March 15 – March 21 (2021) – Wally On The Web

RANDOM PIC OF THE WEEK

Here’s a fun flashback to the late 90s when friends and I did parties as the gang from Austin Powers. Good times!

Another winner from the Coffee Shop Cuts channel on DirecTV (channel #836)! It feels good to discover and buy new music from new artists. Though not every track on this channel is a winner, I find some occasional gems (like the songs I’ve featured for the past several weeks here). This one is called “Caroline” from Arlo Parks. I love it so much, I’m already writing a parody of it about a certain legendary mad scientist who creates a monster from corpses. (One guess who it is!)

Monday the 15th – TORINO TUNES & TOY TIME! – At noon I had an appointment at Al & Ed’s Autosound (a legendary automobile audio service center in Southern California) to have an iPod cable installed into the audio system of my Gran Torino. The audio unit already has BlueTooth capabilities, but I found that the constant necessity of having to bring my tablet every time I drove was a hassle. Plus, the delay of having to wait for it to connect each time, and the considerable power drain on my tablet using BlueTooth could easily be dispensed with if I just had it hard wired for an iPod. But the 30 pin iPod connectors are difficult to find these days. I was lucky enough to find one on eBay for the exact model of my audio unit for under 10 bucks! I dropped the Torino off at high noon and walked over to Lancers in Burbank to meet my friends Edi and Elliot Lurie for lunch. Elliot had completed his vaccinations so he felt comfortable going out and doing things in public again. It was a great lunch with great friends. Not only was it amazing to see Edi and Elliot again, but it was endearing to be able to eat indoors again after all this time! After lunch I walked back to Al & Ed’s, picked up my Torino, and drove to my mailbox to get my packages. A package arrived that I had been waiting to receive for quite some time. It was a set of two vintage plush Muppet puppets from 1967 – Kermit and Rowlf. A collector friend sold them to me because he said they deserve to be on display in the Puppet Room at Planet Wallywood. Though he said he enjoyed the “thrill of the hunt” in the act of tracking down these rare items, once he got them they sat in a box in his garage. He wanted them on display to be enjoyed by people. And that they will. These are the first commercially available plush Muppet toys ever produced! Rowlf had enjoyed a lot of success on “The Jimmy Dean Show” back then (my first dog was named by parents in his honor!) and Kermit wasn’t a frog yet at that point. He was just called “Kermit.” Even though Kermit was in excellent shape, Rowlf would need some extra TLC in order to be readied for display condition. His plastic/vinyl eye pieces had gotten brittle over time and had cracked off, and would need to be replaced. Also, some of the fabric in his mouth had pulled away from his brown fur. My puppet fabricator Alex in Wonderland has restored many vintage items in her career, and she would be the perfect person to do the work on Rowlf! I drove the new acquisitions over to her studio and we chatted about restoring the puppet, the creation of our newest Muppet replica Prairie Dawn, and the fabrication of a 10% smaller Rowlf head for my Muppet replica that I made back in 2018. While I left the 1967 Rowlf toy in her care, Kermit came home with me. I stitched up a tiny hole in his mouth and then readied him for display. I already had the perfect Plexiglas case in my Puppet Room in which to place Kermit and Rowlf together. I went downstairs to the storage in my garage and found a small foam rubber cylinder. I stuffed his head with fiber fill (similar to pillow stuffing) to fill it out, inserted a long loop of armature wire into the foam rubber, placed it in Kermit for support, and posed him accordingly. There will be just enough room in the case for Rowlf once he’s finished and arrives home. It’s always fun to work on a new display of items for Planet Wallywood, and I can’t wait for them to start receiving visitors. I also went downstairs and started streamlining a display in my main showcase. A section of the showcase had gotten quite cluttered with stuff, so I removed a few items I was no longer interested in and took them downstairs for storage. It was at this time that I discovered that my Six Million Dollar Man 8 inch figures needed repair. The inner “rubber band” mechanism that holds the figures arms and legs together had already fatigued and snapped in the Steve Austin and Bigfoot figures. It’s odd that these figures aren’t even that old, but it must have been due to shoddy manufacturing. I took some tiny armature wire and wired the Steve Austin figure back together and redressed him. Bigfoot would be OK because he’s wearing a big fur suit which will keep his arms and legs in place. The Oscar Goldman and Fembot figures seemed like they were still OK, but I’m expecting them to break soon as well. It was an evening of tons of toy fun! Later I did some auditions and typed out Wally’s Week.

