply profound on many levels, and I think as a viewer you get different things from it at different ages in your life. It’s really stood the passing of time, and I love that in every generation, there is a nonconformist, rebellious intellectual who will understand Number 6 and his plight, and that we all live in a village where the rules are rigged against us.
WYATT: Ultimately The Prisoner is an allegory. It’s like a fairy tale. Its symbols and themes are universal. This mostly isn’t true of spy shows. Look back at things like The Avengers, or Man From U.N.C.L.E. or I, Spy, or any of the other programs from the ’60s “spy-fi” wave, and you’ll see that they’re very “ripped from the headlines,” meaning they’re rooted in the politics of the time — Cold War, etc. Watching those shows now (even Danger Man / Secret Agent Man) there’s more nostalgia and less relevance because they’re sneaking through countries that no longer exist or stealing “sensitive information” that would just be on the internet now. They’re using the cutting-edge spy techniques of the time, but it’s all stuff that could be done on an iPhone today. Prisoner, on the other hand, isn’t about specific Eastern Bloc countries — it’s about an unknown totalitarian state that might or might not be your own homeland. That level of allegory means it never gets outdated.
What can fans expect from these new action figures?
HIGNIGHT: Our approach on The Prisoner figures so far has been a very retro five-point articulation, vintage feel, the toys we would have wanted when we were younger fans of the series, stoking that nostalgia. Our new deluxe figures are modern and screen accurate. They are in the popular 1:12 scale. They have play and display value with different parts and portraits that can be switched out. We love our retro collection and actually plan to make more, but we as fans also collect this style of figure and know other fans who have been wanting a very deluxe-feeling, larger collectible from the series. So, yes, larger, more articulation, more optional pieces, more screen-accurate sculpts and proportions. We hope the ultimate deluxe figures are a nice complement to any Prisoner fan’s bookshelf, toy shelf or desk.
Do you feel that the 1:12 size is an optimal one for collectors?
HIGNIGHT: Absolutely. I feel like with this scale, its options for detail and optional parts, we’ve really been able to celebrate Number 2, Number 6 and the series in new ways. I have the prototypes at home with me now, and I get great joy every time I see them.
WYATT: It’s definitely optimal for action figure photography.
Who is in your target audience for this release?
WYATT: People who are awesome.
HIGNIGHT: Prisoner fans, classic TV fans, toy collectors, you name it. While creating the retro figures we got many requests to do The Prisoner in this style, so we are happy to make it reality for everyone who has requested them. We’re happy to have them ourselves. We know there are 1:18 scale collectors, 1:12 scale collectors and folks like Doc and I who collect both scales and have no room in our homes. LOL.
Beyond The Prisoner, what’s up next for Wandering Planet Toys?
HIGNIGHT: We’re not quite finished with 1:12 scale deluxe just yet. We had planned a launch of three in a row we’ve been working on: Laurel & Hardy, The Prisoner Ultimate Editions [and] “a secret soon to be announced super awesome I can’t wait to tell you about it” figure set, and after that, we hope to dive back into The Prisoner retro for wave three, which will have some great surprises in it. After that, we’ve been working on something literally out of this world.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
