A rant about celebrity impressions

King of the impressionists: Rich Little at the Laugh Factory.

Let me say right off the bat that I have always been fascinated with celebrity impressions and the people who do them. From a very young age, I always looked forward to seeing impressionists when they appeared on variety shows or talk shows. Johnny Carson and David Letterman booked a lot of celebrity mimics over the years, and I was grateful to them for that. Rich Little, Frank Gorshin, Fred Travalena -- these were my boyhood heroes. Sketch shows like SCTV, Saturday Night Live, and In Living Color were always good showcases for celebrity impressions, too, with people like Dana Carvey and Darrell Hammond specializing in aping the rich and famous.

It must be weird and a little lonely being a famous impressionist. No one cares about you. They just care about the characters you do. It's like being a ventriloquist: Your act requires you to all but suppress your own personality. Ever notice how, in most ventriloquism acts, the human always has a very bland personality, and the dummy gets all the jokes? It's the same way with mimics. When they aren't in character, they're the saddest, most boring people ever.

Anyway, celebrity impressions are alive and well in the age of YouTube. Lots and lots of people do them. But it's devolved into a parlor trick. People don't even bother coming up with funny things for celebrities to say and do. They just copy the voice and mannerisms, and that's it. Well, I say, that's not good enough. Here's a YouTube rant on the topic. It's not meant to be an attack on anyone in particular, despite that angry-sounding title.

Celebrity Halloween Masks: A Primer

The Point Break gang in their presidential masks. Does this arouse you in any way?

Blame it on Point Break. Without that popular 1991 thriller and its quartet of bank robbers disguised as, respectively, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Lyndon Johnson, the phenomenon of presidential Halloween masks would not be as prominent as it is today, in my opinion. The fad didn't start with Point Break, obviously, but Katherine Bigelow's film kept it going far beyond all reason. As it is, the small-but-vital industry of latex masks designed to look like rubbery, hollow-eyed likenesses of famous people is still dominated to this very day by prominent politicians: presidents, ex-presidents, presidential candidates, and even a couple of powerful governors and congressmen. I wanted to do a little article about "celebrity Halloween masks," but I kept running into the same few faces over and over. It doesn't really matter which site you're exploring. When it comes to masks based on famous people, presidents and presidential wannabes rule all. Pretty much every Chief of State from Kennedy to Obama is represented in this form. The best you can hope for is a really off-the-wall, inaccurate likeness. Take this truly awful so-called "George Bush Sr." mask, which looks to me more like Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The thing on the left is supposed to be George Bush, Sr. The thing on the right is Flea.

Aside from anomalies like that, what will you really find if you go shopping for celebrity Halloween masks in 2015? Exactly what you'd expect: a lot of Obamas, Hillarys, and Trumps, a handful of Chris Christies and Arnold Schwarzeneggers, plus some leftover Mitt Romneys, John McCains, Sarah Palins, and even a few stray Newt Gingrinches if you really go looking. Because of his marital proximity to presumptive Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton is back in a big way as a mask this year. Among the other ex-presidents, Richard Nixon is still the most popular, of course, but there are a surprising amount of Reagan masks, too. Dubya's still up there in popularity. Bush, Sr., JFK, and Carter are less common but not unheard of, while LBJ is relatively scarce. And as for Gerald Ford masks? Sorry, Ger, but those are strictly Ebay collectibles in 2015. There are plenty of Rob Ford masks, though, in honor of the buffoonish, crack-smoking ex-mayor of Toronto. In case you're planning to do a hyper-complete Point Break remake with a nine-man robbery team, here are all the presidents from Kennedy to Bush II as Halloween masks.

American History Latex: Nine ex-presidents as Halloween masks.

That'll stick with you for a while, won't it? Yep, it's difficult to get those images out of your mind. Once seen, they cannot be unseen. You'd think that presidential Halloween masks were scary enough on their own, but there is a weird sub-trend happening in this sector of the industry: rendering the politicians as literal monsters from horror movies and TV shows, often zombies, but occasionally vampires and Frankenstein monsters, too. In case you've decided never to sleep again, here's a selection of those types of masks. In this grouping, you'll see zombie Bill Clinton, two different zombie Hillarys, a couple of zombie Obamas, vampire Obama, zombie Dubya, and my personal favorite, Reaganstein. All are available to those with valid credit cards. As Peter Sellers put it in Dr. Strangelove, "It requires only the will to do so."

