…well, tomato fight, technically.  Everything’s covered in red…the streets, the crowds…even my white stripes!  Good thing they’re colorfast.  

All these tomatoes sure would make a great marinara…wonder who threw the first tomato and started this yearly tradition?  

BTW, now you can create your own “Waldo” or “Wenda” avatar. Use it in forums, IM, blogs and chats.  Click here to begin www.findwaldo.com  

—-> Waldo

This coming Freshers Week the University of Kent in England will once again be hosting a record attempt through the organisation of Kent Union, the JCC’s and RAG!

They will be attempting to break the world record for people dressed as me!!! Check out the details below and dig out your stripes!

Largest Gathering of People Dressed as Wally/Waldo
New record stipulation: 200 people

Date: 23rd September
Location: University of Kent, Canterbury, England!

Rules:
All participants must wear:
– A white bobble hat with a red bobble and red trim
– Clear glasses (NO sunglasses)
– Red and white striped shirt
– Blue jeans
– Appropriate footwear

Remember also a lot of these things can be made. A normal white beanie can be painted and have a bobble added to it. A shirt can also be painted!!

With all those Wally’s, I wonder if anyone will find me??

Hope to see you there!

For more details – http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=23975146446&refurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fs.php%3Fq%3DWhere%2527s%2Bwally%2Brecord%2Battempt%26init%3Dq

Michael: When you developed The Waldo Ultimatum, where did the Bourne/Waldo connection come from?

Matthew: That came straight from the mind of Eric Toth, one of the guys in the sketch group The Imponderables, a long-time collaborator of mine. It just popped into his brain. He went to see The Bourne Ultimatum and I got a call about five minutes after he’d left the cinema. He said, “There’s a lot of running and hiding and stuff.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a good movie.” And he says, “Well, imagine if you took Bourne out, and put Waldo in.”

It was brilliant, hysterical. Because then you can explore the motivations behind the pictures in the book. Who is this guy, and why is he hiding? Or is he hiding? Is he being sought after? And the fact that everybody looks for him is a clear indication that he’s probably the most wanted man in the world. Why? Immediately, the hysterical notions started to flow. It was ridiculous from that point on.

Brad: You can take a character who’s a cipher and give him slightly different motivations, and then it’s funny, because those aren’t the motivations anybody would ascribe to Waldo in the books. But they work remarkably well.

Matthew: With our comedy in The Imponderables, we try to take things that people are familiar with and turn them on their end, force people to look at them through a bizarre lens. This was the perfect opportunity to take an iconic character, and a movie that people were very well familiar with, and mash them together to create this thing that was ridiculous, but has enough context that it makes sense. If you try to think of what a Where’s Waldo movie would actually be, odds are it would be somebody looking for Waldo, probably on a very grand scale. Which is essentially what we created.

Michael: What was the experience while you guys were shooting it?

Brad: I’ve worked with Matt on hundreds of video projects, and lots of them involved running around in public with funny outfits. But I’ve never seen a crowd reaction like when you had Dave Brennan dressed as Waldo, walking out on the street. It’s like we had immediately turned the street into some live action video game. People pulled over to the side of the road and screamed, “I found him,” and took a cell phone picture or text messaged their friends. Tour groups ran across a busy street to get photos with Dave. It actually got problematic, because we had a very short window to shoot this scene. But he was immediately identifiable to everyone. Downtown Toronto is a very diverse, multicultural place. It didn’t seem to matter what countries people were from, if they were old or young. Everyone saw him and felt that they had owned a piece of him. They wanted to claim that on this one day, they found Waldo. 

Matthew: The instantaneous recognition factor was insane. I couldn’t believe it. Later we had 15 or 20 extras out there wearing red and white, the sort of classic scenario in the book. And people just wanted to be a part of it. It was ridiculous.

Brad: It’s funny, because some people really knew their Waldo. They were like, “Where’s his scuba mask? Where’s his tin cup? Where’s the Wizard Whitebeard?”

Matthew: It started to get out of hand.

Michael: In the video, when Waldo has those rougher action scenes, were you figuring out where to take that within Waldo’s character, or is that more a parody of Bourne?

