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This was a job for (surprise) Cadbury’s, who wanted us to create animatronic theme-park mockups of the cartoon characters you see on their chocolate bar wrappers. Click here to see the ever-capable Image FX crew. My main responsibility was to sculpt the WildLife character. WildLife is a living bush who wears a monocle, winklepicker shoes and a big porn star moustache. (Listen, you cease to question this stuff after a while.) We actually got most of our reference material out of the kiddies’ activity books that come free with Cadbury’s fun packs – check out the sticker proudly displayed on my tool box: This was the plan: sculpt the characters in clay. Mould them in silicone rubber with a fibreglass jacket. Use the moulds to get fibreglass copies of the sculpts in two halves. Chuck in the mechanics, stick the two halves together, clean and paint them up… bingo, instant animatronic cartoon characters. The single cloud on the horizon: the clients wanted us to use fire-retardant resin with our fibreglass. We’d all heard the spine-tingling tales about how unmanageable and sanity-threatening the safety stuff could prove to be. However, as we pitched in and work progressed, we began to think, “you know, this batch isn’t too bad”… then we pulled the characters from their moulds and discovered our silky, beautifully finished sculpts had been transformed into scale models of the Grand Canyon! The fireproof resin had taken so long to go off (harden) that the outer gelcoat layer had all bunched up and rippled. Nightmare. (To round this little saga off, later on a crew member was welding into one of these “fireproof” shells and it promptly burst into flames anyway. Wahey… some fun.) Craig Narramore built and installed WildLife’s blinking/ talking/ bodyswervin’ mechs, and then… well, days of daubing on car filler and sanding like a crazy man until finally the thing was rubbed smooth (along with my fingertips). Luckily the clients wanted WildLife textured, and the resulting all-over spray of fleck-coat covered up any remaining imperfections/shoddy workmanship. Dave Bonneywell gave him a lick of paint, and… bingo, almost instant animatronic cartoon character. As a respite from all this cuteness, the annual Image FX remote-control car rally was well underway at this point. Bright, shiny, shop-bought models with all the decals on need not apply… only stripped-down, tooled-up machines of destruction can survive this pint-sized Death Race 2000! Come six o’clock, an uncommon silence fell upon the workshop as competitors studiously prepared their vehicles for the arena. Come ahead, I’ll fight ye. Meanwhile, this was the last crew job at Image for His Satanic Majesty Martin Astles before he emigrated to LA. As a leaving present, we swiped his car (originally as black as Lucifer’s heart and correctly attired in miniature skulls and treble-six motifs) and transformed it into a flowered-up, West Coast love buggy. Mart’s reaction upon finding it tells the rest of the story.
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