The Toxic Avenger's History Explained: From Toxic Waste To Cult Legend

Perhaps the unlikeliest superhero franchise of all is “The Toxic Avenger,” a low-budget flick produced by Troma Entertainment in the ’80s. As the cult classic gradually found its audience, it spawned a line of sequels, a wave of merchandising, even its own widely forgotten animated series. Blending gory horror with cheap superhero action, often with an undercurrent of social commentary, the Toxic Avenger was the ultimate underdog hero for the late ’80s and early ’90s. But rather than falling into obscurity, the Toxic Avenger has risen from the cinematic grave multiple times since his debut, including with the property’s Peter Dinklage-led revival in 2025.

For those who missed out on Toxie, as fans refer to him, and are curious about the mutated crusader, there’s a whole history to the franchise’s surprising growth. The influence of the Toxic Avenger series has an impressive span, including with “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Superman” filmmaker James Gunn, who once worked at Troma Entertainment before leading DC Studios. But as the times change, the Toxic Avenger remains a constant, retaining the familiar hallmarks that made him the favorite of so many social misfits. 

Here is the Toxic Avenger’s history explained, tracing the property from toxic waste to a cult legend.

The beginnings of the Toxic Avenger are inextricably linked to those of Troma Entertainment, which was founded by producers Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz in 1974. Similar to many of the exploitation grindhouse movies being produced by other low-budget indie studios at the time, Troma’s initial output was raunchy sex comedies. To help make ends meet in Troma’s early days, Kaufman worked in various capacities for other movie productions, most notably working as a production manager on 1976’s “Rocky.” It was during the making of “Rocky” that Kaufman began to develop the ideas that would eventually coalesce into “The Toxic Avenger.”

Kaufman thought of setting a horror movie in a spa, tentatively titling his idea “Health Club Horror,” but turned his primary focus to Troma’s sexploitation movies that launched the studio. After producing the major studio movie “The Final Countdown” in 1980, Kaufman grew disillusioned with the big studio system, deciding to return to indie cinema. In the wake of the surprise success of 1981’s “Porky’s,” the raunchy comedy paved the way for other major studio sex comedies (as well as “A Christmas Story”). Rather than compete with bigger studios in the genre, Troma decided to pivot to horror as that genre gained low-budget popularity, with Kaufman revisiting and retooling his earlier idea.

Produced on a budget of $500,000, Kaufman retitled his revamped story idea to “The Toxic Avenger,” directing the movie under the alias Samuel Weil and producing it alongside Herz. The movie introduced scrawny, meek protagonist Melvin Ferd (Mark Torgl), who works as a janitor at a health club in the fictional New Jersey town of Tromaville. Relentlessly bullied by the club’s clientele, a humiliated Melvin falls into industrial waste, transforming him into the Toxic Avenger, physically portrayed by Mitch Cohen and voiced by Kenneth Kessler. Now with superhuman strength and ability to detect people’s evil natures, Melvin dismantles the crime ring secretly running his town.

Filmed around New Jersey, the movie leaned into cheap gore and goofy, occasionally sex-fueled humor, drawing from Troma’s past strengths. As the Toxic Avenger, Melvin takes on corrupt city officials and crooks preying on the downtrodden, with victims sometimes targeted by race and gender. For all the gory kills, including a public disemboweling of the movie’s big bad, the Toxic Avenger is an innocent social crusader. For an era full of masked slashers like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, the Toxic Avenger flipped the script by making its killer a good guy, gruesome murders notwithstanding.

Overlooked by the public commercially and critically during its initial theatrical release, “The Toxic Avenger” received a lengthy midnight run release at New York’s Bleecker Street Theater. This led to the movie developing a cult following and positive word-of-mouth that spread nationwide leading to its home video release in 1986 on VHS and Betamax. It was on home video and the advent of cable television, with its laxer content restrictions, that “The Toxic Avenger” found its wider audience. A theatrical re-release in April 1986 earned $140,000 in its opening weekend, catapulting Troma Entertainment to levels of success it hadn’t enjoyed before.

In the wake of the movie’s success, Troma pivoted its projects to primarily be horror movies, like 1986’s “Class of Nuke’em High.” However, by 1989, “The Toxic Avenger” had earned over $15 million from box office receipts, home video sales and rentals, and television licensing. This made a sequel something of an inevitability, with Kaufman and Herz again directing and producing, with the screenplay written by Kaufman and Gay Partington Terry. However, while the production proved significantly more ambitious than the first movie, it also proved considerably more complicated.

Boasting a production budget of $2.5 million, 1989’s “The Toxic Avenger Part II” has the mutated superhero take on corporate America before going global. The New York-based chemical conglomerate Apocalypse Inc. decides to initiate a hostile takeover of Tromaville, killing anyone who opposes them. Melvin, now played by John Altamura and Ron Fazio, is distracted from his hometown by searching for his long-lost father in Tokyo. Battling through the yakuza, Toxie eventually returns home to thwart Apocalypse Inc’s plans after training in the ways of sumo wrestling.