Matthew: We decided that the best way to play this was really straight. One of the great things about the Bourne trilogy is that they play it straight to the bone. There’s no winking. So we thought what would translate the funniest was to recreate the core principals of the Bourne world. Taking those qualities of Bourne, this ultra-action hero, and transposing them onto Waldo brings so much that is unexpected. 

Brad: One of the appeals of Bourne is Matt Damon is kind of a Joe Everyman. He’s not Schwarzenegger. He could be normal, and then really he’s this incredible butt-kicker. And there’s no reason Waldo couldn’t be the same guy, and that’s where the humor comes in. Because we don’t know how he gets from page one to page two.

Matthew: We don’t know what he’s running from. When the first Bourne movie came out, it was, here’s mild-mannered Matt Damon, and by the third movie, everybody sees him and thinks, butt-kicking Bourne. So we’ve taken it back to square one. Nobody assumes anything from Waldo, and then it turns out he’s this awesome action hero.

Michael: What was the thinking for the motorcycle shot, where you transpose Waldo’s head over actual Bourne footage?

Matthew: From a comedy standpoint, you want to start somewhere and end higher. We wanted to take it to an awesome, macho hero moment. With our limited budget – and we don’t exactly know any stunt people with motorcycles – we were like, “We want explosions, we want car crashes.” We needed a hit that’s really big. And we were like, “You know what? Screw it.” We’re going to take it right out of the movie and simply transpose it.  

Matt: The opening shot is also straight out of the trailer for Bourne. We originally put a little hat and cane on the Matt Damon silhouette. But even just in silhouette, it was too much. You immediately knew it was Waldo.

Brad: It ruins the joke when you reveal him later.

Michael: Did you ever expect how popular this video would become?

Matthew: You never really know. I wasn’t prepared for it to be so popular.

Brad: It didn’t take off right away. We put it out and got some great initial feedback. We were really pleased and moved on to other stuff. And then about four months later, it just exploded. 

Matthew: We were concerned about people knowing the joke when they started watching it. We wanted it to be a surprise when Waldo shows up. So we buried it on YouTube under the name “Bourne Parody.” Then MySpace picked up the piece on their front page, and that kicked open the door. People started taking it and reposting it for us with a different title. That’s when the title officially became The Waldo Ultimatum, and traffic really jumped. 

Brad: Any time someone major would pick it up, it was really fun to follow the traffic. You could see it spreading out as the big sites would feed the slightly smaller sites, which would feed personal blogs, and then all their friends’ blogs, and then it would work its way back up the stream and hit something large again.

Michael: Would you go back and revisit the Waldo character?

Matthew: I’m of two minds. The Waldo Ultimatum was kind of the perfect mash-up, where everything was aligned to make this funny thing, and a bit of a telling commentary on the world in which Waldo would be part of now. But knowing what new interest there is in this character, I would certainly welcome the thought of revisiting him.

Brad: We did not get rid of the sweater. 

Matthew: There are so many questions raised by this, like, is Waldo always running? Or does he take off the sweater and glasses and go back to a family for a little while. It would be pretty funny to do a bit about a guy who’s got a secret double-life. People suspect him. Where does he go? He takes business trips? Really, he’s out of town again? 

Brad: And who’s that old man with the beard who’s always hanging around? It would be great fun to take him and juxtapose him in a completely different set of adventures, and see how people relate to that.

Matthew: That’s what part of this whole thing is. It’s an interesting challenge to the fans to see what they can come up with, where they would put Waldo. Our interpretation of Waldo’s day-to-day life is Bourne-esque, but someone else…I don’t know what they could come up with.

Brad: Six months from now we may have a very different idea of who Waldo is. And then maybe we’ll have to pull the sweater out again and throw it back out there.

Read part 1 of this interview…

Bonne journée —> Waldo

See you at the fireworks display! —-> Waldo

P.S. Check out these U.S.A.-inspired travel graphics from my FAN-tastic Creativity Kit:

Take photos of Waldo-esque red and white striped fashion that you might see people wearing in your daily life. Extra points for stripes with glasses, hats or backpacks. 

There were many, many great entries (check out the Flickr Photo Pool to see them all), but as always a few stood out – sometimes for the quality of the photo, other times for just how much it captured the ssence of Where’s Waldo?

