MM: Could you tell me about your education background?

I went to the University of Michigan for three years. I studied painting, sculpture and a little bit of industrial design. I then went to Pratt for about three more years and studied industrial design there.

About eight years after I left there, I went to the School of Visual Arts at night for about two and a half years studying illustration and drawing.

I had a good amount of art school and I’ve been going regularly to drawing sessions just to stay sharp. I also go out on my own and draw on site as well.

MM: What was your plan after leaving school?

I wasn’t quite sure where I was going. I always had more of a liking for illustration. I think I was aimed at becoming an illustrator more than anything else, I was always into drawing.

I could draw quite well all throughout, so I wanted to use that more than the industrial design, which I had begun to back away from .

MM: So how did end up sculpting in the toy industry?

As an illustrator, I was trying to do book covers and fashion illustration, there was a very dense, highly talented group of illustrators in New York at the time. To go into the three dimensional area, there weren’t that many people doing it at the time, it was kind of a niche business, that’s why I went in that direction. There was just tremendous competition in illustration, and there still is.

At one point I was working at sculpting for the gift industry, I was doing statues and ornate frames and and clocks and relief sculptures that were used as decorative wall plaques.

I had a little studio doing that kind of commercial sculpting as well as illustration and I noticed these toys were out there and I realized they were sculpted much like the gift items. I lived in Manhattan at the time so I circulated to some of these toy companies. I’d noticed a lot of toys in the stores.

I think I started in 1975; I did some small Superman and Batman figures for a plaster cast and paint toy just before Mego. Then in early 1976 I approached Mego and that’s when it all started to get much bigger.

MM: How did things start rolling with Mego?

As soon as they gave me the first job, they started feeding me more jobs right away because they liked what I did.

I had approached them with a photo of a life-sized head of Joe Namath that I had done for a mannequin company or ad agency, and it was a pretty good portrait. I showed it to Neal Kublan and he liked it along with the rest of the portfolio.

He then walked out of his office and he held up a picture and he said “Do you know who this is?” I said “Yeah that’s Fonzie”

(Neal) said “Yeah, we want you to make a little Fonzie” that pretty much started it right there, that was February or March of 1976.

MM: So your first assignment was the Fonzie doll?

They wanted me to do a Fonzie for a 12” version, so I made a head for that size. It was put on hold, they already had an existing one at the smaller size but they wanted me to do some others at the smaller (8”) size.

MM: The Happy Days Gang?

The Happy Days Gang. I did the small Fonzie as well but they kept the other one any way. I did a smiling one and a non smiling one and then they had the other characters, the three guys.

MM: Ralph, Richie and Potsie

Right, and I think I did another character, a little sister or something.

MM: Joanie

Yes, I did a little Joanie and Pinkie Tuscadaro. I did a Pinkie Tuscadaro and that was a nice looking doll, a nice looking wax anyway, but that was as far as it went.

MM: Too bad it didn’t get made.

Yeah, I guess she wasn’t that popular a character; she only came on once in a while.

MM: Tell me of the medium you used to make these heads.

It would be clay and then wax. Wax is what would be used to make the vinyl heads.

They would be electroplated in a tank of copper sulfate and a copper nickel mold would form over the wax and then you’d heat that mold up, melt the wax out and you’d have a negative form of the head.

That hollow form was then used in production. Liquid vinyl would then be poured in the hollow form and put into an oven for a few minutes and rotated. It would then be cured and then they’d open up the mold .It was very flexible at that point so with a little pair of pliers they’d pull it right out of the copper mold. And that’s basically how you make a vinyl head.

MM: From what I’ve heard it’s a relatively inexpensive process?

Well, it’s not as expensive as cutting steel tools but it’s relatively cheap. It can become expensive; it depends on what your project is.

MM: How did you go about getting reference materials for celebrities?

Firstly, the company would give me a certain amount of photographic reference that they were given from the licensor. Sometimes it wasn’t too bad. They were usually promotional pictures, or pictures from a movie set, but most of the time ultimately I would go to the popular magazines.

[I’d go to] TV Guide, People Magazine. if you’d get a shot of them in those magazines, generally those shots were usually the result of looking over many, many shots and it usually looked a lot like the person to begin with. It was a good representation; it showed pretty much the expression that they used and their general hairstyle.

I would also go to photograph morgues and things, places that had photo files, they didn’t have internet to get photos from then, it was much more clumsy.

