The End

The spring of '94 was a death march to the auction. We went through every set in the inventory - and there were hundreds - and spiffed them up, repairing and replacing broken pieces and putting a fresh coat of paint on everything. There were six or seven sets I had never seen in six and a half years, buried far back behind other sets. Some of them Al didn't even remember. We sort of half-assed assembled them however we could, knowing in our hearts that it didn't matter - the new owners would do with them whatever they wanted anyway.

A week before the auction Al came back to the shop and called together the whole Production Department. He stood before us and laid out the plans and described the contracted work in hand for the next four months. I don't remember at all what he said. What I remember is that there was nothing in that speech that made me want to hang around for four months. Al left and I gave my notice to Eddie.

During the three days leading up to the Big Day, we set up everything. The castle was inside the building, along with many other tall and wind-resistant things. The rest of it was set up outside in the parking areas and the lawn. Every single set we had was on display, and I must admit that it was impressive.

I know who bought the castle, because he hired me to set it up its first time out. I know who bought the dinosaurs. The rest... no clue. It was just a little bit sad to see all of this stuff, so much of which I'd built, nearly all of which I'd wrestled and pinned on numerous occasions, being dispersed to the four winds. And anything that wasn't sold was crunched up into the big-ass dumpster.

I still have the little wood tool box I made in the spring of 1988 - for the Pirate party. In it I had (nearly) everything I needed for installing a show. Almost all of it was Image property, but I had kept it close and safe for six years while the Goofies lost or broke fifty times what I had in my box... Eddie said that if I left all those little hand tools, they would go into a big box with the rest of the hand tools, and the whole box would auction for five bucks, with or without the stuff I had.

I still have it. All of it. Still safe, still useful every day. Much of it has "IMAGE" engraved on it. That and all of these stories I carried away in June of 1994. The end.

Jurassic Fiasco

The blistering hot summer of '93 (weren't all summers in Orlando blistering hot?) was dinosaur summer. Moments after the movie Jurassic Park was released, Al Caputo had a sculptor in to carve movie-styled spitters, pterodactyls, veloceraptors, a sixteen foot tall brachiosaur and a twelve foot tall tyrannosaurus rex. Eddie and I were there to help with fiberglassing and assembling. We were even empowered to make and install teeth, claws and other minor pieces parts.


I realize now that I've never explained the medium we used for sculptures - be they alligator, Phantom angels and such, X-wing fighter bodies, moray eel heads or dinosaurs. All of these were carved out of big blocks (4' x 8' x 2') of urethane foam, a dense, fragile, grainy foam that can be carved with saws, knives, sandpaper, whatever. One can also use the two liquid parts (called "A" and "B") mixed together to pour into a mold (careful, it grows to about five times the volume of liquid!) or to glue together the carved pieces. This foam has no strength once it is reduced in volume, so we clad it in fiberglass to protect it and make the surface right for painting. Being covered in urethane foam dust, fiberglass resin and sanded fiberglass fibers is the absolute best way to spend a blistering hot summer.

By the end of August we had a shop full of dinosaurs. The first time out for them was a big Jurassic Adventure party in a soundstage out at - you guessed it - Universal Studios, Florida. This included a huge thirty foot high waterfall set up on scaffolding using all of our rocks, all of our plants, all of our erosion cloth, and a truckload of other plants rented for the occasion. A truckload of union stagehands did most of the work on this party.

Now, if one did not know the true cluelessness of Alexander Caputo, with his "I've got forty million dollars so I don't have to follow the rules" attitude, one might think that Image would have gotten proper licensure before the first big party, since the party was happening at the Florida home of the studio that produced the movie from which our dinosaur designs were stolen. As it happened, however, the day after the party, a letter came by certified Special Delivery. Its return address proudly proclaimed that it was from Amblin Entertainment - Spielberg's company. It warned of dire legal consequences for the continued use of these props or the word "Jurassic" in any future marketing.

