Really Cheesy Facade

An old photo find cleaning the garage. Made this with crackers and cheese whiz for Fox Family's The Basement. One of the best parts about working on a network kid's show is mature people have important discussions about silly props like this. There are many issues of concern... size, shape, cracker colors and cheese adhesion strength.

Fox Family Channel: The Basement

The bookend to the Fox Family Channel show- Morning Scramble (which I previously posted about here) was The Basement. This was a more pre-teen oriented interstitial show between cartoons in the afternoon. It had 3 hosts and puppet characters. This set, as with the Morning Scramble, was designed by Wayne White. I was the day to day Art Director.

Midway in production I was asked to design a new area on the set to change things up from the often used center stage couch. I came up with a wonky sewer pipe bar idea that would come off a rusty pre existing boiler set piece.


I was a little disappointed that time and money prohibited making the clean elbow joints and askew lines of what I sketched above, but I liked the final piece very much.

The main body was constructed from sono tubes. The flat top was thick plexi, covered in green tinted resin. For an oozing liquid effect it was under lit with chasing lights. The detailing was a loose & freeform process using all sorts of junk ...trash can lids, pvc pipes, plastic bowls and old fixtures. During the build I revised the large "shut off" wheel into a side table. This allowed the hosts to be fully seen and give a good place for puppeteers to hide behind the bar.

Fox Family Channel: Morning Scramble

In the late 90's I worked on a kid's show called The Morning Scramble for the FOX Family Channel which had been the Family Channel a year before and is now known as the Disney Family Channel...still with me? OK, when it was FOX, the Morning Scramble was an interstitial show in the AM between cartoons hosted by Mati Moralejo and puppet characters.

The set was designed by Wayne White, production designer of Pee Wee's playhouse, Beakman's World and Shining Time Station. I was first hired to make some of the unique set dressing needed. Working with Wayne was one of the best professional experiences I've ever had. It got better when asked to stay on as the day to day art director once Wayne's job was done. It was a dream job. Everyday I had to design and make some crazy and fun things.

Foamcore, hot glue, acrylic. Click image to enlarge.


Foamcore, hot glue, acrylic. Click image to enlarge.


Click image to enlarge.

Cereal boxes became a usual prop for segments and gags. Because we could not see or say brand names the show producer, Marrisa, made up some funny fictional product names. Captain Fructose was one. At first he was just a generic superhero character I painted on a box. Over time Marrisa began to write Capt. Fructose cereal into the shows as our host's "favorite" breakfast food. I got to develop him, even making an action figure for one gag.

One bit needed a Capt. Fructose comic book. Even though the details of each page would never be seen, I went ahead and drew a small adventure for the fun of it. Far from my best work. It was drawn in haste with magic marker and no concern for punctuation or spelling (as usual). Reminds me of the comics I did for classmates in grade school.

Click pages to to enlarge.