Disfunctional

The idea behind Disfunctional was to give the world my take on a failed Frankenstein monster sort of experiment. Having worked in engineering, I am forever amazed at how quickly raw steel rusts when it comes in contact with water. I imagined if you put a regular steel plate in some guy's head, it would be rusty by nightfall. Voila! Disfunctional was born. (Plus Disfunctional is just sort of a cool word.) My intent was for him to look like he had had two plates bolted and/or screwed onto his head and had died when the 'implant' started to rust and the whole mess got really nastily infected. So the plates and hardware were supposed to look rusty, although the infection coloring makes it a trifle challenging to see. Note the plate on the top of the head. In retrospect, that may have been overkill.

My friend Randy and I actually put quite a bit of work into this one; note the custom teeth. While the polyfoam skulls we used for all of these products were stylistically very cool, the teeth jutted out ridiculously, making them 1) hard to work into the prop if there was skin over the mouth and 2) all look the same. So we started custom sculpting teeth. There actually were real screws and bolts in the original prop. I knew the molding process would pick up such details very nicely. Oddly, I ended up covering them with chewed up Model Magic to make them look more horrific, which was sort of ironic when you think about it. So it's best not to think about it.

This was one of the props that was developed explicitly for the HEDZ commercial line. After I had given up on the company, I donated this prop to the Wyandotte, Michigan Jaycees Haunted House for use in their mad scientist lair in 1998 (This prop would have looked great in a jar of fluid.) Unfortunately, someone working the room one night decided to act like an extremely violent mad scientist and this prop was destroyed. Because we never got any orders for him, no mold was made of the prop. So the only place he can be seen now is here.

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