And so, without further adieu, we present a few choice results, though as the rules state, everyone who enters is a winner, so please, keep submitting your photos and check out Challenge #2 “A Little Woof In Your Life”.

Challenge #1 Highlights

Thanks to Brandon Rhodes
 

Thanks to Jaime Monfort

Thanks to Spotty Logic

Thanks to Dylan Winkler

Thanks to Mikette Miller

 

The Waldo Ultimatum became an online viral hit, and was featured prominently on such sites as Funny Or Die, College Humor, YouTube and MySpace, racking more than an estimated 6 million hits. The video also received notoriety from such traditional media outlets as Entertainment Weekly and VH1’s “Best Week Ever.”

Intrepid Waldo blogger Michael Liss recently met up with two members of the Waldo Ultimatum creative team at the Toronto office of their production company Rocket Ace Moving Pictures. Producer Brad Fox and director/co-writer Matthew Hoos weighed in on the making of the video, the role of fan art and open license agreements in the digital age and all things Waldo. What follows is the first of three blog posts from their conversation.

Michael: What does Waldo mean to you guys? Why is he a compelling character?

Matthew: I hadn’t started thinking of Waldo again since my youth until we started this project. For me, the iconic status that this little man with glasses and a sweater has taken on is astounding. Everybody, everywhere knows who this guy is. He may go by different names in different parts of the world, but it seems to me that people of our generation, people of an older generation who read the books to us, and now kids who are being read the books by parents our age, all have this easy connection with this figure. He somehow managed to clench a spot in the collective consciousness.

Brad: Waldo was the ultimate cipher when you’re a kid. He was a perfect thing to base stories around, because you’re never entirely sure where he is or why he’s there, so you actually have to fill in his characterization and motivation yourself. Why is he at the fair ground, why is he at the airport? Why is he in these various locations, and why are these other little pantomimes playing out around him? So as a kid, part of the appeal is you have to create these stories for yourself to make him compelling and relevant to you. When you become older and come back to it, you can then make the cipher you’ve created relevant again to the little, daily absurdities that you’re dealing with. And that’s fun, because he speaks to everybody for very different reasons, but he’s sort of a shared, storytelling creation kit. 

Matthew: I’ll buy that.

Michael: Is the attachment to Waldo nostalgic, or is it something that he’s still communicating to your lives today?

Matthew: I think the immediate attraction for us was nostalgic, as far as the image of the character itself. The minute we put our man Dave in that sweater, in that hat and those glasses, it was hysterical. It was outstanding, and everybody immediately responded to that. However, that being said, we had a lot of the books around when we were developing the project and while shooting on set, and people couldn’t tear themselves away from them. We’d go looking for one as a prop, and they were always being used by everybody. I think it is nostalgia that takes you back, but once you’re at the books again, you experience the same thing you did as a kid, looking at those pictures. It’s not just about finding him. There’s so much going on in these pictures, in these worlds that are created, that people just can sit there and stare at these things for hours.

Brad: One of the hallmarks of bad nostalgia properties is you go back to them and actually the source material detracts from what you built it up to be in your head. 

Matthew: I think of it as the Spaceballs theory.

Brad: Yeah, exactly. We all have cartoons that we’re passionate about as kids, and when you go back to look at them, you say, “Wow, this was really not good.” And yet with Waldo, you can keep coming back, and because of the open-ended nature of it, it’s always fun. We borrowed a bunch of Waldo books from the library for this and opened them up, and the first thing we noticed in a couple of them is that someone had gone through and circled Waldo in all of the pages in pencil. And the entire room went, “Oh, come on!” Everybody was really upset that they’d been denied that challenge, to the point that we went through with an eraser and cleaned up all the books and then opened them up again. And then it was fun. But the challenge is still there anew, and the original books hold up remarkably well. 

Matthew: I forgot about that. It’s so true. Nobody likes to be robbed of that moment. It’s terrible.

Brad: I was thinking, when you’re a kid, you identify as Waldo. You’re Waldo, you’re out there having adventures and going everywhere. But Waldo is kind of your enemy when you’re a kid. Where is he? Where is that guy? I’m going to find him. He’s a little more like Carmen Sandiego. He’s the protagonist and the antagonist at the same time.

