Murder She Wrote - JB Fletcher

NECA must have found a decent level of success with their Toony Terrors line, because they're now branching out beyond horror movies, under the name "Toony TV." Of course, it helps that the first one is still a character surrounded by grisly death at all times. We don't want to alarm you, but something very sinister is going on! Thankfully, if anything's afoot in Cabot Cove, you can always count on Jessica Fletcher to get to the bottom of it! Created by Peter S. Fischer and the prolific team of Richard Levinson and William Link (who had, respectively, written for and created Columbo), Murder She Wrote was an incredibly formulaic mystery show that managed to run for 12 seasons on CBS (and might have gotten more if they hadn't moved it to Thursdays opposite Friends), and then had four made-for-TV movies between 1997 and 2003, which is why the "Complete Series" release is a whopping sixty-three discs! Plus, on top of that, there's an ongoing series of books that started in 1989 and is still being published today - as in, there have already been two released in 2025, and there's a third scheduled for December. Good lord! This is one of the most successful properties of all time! No wonder it's finally getting toys. Murder She Wrote was originally conceived as a vehicle for Jean Stapleton - All in the Family's Edith Bunker - but she turned it down and so Angela Lansbury was in. An accomplished stage actor, Lansbury had lots of minor roles in film, with her only real prominent work being The Manchurian Candidate. She'd been working for 40 years, but it was Murder She Wrote that made her famous. The various Toony lines share a common cartoony aesthetic, which means you can have JB Fletcher investigating any number of iconic slashers. Just imagine: a widowed retiree puttering around her small Maine town and trying to outsmart Jigsaw! Murder She Wrote x Texas Chainsaw Massacre! Jessica gets a call from a niece or nephew who's worried about what's happening at their summer job at Camp Crystal Lake! So much fun to be had! The figure is sculpted wearing a raincoat, skirt, high heels, and a scarf. I couldn't tell you if that's based on a specific outfit she wore on the show, but it's the right kind of style for her and so looks very good. Her colors are far from flashy. The coat is that bright beige overcoats often get, her skirt is grey, her hose and shoes are tans... the only thing that comes close to "colorful" is her blue scarf, and even that is a pale powder blue. Her hair is a good sculpt of that "1980s woman of a certain age" style, but it's painted to look like she's blonde; it's close to what was seen on-screen, but not quite right. Her hair was that indefinable color that suggets it was red when she was younger, but is fading out of it by now. See, for example, Conan O'Brien today. NECA also made one of their Mego knockoffs of her, and that figure's hair was closer to gray, which also doeesn't feel right. I honestly couldn't tell you how they "should" have done it (quote/unquote), I just know it when I see it. This is not a toyline about articulation and poseability, so "Da Fletch" (as she's known in the clubs) only moves at the Springfield Four: swivels for the neck, shoulders, and waist. In case you're having trouble getting her to stand securely, the set includes a base to plug into her feet. Her other accessories include a large flashlight that can be held in her left hand, and her purse, which can be slung onto her right shoulder. The back of the package features a scene of the Cabot Cove harbor, with a sign revealing the population as 3,560... with the "60" crossed out and "59" scrawled next to it. I remember one time in school, I was at the comicshop and Murder She Wrote came up in the course of our nerdy conversation; the standard joke that Jessica is the one commiting all these murders, and then just finding someone to blame them on. Although Jess was often travelling, many of the episodes did take place in Cabot Cove, with an average of a bit more than five murders taking place there every season; in a town of 3,560 people, that works out to a murder rate of 149 per 100,000, which would make it the second deadliest city in the world, behind contemporary Medellin, Colombia, which was in the middle of drug wars at the time. (It'd still be second today, but now surpassed only by Colima, Mexico, where someone is killed every 14.5 hours - and that's mostly targeted cartel violence, not interpersonal homicide.) Murder She Wrote was a quintessential 80s/90s "mom show" - that is, the kind of thing your parents or grandparents wanted to watch, and so you'd end up watching it, too. But everybody definitely did. Angela Lansbury probably wouldn't have been Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast without the show - yes, she'd performed musicals on Broadway before, but so have a lot of people. She also used her position on the show to hire a lot of older actors, allowing them to keep their Screen Actors Guild memberships active, providing them with health insurance and pensions. She was a class act, and it's wild that she's now got a NECA toy more than 20 years after last playing the character. Only problem is, now I really want a Columbo! -- 08/03/25 What TV characters do you most want to see in this line? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.