Also, I would take pictures right off the television set with black and white tri ex film with a 35 MM SLR camera. I would take these black and white shots of the show while it was going and a lot of times you wouldn’t be able to get profiles in the promotional shots, so these TV shots that I did came in very handy.

The profile gives you the feeling for where the features are set in the head. Sometimes if you look straight or even three quarters, you can’t tell if someone’s chin sticks out or if their eyes are deepset. It’s very deceptive.

In those days, they didn’t have VCRs , later on I’d be able to tape the show and stop motion it, in those days it was pretty crude in terms of research.

There were a couple of instances, especially with the large Farrah Fawcett playhead where they did much more research. They offered to have shots taken of her so I gave them a two page list of how I wanted the shots to be. I wanted her to have her hair pulled back, with no makeup , shot in the round, at a certain distance and height, and lit a certain way.

They went ahead and did the shots, they also had a life mask taken of her. I had a tremendous amount of pictures and I was able to go ahead and do the styling head.

With that styling head, I didn’t put in all the tiny details, they are kind of stylized and simplified. It made the work a lot easier and I thought it came out a lot better than it might have, I had pretty good research on that.

MM: It really looks like her

It has the feel of a beautiful version of her, I would say a somewhat idealized version.

We would try to make a somewhat idealized simplification. These were for little kids.That’s who we designed for. It wasn’t so much for the grown ups so much as giving the kids a child’s version of reality.

MM: That was kind of your rule of thumb in general wasn’t it?

At the time, there was no adult market out there. Naturally we were all grown ups and looking at the pictures and the characters, but they weren’t supposed to be little super real portraits, they were really just toys. The medium itself was the toy medium.

Toys, first of all are smaller and a lot of times when things get reduced the details sort of disappear and you were trying to appeal to the kids. One of the things I did was I would try to make the figures look younger than they actually were. Let me put it this way, younger versions of themselves, slightly younger. It was an appealing look for a toy, I thought.

Also, there was an established style before I came along, it was being done very well by Mattel, who I thought did the best realistic characters in the business . They had some nice portraits of people. Now they would be considered old school or somewhat simple, but they still maintain very beautiful renditions of some of their celebrity characters.

MM: I’d have to agree, I like the way sculpts looked on toys back then as opposed to now.

There wasn’t an attempt to make specific expressions too much on the toys, there was this kind of serenity. However, I would always look for a certain smirk or a little characterization or expression.

For example, Jacklyn Smith had this very sweet little smile and Laverne and Shirley had these big broad smiles. I would try to get that in the final attempt of what I was going for as well as all the features being proper.

Today, the production methods can accommodate much more detail.The injection molded heads can handle much more detail.The rotational molded heads just couldn’t. Today they can handle all sorts of complex expressions, teeth and things, but then it couldn’t be done. The sculptors could do it, but the means of production weren’t there.

In fact, I was instructed by the person preliminary to the factory to put a radius on all the edges. A Radius means there can’t be a sharp edge , either protruding up or a cut going down .It couldn’t be a fine edge because when they rolled the vinyl around inside, it would create a very thin section and possibly tear.

One thing also, if you were to make things that are protruding. Wherever it sinks in, say in the temples or the sides of the eyes, wherever it goes in, you’re going to have more shrinkage, usually in the width.

The idea in rotational vinyls was to kind of make them more egg like, like a hardboiled egg. So you would have that tendency to counteract the shrinking of the depression further.

That was yet another reason that the heads were soft looking or simple looking compared to what’s going on today.

MM: You mentioned that you created a Joanna Cameron head for Isis but Mego just went ahead and repainted the Wonder Woman head, any reason for their motivation behind that?

It came out to be a nice head, she has a very good looking face, I never knew why it was not used. Mego said “We’re not going to use the head, so just forget about it”, they didn’t tell me.

A few years later, I was speaking to somebody and they said there was something to do with Joanna Cameron being in some kind of movie that they didn’t approve of, let’s put it that way. So I guess they had to pull the head because it was a question of that.

MM: Which Project for Mego would stand out as your favorite?

It’s hard to say as far as one favorite. I like the Big Farrah makeup center, the Kiss dolls, the Buck Rogers in the 25 th Century.

MM: That’s a beautiful line

The heads came put pretty good and I’ll tell you the waxes always look better than the finals. It’s no reflection on the people doing the production, it’s just that production in general wasn’t that great in the toy industry in those days.