These monster masks are most definitely NOT a graveyard smash.

Okay, then. There's that. But what about non-political celebrity masks? Do they exist? Eh, sort of. Back in 2010, as you no doubt remember, there was a very messy, widely-publicized power struggle going on in late night television, and this led to a mini-boom in the Halloween mask industry. Of course, the mask makers didn't have the right to use the names of the actual combatants, so a clever manufacturer called Faces by Rubies came up with generic aliases. Jay Leno was "Motor Mouth," David Letterman was "Talk Show Host," and poor Conan O'Brien was "Ex-Talk Show Host." This kind of sly gamesmanship is common in the Halloween costume industry, i.e. "We're not gonna use the real name, but you and I both know who this is supposed to be." The masks themselves were appropriately hideous and bore only a passing resemblance to the real-life comedians on whom they were modeled:

Let this image stay with you throughout the years, my darlings.

Conan O'Brien, in particular, took issue with the appearance of his wizened-looking mask. In a YouTube video uploaded shortly before the debut of his TBS talk show, the ex-Tonight/Late Night host complained: "I look like a burn victim. This is just horrible. This is the face of a 95-year-old man. This is a John McCain mask that they repurposed and slapped some Howdy Doody hair on." O'Brien revisited the mask in his own likeness in 2012, when as part of a Conan segment, he visited a costume shop and found the forlorn "Ex-Talk Show Host" mask among the store's wares. As a clerk giggled and cringed nearby, O'Brien read the description on the package: "Life-like replica of a 66-year-old man-child. Watch him desperately try to win your approval." O'Brien described this text as "very accurate" and then donned the mask himself to deliver a delusional monologue: "I'm still on the air! Why are you all laughing at me? I used to be on network!" This, in turn, led to a bizarre sequence in which the female clerk donned a Conan mask as well and the two Conans pretended to make out as "romantic" music played on the soundtrack.

Apparently, nothing in popular culture has captured the imagination of the Halloween mask industry since the Great Talk Show Wars of 2010. Well, that's not quite true. Charlie Sheen's druggy, hooker-y shenanigans in 2011 inspired a number of masks as well. But that was pretty much it. Frankly, I'm disappointed. There are at least two stores in my neighborhood with a wide variety of Halloween costumes for sale, and I visited both of them hoping to see a fresh selection of celebrity masks. You know what I found? A few politicians and pretty much nothing else. No doubt about it, the industry is in a slump. I was, however, encouraged to see that my local Party City still had a wonderfully creepy mask based on Jim Parsons' popular Sheldon Cooper character from The Big Bang Theory. Spend a good, long time staring at that eerie rubber face. Doesn't that look less like a lovable sitcom nerd and more like someone who would break into your house at night and slit your throat as you slept? Bazinga indeed.

This is supposed to be Jim Parsons, not Sam Donaldson.

P.S. I dug around a little online and found a second Sheldon Cooper mask for sale. This, I'm sure you will agree, is no improvement.

The last thing you see before you die.

Bad MS Paint Art: Celebrities from memory

One of my abstract works made possible by MS Paint

 
Of all the advances of the so-called Computer Age, certainly one of the greatest is Microsoft Paint, that most auspicious of digital time-wasters. While the programmers who created Power Point, Word, and Excel will certainly spend several lifetimes in Hell atoning for their technological sins, the creator of Microsoft Paint has an express ticket to Heaven. At least that's how I see it. I have spent countless, contented hours scribbling away on MS Paint. It's remarkably therapeutic and relaxing. Unfortunately, this delightful application did get me into a bit of trouble once. A little over a decade ago, you see, I was a customer service representative for a major American automobile manufacturer. Let's say the name rhymes with Schmeneral Schmotors. Anyway, before we were allowed to take calls from irate customers, we had to attend a month-long training course which was held in a small classroom on the property. We each had computers at our desks, and our instructor stood up front and lectured. I confess that I frequently got bored during the lessons and started using my computer to draw crude likenesses of Fred Flintstone and Bart Simpson. Well, apparently one of my fellow students ratted me out to the teacher, and I was briefly and gently chastised by her. Oh, remind me to tell you about this woman sometime. She was something else! My guess was that she was some sort of cyborg or replicant, but I have no proof of this. Her name was Nina, but she pronounced it "Nine-a." Can you beat that?

