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"Master Shake told me to go in the freezer, because there was a carnival in there. There was no carnival, it was a damn freezer!--Meatwad, "Escape from Leprauchopolis"
Aqua Teen Hunger Force has got to be the funniest show
in all creation. Now, before you balk at the premise, understand that
this has got nothing to do with the fact that the main characters are gigantic,
living incarnations of fast food. The fact that their purpose in life
is to go around and solve mysteries really isn't relevant, either. This
isn't something that can be easily explained; you have to watch the show
in order to fully appreciate the nature of its inanity.
Needless to say, when I enjoy a show this much, I've got to have some physical representation in the likeness of its characters. Unfortunately, there's virtually no merchandising for the show in existence, and definitely no action figures. (Why Space Ghost can get a toy line but not these guys is beyond me.) At first, I kicked around the idea of kitbashing some of the McDonald's Changeables transforming fast food toys since they were already roughly the size I was after, but I couldn't really think of a good reason why the characters would be able to transform, and I'd still have to build a meatball toy out of modeling clay, so eventually I decided to just create them all from scratch.
Meatwad was the first one I made and the easiest one to do;
I completed him, start-to-finish, during a single night's worth of Adult
Swim programming. I wasn't really sure how to render his ground
beefy texture in three dimensions; I ended up sculpting him into the basic
shape and then sticking gobs of Sculpey to him in more-or-less random spots.
I sculpted him in the correct colors so didn't need to be painted,
but I did go back and coat him with some clear glaze to protect the finished
product and make him look slightly greasy. (I'd thought about trying
to find a way to attach some carpet fibers or something to him since he's
a little hairy on the show, but eventually decided against the idea.)
Master Shake came next, and even though he's got a fairly simply
design, he was slightly more difficult to construct because I had a tough
time getting his body perfectly smooth. (If I'd been thinking, I would
have stuck him in the freezer for a bit so I wouldn't distort his
shape every time I handled him.) I ended up baking the hands and drinking
straw first, leaving pegs at the end so that I could just stick them into
the soft clay of the body afterwards. I accidentally set the oven at
too high a temperature, and discovered that Sculpey will singe if you overbake
it; he came out of the oven with blackened fingertips. This wasn't
a huge concern for me, since I didn't have any of the right Sculpey colors
for him and planned to paint the whole sculpture anyway. (Shake pretty
much disappeared into the background during the photo shoot, so I had to
darken the picture a bit to make him visible.)
Frylock was the toughest to undertake. He was the only
one for whom I had to sit down in front of a freeze-frame of the show to
draw a workable model sheet; it was the only way I could keep track of all
those damn french fries. I sculpted his body first, baking it for about
a minute so that it would retain its shape better as I continued to work
on him. I sculpted each fry individually and baked them first, intending
to sink them into the top of the body. This didn't go as well as I'd
planned, since the fries were uncooperative and I ended up distorting the
body slightly in the process. I baked the body completely to solidify
it, and went back later and added some new clay to smooth out the
shape. All that was left was to sculpt the face and add the beard,
which represented a complication unto itself since Frylock's beard actually
extends below his head/body, meaning there would be no way for the sculpture
to stand unsupported. I ended up cutting the stand from one of my
Transformers PVC figurines in half, drilling a small hole to accommodate
the peg.
Pictured
to the left is the brilliant Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan art drawn by my
six-year-old son, Ethan. I only had my ATHF-themed desktop wallpaper
up for a couple of days when he went downstairs, grabbed some paper, and
produced a reproduction of it from memory. I think he managed to capture
the essence of the characters extraordinarily well.
Also, check out Karstens Creations, a design freelancing site that offers some very simple yet surprisingly addictive games, free for download. The link to their Aqua Teens game page is here. (My favorites are Master Shake's Grand Adventure and Plutonian Escape. Make sure your sound card is enabled to hear the clips from the show.)
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This Page Created 12/1/2002
Uploaded: 1/1/2003
©2003 Inspiration Studios
Aqua Teen Hunger Force is the property of
Cartoon Network and AOL Time Warner