Some companies were better than others, Mattel was definitely the best, but the waxes usually look a lot better. When you get something in production the paint can be off, the rooting of the hair can be off and the thing can shrink up funny, making the proportions off and it turns into something a lot less than you started out with.

I never really thought about it too much at the time, I didn’t follow up too much, I let the company handle that.

I also like Christie McNichol, I always thought I caught her littler smile. She wasn’t that popular a character but I was happy with her.

Jacklyn Smith, I liked part of her, I think her chin got smaller and shrunken in trying to make it on that tiny neck they had for [the Cher doll]. I had many versions of her and I think I may have picked one where the chin came out a little small but I thought I caught her little smile, in general anyway.

As far as the ones that were known to be produced, I liked the Lex Luthor that was Gene Hackman for the Superman 1 Film. Actually Sonny Bono. The one that came out got narrow in the head like some of the others and lost the proportion of Sonny.

The original wax, however, looks a lot more like Sonny: his real shaped head and if the head gets to be out of whack in it’s overall shape it really hurts the character.

The very first thing that I look to happen is that at a quick glance you want it to look like the character right away, and that has to do with the shape of the head and the hair. If the shape becomes too narrow, in a broad sense, it doesn’t matter how good the details are, it’s going to hurt it a lot.

MM: I can’t imagine what your least favorite would be.

My least favorite in terms of what it looked like? Laverne and Shirley, I did them at eight inch size and they are just beautiful. Then (Mego) blew them up in Hong Kong , by some mechanical method into 12” and they turned into these real monsters. Cartoonized versions of what I did, and I never complained about but it just didn’t reflect the original work.

To this day, it’s one of my biggest regrets in that people look at Laverne and Shirley and say “Gee, those are kind of harsh looking things” and nobody ever saw the original ones. In fact, I was even given two little models, first shots of the eight inch ones and they look terrific.

MM: Of all the things you did for Mego what was the one that you were disappointed that didn’t get released?

The Grease line, I did a terrific little John Travolta and Olivia Newton John. Those are great and I would have liked to see those come out. They did a good job of mocking them up, I think I may have painted them afterwards too.

I did a great Cheryl Ladd, it never got released.

I did an interesting Dracula as well, it was a 12” Dracula. He was going to have two faces, I put two faces on him anyway. One face was a mild grimace and the back face was an extreme grimace like he’s ready to really drink your blood.

His eyes would light up when he turned around on the more extreme grimace . He had a big cape that covered the back face, cape came up in back. You would squeeze his stomach and his head would rotate as you did it, he may have made a growl sound.

They only put one face on the mock up, I think it was the grimacing face. That was an interesting character, I had a good time sculpting it because they didn’t have any pictures of Dracula or anything they just wanted a generic Dracula so I just kind of made him up and I used myself for the two grimaces in the mirror.

I looked at some comic books at the time to get the expression right, it finally just didn’t go, that was an interesting one.

MM: What year was that?

That was probably around 78 or79.

Plasticman, that just started and didn’t go anywhere.I did a nice clay.

MM: That was a 12” figure right?

Yeah that was going to be a 12”. I did a Lindsay Wagner also, a 12” , that never went anywhere either, but it was a nice looking head.

MM: You did a Lee Majors as well right?

I did a Lee Majors as well , he wasn’t too bad I kind of liked what I did there.

MM: Getting off track of Mego, you did the Remco monsters, and you were called in because of your experience with Mego?

Well actually, Remco was right near Mego a few blocks away and they competed with each other quite a bit. They were both dealing in the little figures, they were natural competitors.

A friend of mine who I had worked with at Mego, he had moved over to Remco on staff and I think he put in a good word for me, at least mentioned I had done these figures. Between my coming in with a whole portfolio of figures for Mego and his recommending that they take a look, also I had done some baby dolls for Remco before I did the monsters.

MM: The glow in the dark has taken away a bit of the detail from those figures.

It pretty much takes all the detail, really, between the way they melted, all the shapes kind of melted out, the big heavy paint jobs and the phosphorescent vinyl that they used, they just lost all the detail and they don’t have hardly any relationship to the original waxes.

They do kind of resemble the characters, I would say that. I did the bodies, the hands and the feet on those things as well.