Michael: In today’s world of GPS and iPhones, and connectivity no matter where you go, how does Waldo fit in, the idea of getting lost in this big crowd?

Brad: Waldo was always a very freeing character. Waldo is someone who can travel to any country he wants, can go to any public instillation he wants, and seem unfettered by rules or boundaries or restrictions. That’s just more appealing in this day and age. Everyone’s got cell phones and everyone’s got their Blackberries, and it seems you can go to the other side of the world and still be messaging with your buddies. And he’s an ultimate loner who lives entirely off the grid by his own rules. That’s just increasingly appealing. It would have been even back in the day. But it’s even more so now.

Matthew: He’s a definite loner. He’s a very free-minded individual, which is something you don’t often see with all the community connectivity. Any guy who’s brave enough to wear a sweater to the beach is free thinking, is alright.

Brad: Wearing a toque, 24-7. In the middle of the desert, a toque.

Michael: Do you think it’s still possible to disappear the way Waldo does in today’s age?

Matthew: I would really like to see what new Waldo pictures would look like. I’d like to know what people are doing around him. You would think it’s more difficult for people to disappear.

Brad: He’s a celebrity.

Matthew: Well, that’s the thing. He’s become famous. And just his attire in general. I mean he’s going to stand out. We tried to put Waldo out on the street in the middle of a busy place. We’re at Yonge-Dundas Square. Everyone’s going somewhere, everybody’s got something to do, and we stopped traffic in the busiest intersection in Toronto. I don’t think Waldo would be able to hide.

Michael: But just as a character, less as an icon. Today, in our age, when we look at these Waldo books from a very different time, can we still disappear this way? 

Brad: I think we can disappear through Waldo. That’s what escapism is all about, imaging you’re the hero, you’re the guy who can vanish off the face of the earth and stay two steps ahead of Odlaw every step of the way.

Matthew: The other thing that Waldo got right is that, if you’re going to disappear, you’re going to do it alone. I think that you could disappear in this day and age, but you have to be committed to being out there on your own and not really communicating with other people. Because the minute you begin to communicate with others, these people then have way too many options to communicate. You could put on Facebook, “I saw Waldo the other day,” and then your entire high school knows that Waldo is in Edmonton. I just think that if you’re going to try to disappear in this day and age, if you wanted to be Waldo and just fall off the face of the earth, and lose yourself in a crowd, you have to be committed to not communicating. Leave the cell phone at home. Don’t talk to people around you. And you’re on your own.

Brad: Waldo’s a guy who dedicated his life to not being found. He’s pretty maverick. But he challenges you to go find him. He basically challenges the collective intelligence of the world to find him.

Michael: If you were able to pull a Waldo and just disappear into your own tableau right now, where would that be? Where would you take that moment?

Matthew: I think I’ve been fortunate to have a moment like that. For example, I can think of standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City, one of those iconic places that you’ve always seen growing up. You stand there in the middle, and there you are, with hundreds of people doing their own thing. They don’t know you from a hole in the ground, you’re just another tourist. But I was there alone, with no one else to say, “Oh hey, look at that thing.” And I just stood there and let the world pass me by, and I can’t even remember how long I stayed there for. I’d say that’s the closest thing I ever had to a Waldo moment, and that’s the kind of thing I’d want to do again.   

Brad: I’ll take a different bent. If I could go anywhere fictional or real, I would love to go into one of the beach or ship tableaus from the books. There are always these fascinating juxtapositions of absolute idyllic tranquility, with beautiful waterfalls and pools, and people swimming and luxury, and then just insane wackiness, with fighting squid or animal attacks. You could have anything you could want in your entire life within an eight block radius. In the morning you could go to the pool. You could drink the ridiculous, giant drink. You could hang out at the cabana. And then if you got bored, you could just walk 20 feet the other way and you beat the kraken with an oar over its head. You could have everything you could want in a lifetime in those scenes.

Matthew: I’m into that. For sure.

You can watch The Waldo Ultimatum on Break.com at http://www.break.com/index/the-waldo-ultimatum.html

AND make sure to check out Waldo’s Fan-tastic Creativity Kit at http://canyoufindwaldo.com/fankit

Till you see me —–> Waldo