This is the latest in a series (of indefinite length and regularity) of blog posts memorializing cancelled toys. We finish our coverage of SOTA's Darkstalkers with a pair of repaints.
Even when they were doing Street Fighter, SOTA understood that repaints were a necessity to cover the cost of such elaborate toys, so it's no shock they planned to do the same with Darkstalkers.
First we have a way for them to reuse the Dmitri Maximoff molds, Donovan. Or more properly, "Dee." Introduced for Darkstalkers 2, Donovan was a half-human vampire (like Blade) who hunted the other monsters. In his original ending, Donovan has defeated so many Darkstalkers that he loses control and fully gives in to his vampire half. When Capcom released a PS2 collection of all the games in 2005, they introduced "Dee" as a new unlockable character in Darkstalkers 3. He was just Donovan's head on Dmitri's body, and so this toy would have been as well.
(If you look in the background behind Jedah's wings, you can see the back of this figure, clearly showing Donovan's braid and sword, in case there was any question about who it was meant to be.)
The second repaint would have required some heavy remolding, as well. It's Morrigan's little sister, Lilith. When Morrigan proved too powerful to control, her father split her soul into three pieces; Lilith is the physical embodiment of one of those thirds.
When the character was being developed, the game's creators were aiming for "non-binary," but eventually ended up leaning slightly more toward female - though still fairly androgynous. That would never work with Morrigan's bust-tacular design, so Lilith would have had a new chest in addition to a new head. (Or possibly "new hair," depending on how the figures would have been assembled.)
SOTA had great plans for Darkstalkers, and the line really could have shined some light on a somewhat forgotten game, but factors conspired to mean that never came to be.