Sea World's Hallowe'en Spooktacular was the next time out, dispersed here and there along the trails through the park. They were painted so they did not so completely resemble the movie critters. There was no advertising about dinosaurs at Sea World, and a splendid time was had by all. There were no lawsuits filed that I know of.

A month or so later, one of our guys took the tyrannosaurus rex to a function in New York City. Now the rex was in two parts, the six foot tall leg assembly and the body, about twenty four feet long from its head to the end of the tail. It fit fine on the truck, but the freight elevator in the destination building - not so much. Our guy ended up borrowing a hand saw and sawing off the tail. When it came back, Eddie and I made the removable tail work well and look better.

Next trip out was a Dinosaur Happy New Year at the Buena Vista Palace. We made a section of tall chain link fence with a "10,000 VOLTS" sign on it being trashed by T-Rex, hung pterodactyls from the ceiling as usual, built a bamboo gazebo from scratch, and on New Year's Day there were three parties to strike.

The spring of 1994 was the beginning of the end of Image International, which in any case was now called Noro Orlando Associates Destination Management. The scuttlebutt was that Al's five year contract with Noro was coming to an end, and he was being squeezed out. There were other convention services companies going out of business or at least cutting loose their themed party accoutrements. Al saw these companies having auctions to sell off their stuff. He wanted to have an auction too! He did.

The last I saw or heard of the dinosaurs, they were decorating the miniature golf course out back behind the Mystery Fun House on International Drive in Orlando. This was in '95. I'm sure they're long gone.

So Many Trees

During my six and a half years at Image International, there was really only one absolute certainty: we were working New Year's Day. For several years before I got there until the year after I left, the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress had a "Vienna Woods" New Year's Eve party. I like to make up stories, so my invention about this event is that Al Caputo realized that every Christmas tree lot in Orange County had trees left over on Christmas Day. These trees had to be disposed of somehow. What could he do with them to make money? Hmmm

So every year on Christmas morning, Al and every cheap labor employee he could rope into it set out with the semi and went to every tree lot in Greater Orlando, picking up every leftover tree - for free! The owners were happy to get rid of them - for free! Unlike most Caputo deals, everybody made out on the deal. The semi, crammed full of trees, returned to the shop, cheap wire stands were screwed to the bottoms, they were flocked with fake snow and stuffed back into the semi.

As soon as the biggest ballroom at the Hyatt was free, we went in, set up the stage and installed The Vienna Castle set, put mirror panels around the room and the trees started coming in. Only about a quarter of them came inside. Early in the morning of New Year's Eve the main entrance and the drive leading up to it were closed off. Al, his decorators and his Goofies (laborers) lined the portico and the driveway with trees and fake snow. If Eddie or I were called out there it was to set up a teflon skating rink nestled in the trees. As night fell and the lighting was turned on you'd swear you were in a pine forest. They shuttled guests from the parking lot in horse-drawn carriages, and they were surrounded by trees and snow until they went home. The Florida Symphony was the entertainment, and a splendid time was had by all.

New Year's Day was the strike. When Vienna was the only party, shop guys came out, took down the set and stayed until everything was loaded up. The biggest crew was taking cheap wire stands off tree bottoms and feeding them into a chipper truck rented for the occasion.

After "O Ghost Who Walks" and then "Jurassic New Year" were added, Eddie struck a deal that we would start at 7:00, go from hotel to hotel to hotel and disassemble every piece, then go home, leaving the cheap labor to load it all out. Another win-win situation

I'll leave this reminiscence with the words of a song sung by Curtis Hayes, one of the goofiest of the Image International goofies. It's sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum.

Hyatt Regency, Hyatt Regency
Why do you need so many trees?
We cannot lean them against your walls
We cannot leave them in your halls
Hyatt Regency, Hyatt Regency
Why do you need so many trees?