Tuesday the 16th – LONE RANGER & GLENN STRANGE-R! – Since I needed to replace a glass door on a display case that had broken in an unfortunate accident a few weeks ago, I phoned up a glass place in the area that had been recommended to me. I gave them the measurements of the door I needed replaced and they were going to work out an estimate for me. But the thought of removing the door that was still good, and transporting it in my car to the glass place to have it replicated was making me nervous. I’m so accident prone that I was certain the door wouldn’t make it to the glass place in one piece. Plus, if it shattered in transit, I didn’t want the burden of cleaning glass out of my car. I made the decision to pay their professionals to come remove the doors (the broken one and the good one) and transport them back to their facility for disposal and replication respectively. I went to McDonald’s to get some food at the drive-thru, and then I drove into Burbank to get the Torino gassed up and washed. The recent rain had left the “striped tomato” spotty and gross. I remembered a great car wash that also had gas, so I could get it filled up and washed at the same stop. The attendant came out to fill it up so I stood outside the car just waiting. A guy came up and started talking to me about the car and about how much he loved the show “Starsky & Hutch” as a kid. After the tank was filled the attendant asked me to pull the Torino forward to the car wash line. I asked him if he’d like to do it and he simply said, “I’m scared.” Yep, the Torino IS a bit intimidating I suppose. So I asked the guy I was talking to if HE’D like to pull it forward. He didn’t hesitate for a second! He hopped in and even though he only drove it a mere 25 feet, it was like he was a kid again! (I know the feeling!) The hand wash and wax job was fantastic, and I drove over to Alex in Wonderland’s studio again to drop off some lace for Prairie Dawn’s dress. On the way back home I stopped at my box to get a package, and once I hit home I did some work around the house, recorded some auditions, and did some graphics work. I also rearranged a few items in my Hanna-Barbera display case in the Puppet Room so certain items could be viewed more easily. This was achieved with several suction cups and a few safety pins. I put the safety pins in the backs of the items I wanted raised up, attached the suction cups to the inside of the side glass panels, hooked the safety pins on to the metal hooks attached to the suction cups, and arranged them accordingly. It looked great! Later I made a pot pie and started in on the Lone Ranger DVD boxed set that I purchased several years ago. I used to love these old shows as a kid, and even had a Halloween costume of the Lone Ranger one year. The opening tracking shot of the Lone Ranger racing down the trail on Silver, shooting his six guns at an unknown baddie is a visual that I’ve carried with me all these years. Seeing that opening again really took me back and made me smile from ear to ear! The series started in the infancy of television; 1949! They basically took the same stories from the popular radio shows and just translated them to television. It’s funny that they still had a narrator describing all the action, even though it was there for everyone to see in plain sight through the magic of television! I guess they were in the habit of providing a narration on the radio show, and it took them some time to realize that a narrator was superfluous in this new, visual medium. The first episode was the Lone Ranger origin story, and it was delightful to see. Though the acting was really, really terrible – it didn’t detract from the charm. In fact, it rather embellished it. And the main bad guy was played by the great Glenn Strange; best known to some as the bartender on the long-running “Gunsmoke” TV show. But he was best known to me as my favorite Frankenstein monster! He had played the monster several times in the 30’s and 40’s in various films. Though he was playing the wicked Butch Cavendish, it was hard to hate him too much because – well…he’s GLENN STRANGE! Like the radio show before it, the TV show episodes were also serialized. These are great! And one of the best attributes of the show was that they had an ACTUAL Native American playing Tonto – a rarity back in those days! Normally, back in those days, the thing to do was to dress up a Caucasian in ethnic wardrobe and make-up to try and pass it off. But Jay Silverheels is the real deal! This will be a fun set to watch!