MM: They’re neat figures

I like the action of the figure, the way they bear hug each other. It was a pretty nice action, actually. I had a good time doing them, I always liked the Universal monsters. When I was doing the Mummy, I would try to make a little Boris Karloff beneath the bandages. I would try to get the look that, hopefully it’s Boris Karloff beneath the wrappings; I tried to put an extra touch in there, not just a plain Mummy.

MM: Now the Mummy looks like Karloff, the Wolfman is inspired by Chaney but the Dracula is rather generic looking.

That’s very good, hard to say, I may have just looked at a comic book. I’d have to check with my research. I may have gotten photos of the Universal characters. Probably if I had [pictures of] Lugosi I may have made it look more like him but I remember looking at that one, it looks like a simple little thing with blobs of color. I don’t like the way it came out, it’s such a crude looking thing.

I’ve never considered it, but maybe somebody changed it when it got to Hong Kong . It’s interesting that you tell me that because I never realized people could see the difference on that. It was my least favorite one.

MM: You’ve moved away from toy sculpting now to developing concepts , how did that come to be?

It was actually while I was at Mego, after about two years there, somewhere around 1978, I was around a lot of designers and I started to have ideas of my own for toys. It’s impossible to be around the toys and not get ideas.

Also, I was always very interested in simple physics, mechanisms, sort of simple science. It still continues to be a strong interest of mine today. With the idea of putting toys together I could combine the artistic ability, interest in science and mechanical things and some of my sense of humor too. Pack it all into one thing.

Many of the toys that I was interested in doing had special features. If you put a mechanism together in a simple elegant way and make it work, it was a good step toward being able to make toys. So it kind of satisfied certain simultaneous areas of interests.

Also, I’d hear stories that you could make more money at selling concepts. So there was motivation there as well.

MM: So it essentially took over?

Yeah, lets put it this way, for a long time I was doing both, I did them simultaneously. So I would do assignments for a certain amount of time and then in my downtime, work on these other projects of my own. You’d kind of nurse one with the other.

Also, if I was doing a sculpting project, having explored the different ways of putting things together with the mechanisms for a development project made me a better sculptor. If I was doing different products, having learned how things are made and manufactured from doing sculpting made me a better inventor.

Both areas nurtured the other, so I became much more capable by having both things going.

MM: What’s your opinion on today’s toy market?

Naturally the action figure market has been taken over a lot by grown men and collectors. I think it’s probably a good thing because the level of the product has become more refined.

It also showed another dynamic, that’s very, very powerful, is that the impact of these toys when they were first played with, left a very strong stamp on the children, to the extent that they’re willing to carry their interest through, all the way into their adult life.

It shows the power of the toys and the entertainment properties. I think it’s a healthy thing actually that the adults get pleasure being involved in collecting.

It’s a good thing to be able to do and it’s something that only came about in the last 20 or 30 years because of the intensity of what the kids are being presented with. Back in the fifties or earlier when I came up, the kids didn’t get a whole presentation of a character, maybe a cartoon, a comic book, maybe a toy, or a little bit of a toy, but as things got into the 60’s and 70’s, the kid was presented with a line of toys, products of all kids. [The child] is given a whole world to sink himself into and it’s just a nice thing to have happen for people.

MM: So when you go on ebay are you amazed at the prices being fetched for things you worked on?

Well I guess they’ve become sort of rare, I’m glad to see the prices on them are pretty high. At the time we did them, we didn’t know this was going to happen, we thought this would be over in a year or something. I never thought the toys in general would have a long term impact on the people who played with them as they became adults.

I think Women were ahead of men on this because the women had been collecting dolls and passing them on for many years. It seems they had a closer touch with that side of them, as far as retaining those warm feelings that they had for these dolls.

Pop culture artifacts are saved through the generations of people who are willing to keep them in good condition, which their price will reflect, and keep them in existence. It’s a means of preservation of the popular culture of the day, really.

I myself am a collector of the work of Carl Barks. He was a master story teller and artist. I didn’t have a lot toys, I came up in the fifties, but when I put my hands on one of the better copies, it has a kind of tonic effect. By just reading it, it has a calming effect, it puts you in this little world, it’s a nice thing to have happen. So, I understand that feeling.

MM: Do you still sculpt today?

Not a lot. I do make three dimensional things. I build things for the design side. I don’t get involved in too much sculpting as much as I used to. I’ve got some projects of my own on the back burner, and I am always open to the right project.

I do much more two dimensional work of my own. I’m kind of moving back towards the art side now. I’m more in that area, painting and works on paper.