The Adventures of Elliot Wangley

What's the deal with this section of the site?

Well, if you're like me, you're interested in the backstory of where things come from. If so, read on:

Elliot Wangley began life as a fan film made in 1987 by some friends and me. That's him up there. The "live action" version. "The Spy Who Bugged Me" was a James Bond parody film starring yours truly as Elliot Wangley, an incompetent spy who never gets to save the day because of the next spy above him on the list, who never fails.

The idea for the movie sprang from a short scene in that year's James Bond movie, "The Living Daylights." In the scene, Bond refuses to take a mission and the threat is made that the mission will be given to 008. Mark McCrary, Mark House and myself (who will all go by their last names in this text) saw the movie while visiting Chicago and quickly latched onto this. Since Bond frequently took missions because smaller-number agents had failed, we realized that poor 008 would *never* get any missions because Bond would never fail. The idea seemed ripe and we'd abandoned our first fan film after we accidentally lost an entire day's footage, so we returned home anxious to make it happen.

The basic plot and characters were scribbled on pieces of paper in the breakroom of the department store that both House and I worked at the time. We figured 008 would have to be a weenie and the name had to match. "Elliot" seemed nicely off and "Wangley" was a garbling of a couple of words used in one of Douglas Adam's "Liff" words. (If you really care, the words are in the definition of "Botley.")

What solidified the character, was a single line of dialogue spoken by Ringo Starr in the Beatles' movie "Help!" Paul discovers Ringo has been painted red again and says so. Ringo replies: "I know. I'm starting to like it." That was the inspiration for the voice. Not so much an imitation of Ringo, but of Ringo's delivery of that line. With that voice locked down, the character came to life.

For some reason, that was a productive summer and along with our comic book projects, we were doing a radio series on the local college station. Since I was writing that, I turned the writing of the movie over to McCrary, who also took on directing the movie and playing our James Bond. House took on the role of Arnie Puffield and added more than his fair share to the match. Stuart Martin as "Oddball", Dena Blackburn as "Lips O'Plenty", and David Wagner as "M" rounded out the cast. Doug Newman sacrificed a great deal of his time to edit the movie and took a turn as "Q." We had a lot of fun and had the satisfaction of finally having finished a film.

Fast-forward to 2002, 15 years later, and McCrary and I start talking about taking the old footage from the film and making a long-lasting digital version of the movie on DVD. While joking about making a "Special Edition," I gave thought to the idea of doing an animated title sequence. As I began working on it, the idea occurred that I could do episodes of an animated Elliot Wangley. This sounded like a fun idea and I started working on some storyboards and character designs.

David Wagner and I got together to go over some story ideas and I soon realized that my limited ability to do animation would mean that the stories would also have to be limited. This was a bummer. There was also the matter of getting the voices recorded, music, etc. I didn't completely abandon the idea, but I put it on the back burner, figuring I'd tackle it later.

I couldn't completely give up on it and liked the ideas that Wagner and I had come up with for an origin story for Elliot, so I started to think about doing a hybrid animated/comic strip version with some spots animated. This seemed like a good idea for awhile, except that I couldn't quite work out how much would be animated. Would I animate the word balloons as they came into a panel? Long thoughts on the process again stalled the process. I would have to do the entire job in Flash and that would mean a loss in quality of the drawings and I worried about it getting too gimmicky.

So, I decided to just chunk the animated bit for now and go with a weekly online strip. This way I get to tell the stories I wanted to tell and the process of doing it in segments solved the "daunting task" dilemna.

So that gets us to where we are.

For fun, though, here are some photos and stuff from the fan film that we did all those years ago. If nothing else, it'll let you put a voice to Elliot.