Playing Dress Up

There were several occasions when it fell to me to be a costumed character for Image parties. I had long hair and a beard, so all I had to do was paint them white and put on a red suit to play Santa Claus, which I did several times. The best part of that was riding my motorcycle down Interstate 4 and watching the reactions of the other drivers as I zoomed by.

As I mentioned in the Oz posting, I wore a Cowardly Lion suit twice, once for a full-blown Wizard of Oz party, and once as a game operator in an Oz-themed carnival party. On the first occasion I was walking around among the guests, and the costume got damaged in vicious attacks by children whose parents stood there and laughed at how cute their kids were while they were ripping pieces of the costume off. Little bastards!

The best one, though, was an impromptu "change of plan" thing improvised by Al Caputo himself. See, Image International was a full service agency that would book the flights and hotel rooms and meeting spaces for your hundreds of attendees, arrange rental cars, provide transportation to and from the hotel and whatever attractions anybody wanted to visit, provide audio visual services, and even theme parties. Many many things went on in this regard of which we were not even a little bit aware, which became abundantly clear one late morning.

Al came back to the warehouse with a crazed look in his eye. "Guys! We need to clean the warehouse real good. Pull out all of our casino stuff." We had roulette tables, blackjack tables, craps tables, wheels of fortune, that kind of thing. "Hide the theme party sets and stuff and bring out all of our crates. We're having a "Warehouse Party" in here tonight, like a speakeasy kind of thing!" Alex Ostovich and I were conscripted to be gangsters, fitted into pinstripe suits up in the costume loft, and told we were working the party. We were sent to dinner early and told to be back at 5:00 in costume and ready. To our dismay, once we were dressed we were each issued a firearm loaded with blanks. Mine was a stainless steel sawed off double barrel shotgun. Both guns belonged to Al Caputo.

One of the high-ranking women up in the office, "Patty Paycheck," we called her, was married to a State Trooper, and we were told to go sit in his patrol car. He finally told us what was going on.
Image had arranged to transport two busloads of conventioneers to the "Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre" nearby - but it turned out that the place was unexpectedly closed that evening. Instead of just telling everybody what was up, we were going to hijack the buses and take them to the Image warehouse for a speakeasy casino party instead. Oh, is that all? No.

The warehouse was still being set up and decorated, the booze was being brought in, the bartenders and game dealers were being rounded up and organized - in short, our first job was to stall for time. Our State Trooper mentor suggested a brilliant plan for this. First, as the two buses neared the dinner theatre location, he came up behind them with his lights a-flashing. They immediately pulled over. I believe the drivers WERE told the plan in advance. Then Alex and I, brandishing our weapons, strolled in a liesurely fashion up to the doors of the buses and climbed aboard. Then, using our best improvisational skills, we went one by one to each passenger and demanded a one cent ransom. It was actually great fun, messing with this captive audience that had no clue what was up. And by the time we had collected a penny from each passenger, State Trooper Man got the "all clear" and led the way three blocks to the Image warehouse. When the buses were parked, Alex and I exited and each fired off a round from our guns, just to let the passengers know we were a "serious threat."

After that, it was just a matter of hanging around the party as part of the ambience. At 11:00 Al collected his guns and sent us back to the costume loft to change into our civvies and go home. Just another day in show biz.

Doctor Jones and the Template of Doom

One big ongoing thing during the late eighties and nineties was the hype around Universal Studios beginning operations in Orlando. This bled over into the theme party biz a few times when our crackerjack sales department sold "Back Lot" parties. Mostly this involved renaming and repainting old stuff. For instance, rearrange the decompression chamber from the "Undersea World," paint it dark blue and call it "The Bat Cave."

