The thing about being an obsessive fan of a very specific thing is that your enthusiasm for the subject will eventually burn out because there is nothing new left to discover about it. First, you absorb it, you watch the movie repeatedly, re-read a book, watch every episode of a television series or listen to every song from an artist’s catalog of music. Next you collect it, buying up every scrap, odd and end related to the thing; the home video releases, magazine articles, posters, toys, stickers, promotional buttons, whatever. Then you research it, you start to dig for every microscopic piece of information on the creation of the thing, interviews with the artists, writers and anyone who came into contact with the thing when it was being conceived and produced. Then you obsess over it, you find the fan-base and trade information, you seek out the creators online to try and chat with them, you go to conventions to acquire autographs and anecdotes, and you even might take part in a documentary about said obsession. Then, you burn out. There’s nothing left to collect that isn’t incredibly expensive. There’s no new information to gleam from those involved in the creation, and honestly you’re getting worried that your enthusiasm might be off-putting to both those around you and any connections you’ve made to the folks responsible for creating your obsession. So you let it simmer on a back burner. You still love it, but you know you have to let it rest, or you might just destroy your love for it.
This is my relationship to The Monster Squad film. If you’ve read anything on this site or know me on social media at all this should be no surprise. If you’re just finding me and my writing, hi, I’m mildly obsessed with The Monster Squad. Even though I’m effectively in burn-out mode when it comes to my obsession with the movie, there’s a beauty to this stage of the fandom. In, essentially, letting it go I’ve found a patience that is nonexistent in the early stages of the obsession. There’s no need to scour the four corners of cyberspace looking for new tidbits every single day. Instead, I leave myself open to discovering new things organically when they come to me. Whether it’s friends pointing me to things I was unaware of, or just new things coming to light naturally, and it’s the closest feeling to falling in love with my obsession for the first time again.
For me, those new Monster Squad tidbits have been very few and far between and have usually involved rare items popping up on eBay. A couple years ago it was proof that a very rare prototype for a plush Scraps toy was actually produced and sold in limited quantities by the Russ Berrie company. And today is was confirmation of an amazing little bit of trivia about one of my favorite monsters from the film.
Back in 2013 I did a deep dive into the film on my website cobbling together all of my research and discoveries about the movie into a series of 31 articles and show-and-tell pieces. At the time it was probably the best resource of information on the film that existed online, all in one place. I was pretty proud of the work that month. In the course of gathering information for my articles I found an interesting fact that Steve Wang, one of the creature shop artists at Stan Winston studios who was responsible in co-designing the Gillman monster suit (along with Matt Rose), sculpted an homage to the original Creature From the Black Lagoon on the scales of the new suit. I actually managed to chat with Steve at the time when I was writing the piece and even though he confirmed that it was in fact true, he couldn’t remember where exactly on the suit he sculpted it. So I went through every single photo of the Gillman I could get my hands on, including going frame by frame on the blu-ray of the film to try and find it.
I could never definitively find the exact position, but based on a couple of images, one photo from the Stan Winston school archives and a screengrab from the film, I had a pretty good idea where I thought it might be. My guess is the blue scale in the image below…
Well, eleven years after I shared this bit of trivia on my old website, I awoke to an eBay listing alert on my phone that a “Rare Monster Squad Resin Head Casting” popped up. Like most listing alerts I see, I figured it was probably just the same Gillman busts that tend to pop up a few times a year which are very cool, though not actual castings from the film mold. But to my surprise the auction seems to have a legit casting of the original sculpt. The seller has uploaded a lot of high resolution photos which is nice, but the cherry on the top is that this casting captured the Steve Wang homage!
I mean holy crap! I finally have visual confirmation and it’s beautifully rendered and unmistakable. Though I don’t have $1,500 to drop on a piece like this, I’m just finally glad that I can see the homage in all of it’s glory! And it’s pretty much exactly where I pegged it to be from my painstaking frame by frame analysis. Enhance. ENHANCE!
I kind of live for the little things like this. I’ve loved this movie for so long, have researched it for years, met and chatted with a lot of the principal actors and it’s really gotten to the point where there aren’t all that many surprises left to learn about it. So the little things become huge.
Here’s a super nice look at the homage to Millicent Patrick’s original Creature design…
This truly is an amazing piece of Monster Squad history and I hope that whoever buys it makes affordable copies, because damn, would I love to have this mounted right next to my Creature From the Black Lagoon gravewalker…
Even though Fred Dekker and company could get the original Universal Monsters into The Monster Squad, there is this one tiny piece that carries over the history of that studio into one of my favorite movies of all time. And finally getting to see it up and close is nothing short of a miracle of patience.