According to Fazio’s biography on IMDb (that he apparently wrote himself), Altamura was fired during filming on “The Toxic Avenger Part II,” with Fazio completing his performance, though a significant portion of both sequels retains Altamura’s scenes. Filming locations included New York City and Tokyo, showcasing how far Troma had come since the first movie, though these lengths would go unappreciated. “The Toxic Avenger Part II” only earned $792,966 at the box office, with fan response more muted than its predecessor on home video. Despite these setbacks, Kaufman and Herz discovered they had filmed enough material for another movie, leading to rapid development at a third installment.

Repurposing the unused footage originally intended for “The Toxic Avenger Part II,” Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz created the sequel “The Toxic Avenger Part III: The Last Temptation of Toxie.” Also released in 1989, nine months after its predecessor, the movie has Toxie struggling to pay the bills after cleaning up Tromaville. Agreeing to become spokesman for Apocalypse Inc., Toxie discovers the corporation’s chairman is actually Satan (Rick Collins) in disguise. In a grand contest between Toxie and the Devil, the two engage in a series of video game-inspired challenges for the fate of Tromaville and Toxie’s soul.

Like the preceding movie, “The Toxic Avenger Part III” failed to recapture the magic of the first movie and was met with a lukewarm reception. During its theatrical run, the movie earned $363,561 at the box office, cementing a law of diminishing returns for the franchise. With the fans not turning out for the sequels as much as Troma had hoped, it decided on alternate avenues to keep the franchise alive. During an era when many of its popular contemporaries received animated shows, it was time for Toxie to go cartoonishly family-friendly.

As the franchise’s popularity diminished in theaters, Troma decided to reposition the Toxic Avenger for wider audiences through animation. Troma had some experience working with animated projects, which later included handling the animated masterpiece “My Neighbor Totoro” for its North American distribution in 1993. But 1991’s “Toxic Crusaders” was primarily a Troma project rather than licensing a pre-existing property, adapting the Toxic Avenger as a family-friendly aspirational figure. Toxie’s origins were reimagined in a far less gruesome manner for the 13-episode series, while the sex and violence from the movies were obviously excised completely.

Like most of the socially conscious cartoons of its era, including the preceding year’s “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” “Toxic Crusaders” carried a strong environmental message. Toxie (Roger Bumpass) led a team of similarly mutated heroes, each with their own powers, against a rotating roster of supervillains threatening Tromaville. These sinister plans often involve unleashing heavy pollution throughout the town, with Toxie and his friends ready to clean things up. Though only lasting a single season, “Toxic Crusaders” helped keep the franchise alive into the ’90s, introducing it to younger audiences, while its impact would be explored elsewhere.

With “Toxic Crusaders” opening the Toxic Avenger franchise to a younger generation, Troma capitalized on this heavily through merchandising. Troma licensed “Toxic Crusaders” to Marvel Comics for an eight-issue comic series as a tie-in to the animated series, keeping in line with the tone and content from the show. Given the perceived cross-brand appeal as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Playmates Toys, which also handled the TMNT action figures at the time, gained the toy license for “Toxic Crusaders.” A side-scrolling beat’em-up game published by Bandai was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy in 1992, along with a Sega Genesis port published by Sega.

Like many animated properties of its time, “Toxic Crusaders” saw its merchandising extend to everything from trading cards to a board game, broadening the brand’s wider awareness. While this merchandising push kept the Toxic Avenger franchise active beyond the end of “Toxic Crusaders,” its momentum was short-lived. A second line of “Toxic Crusaders” action figures was planned by Playmates Toys, but quietly canceled when it became clear the show wouldn’t receive a second season. This led to a lull in franchise activity for the first time in its history that subsisted for the majority of the ’90s.

Over a decade after “The Toxic Avenger Part III,” Troma produced 2000’s “Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV,” co-written by Kaufman and Herz, with Kaufman directing. The movie has Toxie (David Mattey) transported to a morally inverted version of Tromaville (Amortville), while his evil double, the Noxious Offender, replaces him. As Toxie searches for a way to return home, Noxie terrorizes Tromaville, killing the mayor and battling a new group of heroes in town. This leads Toxie’s wife Sarah (Heidi Sjursen) to become pregnant with Toxie and Noxie’s twins as the fate of Tromaville hangs in the balance.

Certainly an improvement over the preceding two sequels, “Citizen Toxie” is also the franchise at its most mean-spirited in terms of its subject matter. The movie opens with a school shooting, relatively played for laughs, while the subsequent lowbrow gags feel especially sadistic this time around. The sequel includes James Gunn in a supporting role at a time when he was still working at Troma while trying to remake horror classics and adapt Scooby-Doo in live-action. Like the original movie, “Citizen Toxie” would find its success with the home video market, giving the Toxic Avenger its second wind.

