2020 – Mad Monster Party (Happy Crappy Halloween)
(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on October 30, 2020)
From Wikipedia: Mad Monster Party is a 1967 American stop-motion animated musical comedy starring the voices of Boris Karloff, Allen Swift, Gale Garnett and Phyllis Diller. It has become a cult film.
Let me state right off the bat that I have never seen this film, don’t know much about it and am not connected to it in any way, shape or form…………..EXCEPT:
In 1995, a very good and talented friend of mine – Charlie Stoddard (you may remember him from the Uncle Floyd Show) – asked me if I could help him out with something.
He was VERY into this type of scene and actually had the ability to create molds of the movie’s characters and create perfect resin likenesses of them from those molds.
Because he was creating a business with them, he needed many copies of each character. I had the time and the space (my old and recently-retired darkroom) and the training to create exact chemical solutions and follow strict procedures to get the job done.
“Sure – sounds like fun.”
He drove up, brought me the molds and chemicals and showed me what to do.
It turned out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated. This resin solidified REALLY quickly. I still have my first original resin creation from 25 years ago and I still find it amazing…………..and it’s NOT a movie character.
Apparently, I was pouring resin from a cup into a funnel, which I imagine was inserted into a mold. The resin never made it into the mold:
The resin made it into one-piece stop-action art.
So that’s the one item I’ve had that reminds me of that time in my life a quarter-century ago…………….until I recently found another one of those tucked-away mystery shopping bags of stuff:
And looked inside:
These are some very-yellowed rejects that I apparently kept.
Because I haven’t used the darkroom in all this time for anything (still waiting on that call from the Smithsonian), I STILL have the shirt I wore when working on these resin pieces and it’s STILL hanging from the darkroom’s inside door handle:
I have no idea why only part of one letter of “GUITAR” is still green (Guitar World was a magazine I shot for), but I think the shirt’s kind of cool-looking in a sloppy, artsy-fartsy way.
So now that I have all this newfound stuff and it’s October, it’s kind of a ready-made Halloween post, no?
On to the defective pourings (from which I’ve removed a LOT of yellow):
I don’t know most of their names, but I think we all know Frank:
……….and his lovely Bride (her voice and look in the movie were provided by Phyllis Diller):
NO idea who this is, but he has two flags behind him that say, “Big Daddy is our Leader” (Garlits or Roth?):
I think this is The Mummy:
No clue:
Don’t know her either, but these had resin-thinness problems under the arm (left) and in the skirt (right). Her sign says, “I love to go out at night – WAY OUT”:
Further research reveals that this was a 1966 Aurora kit called, “The Vampire” and I found 3 examples of finished products from the kit:
No idea who or what this is, but it’s really tiny:
Not so tiny is Francesca:
This guy looks somewhat related to Francesca in a similar non-tiny way that went straight to his head:
From what I can gather, this character’s name is Yetch and he’s Frank’s butler:
Dunno who this lovely lady is, but what a great head of hair she has! I took all the yellow out of the second pic and I think I can see fingernails in the picture, but that level of detail couldn’t really be gotten from the mold:
Finally! Someone we all can identify – Gilda Radner’s second husband:
Leftover sign, probably belonging to one of the above people/creatures:
Encore!
As the cast returns to the stage, they sing their theme song:
So, Happy (non-existent 2020) Halloween from me and the spooky cast of…………
I’ll leave you with a much happier Halloween photo I took 37 years ago.
From my site:
Greenwich Village, NYC
Grieving New York sophisticates recoil in horror at the sight of another brutal, senseless homicide.
Terribly sad.
Well……………….some of the people look happy.
Late bonus: If you read the Sears Closing post, you may recall that I tripped and fell hard on my shoulder on August 6. I’ve been going to physical therapy for the last two months (they finally figured out that I had a sprained AC joint – the same injury the Jets’ Sam Darnold received a couple of weeks ago when he was slammed to the turf).
While I was on an arm machine this week, I noticed this scene right next to me…………….interesting name:
Between the name and the happy armless pumpkin witch suspended by its neck, I thought that somebody’s got to be pulling my leg………..er, arm.
Turns out the doctor is real. My apologies, KFC (even the initials are interesting!).
On the way home from PT, I shot these Halloween-festooned homes from my car in the pouring rain (beware the scary Hackensack recycling can in the second pic):
Another happy customer who saved 20% here:
Telle est la vie à Halloween!
(Such is life on Halloween!)
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