The coolest thing, though, was the Indiana Jones cave. We took our two swamp ponds and the fiberglass rocks from the "Pirate" parties and set up the two rock archways as the entrance and the dead end. At the end we rigged two pumps to create the double waterfall that that rock archway was actually designed to handle, with the path taking guests between falls. One fell into a fiberglass rock with a built-in deep pool, into which we placed bones from the human skeleton that had broken years before. Between the entrance arch and the waterfall arch we flanked the path with every rock we had in stock, which was a lot, thatched it over and dressed it up with erosion cloth, reed fencing, areca palms, ferns and whatever else there was to turn the pile of rocks into a cave.

The purchasing department provided us with bushels of large, brightly colored bugs, lizards, snakes and rodents. We placed these throughout such that anywhere you looked and anywhere you might put your hand, there was a critter of some kind. (Of course, after the first time out our supply of critters was reduced by about 75% due to theft by party goers!) Just before party time, we broke out the cobweb machines, went in and went crazy with the cobwebs.

During the party, guests could sign up to be Indiana Jones in a video taped adventure in the cave, taking a tape home as a souvenir. Very clever, really, and hokey as hell. Of course, they weren't really prepared for the reality of it: they didn't have the hat and they didn't have the brown leather jacket! Lucky for them, they had a guy (me) with a brown leather jacket for riding my motorcycle, and several fedora styles from which to choose. Saved the day again!

Needless to say, the cave required exacting placement of ponds, rocks, archways and pumps to make it work properly. So when we invented it in the shop the first time, we laid it all out on quarter inch plywood, marking the placement of each element for future reference: The Template of Doom!

O Ghost Who Walks

There aren't many of you who will get the title of this post, so I'll explain it straightaway. Years ago there was an action/adventure strip called "The Phantom" in the comics section of the newspaper. The natives who lived around where The Phantom lived and fought the forces of evil called him "O Ghost Who Walks." Well... the next big hoo-hah that comes to mind from the Image International days was our New Year's Eve party at - you guessed it - The Marriott World Center. It was The Phantom Of The Opera. Once again, Al was gaga over the idea, spared no expense, and all things considered, it was one of the most interesting projects ever. My nick-name for it: "O Ghost Who Walks." Even twenty years ago hardly anyone knew what I was talking about.



Al brought in his Whiz Bang Filipino sculptor - an ice sculpture specialist who did other sculpting on the side - to do the giant sculptures on the stage. There were two twelve-foot tall ones of horned guys molesting half-naked women, one for each side of the stage, and one eight foot by eight foot angel thing flying over the center. Eddie and I were in charge of fiber glassing them and making the angel hangable. We also put rigging points on the twelve footers, knowing how these parties go and how unpleasant it would be if one - or both - fell over. The big deal with these was the nipples on the women. We put some on, Al came through and said, "Make 'em bigger!" We put some bigger ones on, the women from the front office came through saying, "That's ridiculous! They need to be smaller!" We tried about seven different sizes before everyone was satisfied. Then we fiber glassed them.



The entranceway for this one was very unusual. Guests who were willing and able were led down a back hall to a very steep set of steps up to an eight foot high series of platforms that led across one closed-off section of the ballroom. There were concrete-looking posts on both sides with chain connecting them, making it a bridge over the sewer, with pipes sticking out here and there down along the side. There were "bridge facades" on either side of the entrance bridge. In the thirty-foot space between bridges were twenty-something floor-standing candelabras with flicker bulbs, and a gondola was parked. This looked pretty hokey when we set it up, but after the fog was pumped in, it was way cool.



At the other end was a wide and long curved grand staircase. I built that baby, and I took the time to make it really beautiful. Unfortunately, my patience with this was not shared by Mr. Caputo, who told Eddie, "Don't spend all day making the curve! Just jam some plywood in there!" Eddie ran interference and I made it pretty. The staircase led down into the main part of the ballroom, which was draped all along all four sides with black rain curtain, also known as shimmer curtain. There were more candelabras standing at regular intervals along the sides. The stage was outfitted like the cemetery scene, with ornate wrought iron gates behind the entertainment. on the stage left front corner was a raised pulpit cantilevered out so it gave the illusion that the person in it was floating in space.

