Tales From The Crypt 1996 Greg Aronowitz Sculpted Bust

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TALES FROM THE CRYPT You are biding on Cold Cast Porcelain sculpted HBO Cryptkeeper bust. From 1996 Sculpted by Greg Aronowitz, handpainted 8 1/2" tall. I found the following info on Greg's Blog....According to this, this is the first run of this bust. Next on board was the Crypt Keeper from Tales from the Crypt. The show had been on for years, and Kevin Yagher’s puppet host was a staple of the horror genre. I wanted to do the character reading from a tome, with a tombstone base. I happened to be working on an unrealized version of Speed Racer at the time, which was being produced by Richard Donner (Superman, Lady Hawke) and Joel Silver (The Matrix, Die Hard) who were the original producers of TFTC. Every time I went into their offices, I saw the Crypt Keeper sitting in the corner. When my contract for the license was finalized, I asked Richard if I could borrow the display piece for a few days. He was reluctant at first, because it was one of Yagher’s original puppets, but eventually he had a truck deliver it to my studio! I was able to study every tendril of rotting flesh to make it as perfect as I possibly could. One key element to the Crypt Keeper’s ghoulishness is his fogged over eyes. He has a definite cataract effect, which I achieved in my prototype by not-fully-mixing a drop of translucent white acrylic into a clear gloss. Unfortunately, the artists at the factory had a difficult time recreating this. They were amazingly talented, and I even have a hard time telling my originals from final product. But the cataracts kept getting painted too opaque, spotty, or non-existent. So I decided to paint them myself. I think there were 2,500 Crypt Keepers made, which means 5,000 eyes to paint! It took me about a week, and hopefully I will never have to do that again! But if you own a L3D Crypt Keeper bust, I painted those eyes! The Crypt Keeper was also the last of the “white box product”. When I first started the company, the goal was to keep costs as low as possible so that the maximum effort could go into the statue itself. One idea was low cost packaging. The factories offered generic white boxes for pennies a piece. We were already spending a fortune on custom made Styrofoam inserts to make sure the statues didn’t break in transport, and I was used to shipping garage kits in brown UPS boxes, so it seemed fine. Until the first batch of product got delivered to the shop. A stack of generic, white boxes. Nothing says, “Don’t buy me” like a blank white box. So the first run of product got stickers slapped on it to try and make the box more enticing. Badrock had a halftone image of one of Liefeld’s comic panels, and production designer Sean Hargreaves recreated an environment for Aeon Flux. Matt Codd did several beautiful pen and marker drawings for me to use as backgrounds, including this cemetery for the Crypt Keeper. I photoshopped it into a cover of the original comic book. A little bit about the artist " Over the past eighteen years, Greg Aronowitz has honed his skills as a special effects artist and design specialist by contributing to over two hundred films and television projects. His visual sense and wide-ranging abilities have been called upon by every major studio, and have made him a valuable commodity in the independent circuit. Greg has collected a large library of techniques to suit any size schedule or budget, having worked in every arena from Steven Spielberg to Roger Corman. His ability to deliver a rich visual style for an achievable budget keeps him in constant demand. Most recent film credits include Memoirs of a Geisha, Disney’s Haunted Mansion, Scooby Doo 2, Minority Report, A.I., Castaway, Saving Private Ryan, The X-Files, and Contact. Even on the largest of productions, Greg is often found wearing multiple hats; he has held almost every position on a film crew: From script supervisor to production designer, boom operator to sound design, gaffer to director of photography, producer to director." I am selling off an estate of someo... read more

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