Re: 1/6th Creature Cantina band
NICE PIC SpaceCrawler!!!!! THANKS for sharing!! What was that visit like????
For those who don't know, Rick Baker is the top special effects makeup artist in film and did several of the creatures in the cantina scene (and since has done countless other films). My older brother and I were very into movies as kids, Harryhausen films, makeup effects, classic films, etc. We spent our youth making super 8 movies. I was pretty young, but we created quite a catalog of weird and crazy films and monsters as kids. Anyway, as we got older my brother decided he wanted to do that for a living and eventually struck up a correspondence with Rick Baker, asking for tips, etc (we were still sort of young at this point). This eventually developed into an invitation to Baker's house when my family took a trip to California in August of '78.
Rick's place was full of his sculptures. It was amazing to see. I have a bunch of photos from that trip. He also had a few of the other pull-over masks used in the cantina scene there, but this was the only photo I scanned. Rick was very nice. We visited with him many other times as well (we even made a super 8 gore comedy film that has an appearance with Rick called "Bloodbeast of the Old Zoo". It gained cult status among the effects people in the early 80s, even directors like John Landis saw it and loved it- in fact Landis "borrowed" the arm dropping off the walking zombie in Thriller from Bloodbeast where the same thing happens.
Anyway, my brother eventually went on to work with Rick Baker on Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video (he's actually one of the zombies at the end, pictured below), American Werewolf in London (my brother played the wolf in half the film and puppeted the dead "Jack" head in the theater scene), and others. My brother is the guy on the far left below:
My brother also worked on The Thing and countless other films, including GI Joe, the new Tron, Pirates of the Caribbean, Van Helsing and lots of others.
Anyway- I'm sure there's more to tell about the visits with Rick, D i ck Smith and other guys, but it's late and I'm waiting for Santa to show up.
But one of these times Rick took my brother and me on the Universal studios lot and we just walked around for a while, saw the shooting set for Battlestar Galactica (the bridge of the ship) and tons of other stuff. Fun times.
And I agree- the Sideshow head doesn't look quite right compared to the original.
Sean
I've just never cared for partial environments.