The Orlando Opera Company was part of the show, with full costumes and an orchestra. I never attended this or any of the other New Year's Eve parties, but I was assured everybody loved it.

As is the case with all of these parties, seen in the stark flourescent light the scenery looks pretty lame. But you turn out the lights and plug in the flicker bulbs and the whole scene comes to life. Get the partygoers a little drunk and it's all magic. That's what I was in it for: the magic.

Oz and Az

Eddie Channell had been with us for about four months when we got the word that Ray had sold the big one! Hardee's (of all people!) were having their big annual meeting at - you guessed it - the Marriott World Center, and they wanted two big party extravaganzas. Night one: The Wizard of Oz; night two: another Hi-Tech Aztec just like the one Al sold a year previously, and the buyer in California wouldn't rent it or sell it for less than it cost to build a new one. The good news: I still had a couple of both kinds of stringers for the step pyramids lying about in the steaming heap of old set parts.

Since I had done it once before, Eddie put me in charge of the Aztec set. We hired in two more guys to work with us, and three guys to work the night shift 3:30pm to midnight. Mostly we worked on Oz during the day, except for the time I spent doing drawings of Aztec pieces for the night shift to build. We'd come in every morning to find something Aztec standing up, ready to be taken down, painted and glittered.

In addition, Al had his "whiz bangers" come in to build the step pyramids. These guys were a construction crew that Al usually called in to build things like big-ass decks and step units. Yes, they built two step pyramids in a big hurry, thanks to my stringer templates, but the pieces that needed to come apart for shipping were screwed together in places blocked from access by the outer skin. We had to rip them apart with pry bars and repair them. Big time-saver.

Al was totally into Oz. He bought ten enchanted apple trees, fiberglass trunks with faces on them and fiberglass limbs to be screwed on with the "special screws" included with each tree (1 5/8" drywall screws!) He bought a couple hundred fake purple corn plants and a few hundred big fake Munchkin Land flowers. He bought Dorothy, Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow costumes for walk-around characters (I was Cowardly Lion for two later rentals, but not the first run)

The entranceway was excellent! Out in the hallway Auntie Em's house was all black and white and grey, with a grey pig pen and grey pigs off to the side. The front porch led you to the double screen door (to make it wide enough to please the fire marshall) where you stepped into the Grand Ballroom into Munchkin Land, with everything in brilliant color. The house on that side was kind of crunched up, with Wicked Witch of the East legs poking out from under, wearing Red Glitter Slippers. The Yellow Brick Road led you past Munchkin houses, through the Scarecrow's corn field, past the Tin Woodman's house, through the enchanted apple trees to the Emerald City (green glitter.) The stage for the band was backed with the Wizard's chamber, gold glitter, complete with fake flames and smoke and a lame, puny video of the Wizard's head in the middle. Then was the Witch's castle facade, which was huge and dark blue, and back to Munchkin Land. For some reason, Al didn't go for a tethered balloon thing for the end.

We worked a thirty five hour day finishing up all that stuff, loading it on the trucks and installing it for the last twenty three. We all went to breakfast in the morning, after twelve hours in the ballroom. We noticed people staring at us, and we deduced why: we were completely covered with glitter. Then we went back at it, finishing up a half hour before starting time. We went out in the hall to check out Auntie Em. What a disappointment! She was sitting in her white rocking chair in front of her grey and white house, wearing a blue dress and snapping green beans! Ruined the whole illusion - but...that's show biz!

We went home, washed off a half-ton of glitter and crashed for a few hours, then went back at 11:00pm to disassemble everything. The carpenters, who would begin installing Aztec the next morning, unscrewed and laid down all the pieces and went home, leaving the "goofies" to load the trucks. As it should be.

Aztec was anticlimactic after Oz. Different colors of glitter. The high point came when the President of Hardee's Himself came in while we were working and told us what a great job we were doing. It doesn't get any better than that!