But let's get back on track. All these years later, I still love MS Paint. I've used it to create every last Zomby cartoon, for instance, and I still while away the hours doing little abstract designs whenever I am bored, which is frequently. Lately, I've had the idea of trying to draw various celebrities from memory. I thought I could turn it into some kind of parlor game -- kind of a variation on Pictionary or Win, Lose, or Draw. Anyway, here are a few examples:

Michael Jackson

Prince

Hulk Hogan

Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean

Benjamin Franklin

As you have probably guessed, I normally pick celebrities who already have a cartooonish, outsized image and who can be reduced to a few outstanding physical characteristics. So then I added a little twist to the game: I would draw less obvious celebrities from memory, then redraw those same celebrities after doing some photo referencing and compare the results. Here's how those turned out:

Anne Hathaway

Alfred Hitchcock

Michael Douglas

You might be wondering what the point of this article is. Frankly, there isn't one. But it's been a while since I posted anything to this blog, and I had all these pictures saved to my hard drive and decided to get some mileage out of them. Hope you enjoyed.

A gallery of grotesque celebrity puppets from "Spitting Image" (1987)

A group shot of royal puppets from Spitting Image

England's bizarre satirical puppet show Spitting Image ran for an astonishing 132 episodes on ITV from 1984-1996. With its extremely topical parodies of politics and show business, the program was something like our Saturday Night Live... only with a much nastier edge and with all the celebrity parts being played by foam and latex doppelgangers of the rich and famous. These three-dimensional, often unflattering caricatures became the show's trademark. Although the original British series never quite caught on in the States, the puppets did have a brief window of notoriety in America thanks to their appearance in the "Land of Confusion" video by Genesis in 1986 and a few prime time network specials. Although America's interest in the show was short-lived, the fad did manage to produce at least one souvenir book. 

In 1987, Harcourt Brace Jonavich published Spitting Images, a collection of photographic portraits of some of the puppets, with accompanying text by National Lampoon's Sean Kelly. In the interest of preserving pop culture history, I have decided to scan some of the better ones. The captions are directly from the book. The photos are by John Lawrence Jones

Bette Midler: America's Happiest Camper

Bruce Springsteen: For unto Us a Savior is Born in the U.S.A.

Johnny Carson: He Do Re-run-run-run, He Do Re-run-run

Bill Cosby: Call Him a Doctor? Okay. He's a Doctor.

Clint Eastwood: Dirty Harry Says, "Have an Ice Cream. Or Else!"

Jack Nicholson: Not Invited? But I'm Always Invited!

Mick Jagger: Rolling Stone Youth Formula: Removes Lines, Wrinkles, Moss!

Muammar Al-Qaddafi: Radical Sheik

Leonard Nimoy: To Be Spock or Not To Be Spock? That Is the Question.

Pee-wee Herman: Disney Just Drew Mickey Mouse. Pee-wee Is Mickey Mouse!

Prince Charles: The Dunce and Future King

Richard Pryor: A Blazing Talent Gone to the Dogs

Queen Elizabeth: A Scepter is Haunting Europe

Ronald & Nancy Reagan: What Did the President Know and When Did She Know It?

Sylvester Stallone: All He Wants Is for His Country to Love Him As Much As He Does

Barbara Streisand: The Biggest Star So Far (By a Nose)

Margaret Thatcher: A Tory Party Animal - A Minister in Her Prime

Woody Allen & Mia Farrow: Hanna and Her Sisters Meet the Brothers Karamazov

If you enjoyed this article, here's the sequel.

Crude MS Paint Portraits of Celebrities!

My attention span has gotten so bad lately. I can't even watch a TV show anymore and give it my full attention. Recently, my TV-watching hobby has been creating very crude, childlike portraits of celebrities in the venerable MS Paint program.

Here are a few examples. See how many you can identify.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Answers (sort of) in the comments section!