Soon after the release of “Citizen Toxie,” Kaufman hinted at plans for a sequel, tentatively titled “Toxic Twins: The Toxic Avenger V.” As the working title suggested, the movie would’ve centered on Toxie and Sarah’s twins moving forward. After years of being stuck in various stages of development, Troma announced screenwriter Collyn McCoy would write the sequel’s script in 2010. In the accompanying press release, Kaufman gave McCoy his blessing to write the screenplay, expressing excitement in what the writer could bring to the franchise.

However, plans for a direct sequel to “Citizen Toxie” began to stall out as the franchise began exploring the possibility of a full cinematic reboot. Over the years, Kaufman maintained hope that a direct follow-up would still occur, claiming the script was complete as recently as May 2018. Kaufman provided more details about the planned sequel, elaborating that it would take place 20 years after “Citizen Toxie,” with Toxie and his mutant family traveling to Chernobyl. The proposed sequel was quietly shelved as the franchise reboot gained more momentum and the backing of larger studios.

One unlikely aspect of the Toxic Avenger franchise that has seen surprisingly robust success is a stage musical adapting the original 1984 film. Written by David Bryan, with the songs written by Bryan and Joe DePietro, the musical reimagines Melvin as an ecologist trying to save Tromaville from pollution. Reborn after being dumped in toxic waste as the Toxic Avenger, Melvin fights the Mayor and her army of polluters from trashing Tromaville. Melvin’s ascension into a superhero role is coupled with his budding romance with the town’s librarian Sarah, who is attracted to Melvin’s earnest idealism.

Debuting in New Jersey in October 2008, the Toxic Avenger musical premiered Off-Broadway six months later where it enjoyed critical success. This led to productions of the musical around the country, eventually spreading to productions in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Critics praised the show for capturing the goofy sensibilities of the movies, while making the story and its gags palatable for theater-going regulars with an interest in something zany. Given its inherently campy qualities, perhaps the Toxic Avenger was best suited as a musical all along, we just didn’t make the connection.

A decade after “Citizen Toxie,” a planned Toxic Avenger remake was announced as being in development by Original Media, with prolific screenwriter and producer Akiva Goldsman among the producing partners. Proposed to have a more family-friendly tone than its cinematic predecessors, Arnold Schwarzenegger was approached to star as a mentor to Toxie, but dropped out to appear in “Terminator Genisys.” By 2016, Conrad Vernon signed on to direct the remake after directing that year’s adult animated movie “Sausage Party.” However, this version also fell into development hell as the remake project quietly lost its momentum once again.

It wasn’t until Legendary Entertainment scooped up the rights to the Toxic Avenger in late 2018 that the project began to gain traction again. The change in studios also saw the welcome return of Kaufman and Herz, who had their producer positions on the remake restored. Filmmaker Macon Blair landed the directorial gig three months later, signing on to both write and direct the remake. After over a decade of delays and creative changes behind-the-scenes, principal photography on the Toxic Avenger remake began in June 2021 and wrapped filming the following August.

The remake premiered in September 2023 at Fantastic Fest, with Peter Dinklage’s performance as the new Toxic Avenger praised by critics. Dinklage plays Winston Gooze, a single father and janitor who is summarily dunked in toxic waste created by a sinister corporation. Transformed into the Toxic Avenger and armed with his trusty mop, Winston takes on nefarious corporate bosses with no moral qualms about trashing the Earth. Honoring the earlier movies, the remake isn’t family-friendly at all, celebrating the gore that made the franchise a cult classic, right down to guts being pulled out of a butthole.

But even in completion, the Toxic Avenger remake ran into a fresh set of problems, specifically in regards to its wide distribution. Potential distributors were reportedly concerned that the movie was too deliriously gory to support a substantial enough theatrical release. It wasn’t until March 2025 that Cineverse and Iconic Events Releasing teamed up for an unrated theatrical run for “The Toxic Avenger” that same year. Given the studio and distributor’s past success releasing the “Terrifier” movies, “The Toxic Avenger” was another collaboration that made perfect sense.

For over 40 years, the Toxic Avenger has embodied the social misfit spirit not of its mutated superhero but the creative minds that brought him into existence. As grindhouse cinema died out in theaters across the United States in the ’80s, it was Troma’s gruesome crusader that kept those sensibilities alive and well. Beyond sleeper box office success, the Toxic Avenger signaled that movies could thrive in the home video market and connect with the audiences that eluded them theatrically. Just as the meek Melvin became a powerhouse outmatching the popular kids, the Toxic Avenger proved not all superhero movies needed to come from major studios.

The Toxic Avenger gave Troma Entertainment the boost it needed to stay alive into the 21st century as its contemporaries closed shop. The studio gave plenty of young actors and filmmakers their own start in the industry, including launching James Gunn’s career. The Toxic Avenger is the quintessential schlock superhero underdog and it’s something that has endeared the franchise to fans for generations. With a fresh remake finally getting the wider spotlight it deserves, hopefully its legacy will continue to grow.