Wednesday the 17th – CLAWS & CASTING! – Sick and tired of my cat Spooky sticking to my carpet (and everything else his little feet touched) I took him over to the local groomer’s to get him a kitty “mani/pedi” so he wouldn’t stick to stuff. I also made some calls to various actor friends to see if they’d be available to perform small roles in a historical-based podcast a friend of mine was producing. It was fun chatting with them again, as I hadn’t spoken with a few of them in a long time. I recorded a few auditions, while attempting to dodge a few loud sounds coming from outside. It was challenging. I did some work around the house, and later I sat down and started coloring some of the black and white images I had received from my Christoween ‘animatic’ illustrator Luke Ski. I decided that I was going to have a few copies printed of the first story in my Christoween series. And since Luke had already created several images for the ‘animatic’ (see it at Christoween.net) all I needed to do was to have him extract a few dozen images from his animatic and send the hi rez versions to me for colorization. This way I could include them in the book to accentuate certain points in the story. I worked all through the night, and didn’t get to bed until around noon on Thursday!!

Thursday the 18th – COLOR FUN! – When I got up later in the day, I started in again right away coloring some of the images I had received from Luke. I had created several color reference palettes that I would use to keep the characters’ colors looking consistent from image to image. This was great fun and I can’t wait to see how it all looks when it’s printed in hard copy form. I kept working and coloring the rest of the day!

Friday the 19th – MAIDS, MICHELLE, GLASS GUYS & CHRISTOWEEN COLOR! – Right after noon the maids arrived to clean up Planet Wallywood. Shortly after they left the glass guys arrived and removed the two doors from my display case, gently transported them to their vehicle, and took them back to their facility. Whatever the cost for this service was, it was WORTH it! Sometimes you just have to let the pros do it, whatever the cost (especially when dealing with something as fragile as glass!). Michelle came by after she got off work and we met my pal Sara for dinner at Bob’s Big Boy. Big mistake. I had totally forgotten that, not only was Friday night “Hot Rod” night at Bob’s, but because of the recent reinstatement of indoor dining, Bob’s would be swarming with people! We put our name on the list for a table, but the wait time was over an hour! (This was also due to indoor dining capacity being limited to 25%.) After about 15 minutes of waiting Sara suggested we just drive over to Paty’s and eat there. Michelle and I concurred. It was so nice to be able to eat inside again, even though I’m a big fan out outdoor dining. But it’s just nice to have a choice again. After dinner I drove back home and kept working on coloring Christoween images.

Saturday the 20th – THIS IS WHAT SATURDAY’S ALL ABOUT! – The first day of spring provided the Los Angeles area with a gorgeous day! Michelle and I put on our walking shoes and walked over to Kit Kraft to pick up a few items, including some wire strands that we’ll use for Prairie Dawn’s arm rods. We walked to Panera to grab some lunch, and picked up a few items at CVS and the grocery store. Upon our return to Planet Wallywood we got things set up to shoot a few video greetings I needed to do. These greetings involved all sorts of fun stuff, including some of my Muppet replicas, and even a cameo by Michelle herself! Then I did some more coloring on the Christoween images, and close to dawn on Sunday morning I made my Saturday Night Super Saint Salad and enjoyed another episode of “The Saint” from the second season DVD set!

Sunday the 21st – COLORING CRAZINESS! – The entire evening was spent trying to get all 35 Christoween images colored, edited and arranged in book form on Shutterfly. I had a fun two-hour conversation with my old friend Mark Evanier (he wrote and produced all of the episodes of “The Garfield Show”) and I put the finishing touches on the Christoween book. I only have a few more items of text to finish up and I’ll probably order the first book to be printed sometime this coming week. I recorded my auditions and submitted them to my agent. When Michelle got off work late in the evening she came over and we made dinner. I made some plans for the new week and turned in.

And how was YOUR week!!??

PIX FROM THE WEEK

Here is how the vintage Ideal Toy “Kermit” looks in the cabinet. I’m going to eventually cover the foam rubber ‘stool” with a dark green fleece.

This is me in my Lone Ranger Halloween costume many, many years ago.

As you can see, time hasn’t been kind to the plastic/vinyl eye pieces on my vintage Rowlf puppet. But my pal Alex in Wonderland will recreate them perfectly.

Here are some of the colorized Christoween images I did for our upcoming book!

I’ve been going through some of my old videos I’ve digitized, pulling out a few small clips that might interest some of my followers on Twitter and Instagram.

Here’s a capsulized video of the make-up process that turned me into Freddy Krueger for a TV commercial back in 1990.

Here’s a retro peek at the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland!

In a rare instance when the great Stan Lee had no line at a convention appearance in 1990, you can see very well how warm and kind he was with all of his fans, both young and old alike!