Movie Meltdown: Michael Possert Jr. and Some Time-Traveling Adventures

This week we kick off our coverage of WonderFest as we sit down with Michael Possert Jr., who has spent many years working as a Special Effects Modelmaker as well as a Stop-Motion Fabricator. Listen as Michael tells stories of his adventures in the semi-recent past as he worked on huge movies like The Rocketeer, Apollo 13, Terminator 2, Alien 3, Serenity, True Lies, RoboCop 3 and many others all before joining up with Laika Studios to work on amazing stop-motion films like ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings.

Plus we travel back in time to several different stops on an epic road trip involving dinosaurs, civil war soldiers, super spies, cryptids, frightening penitentiaries and rock and roll superstars!

So strap on your rocket pack and zoom back in time as we also hear tales of… the flying door hinge, throwing rocks at battleships, so much nickel-plating, the hall of blacklight posters brought to life, a cat jury, the bobbing Mystic Seer head, interspersed little green monsters, the warden’s wife’s dog, every mystery hill and mystery hole, a pterodactyl stealing the Gettysburg Address from Abraham Lincoln, your time traveling way to communicate with each other, Detroit, I should be able to take pictures, I’d done my chores for a few weeks and had enough money for the two dollars worth of film, Roger Corman, WALL-E, creepy motels, The Dinosaur Kingdom 2, 12 Monkeys, putting a sparkler in, The Mütter Museum, Patrick McClung, splashdown capsules, where the oxygen tanks blew up, Cinefex, the van chase, Solar Crisis, the thinnest of plots just to get spaceships on screen to blow them up, The Mothman Prophecies, sometimes puppets have to hold a prop, hit a couple of penitentiaries, Boss Films, Portland vs L.A., The Spy Museum, we generated over twenty-thousand individual handmade items, Al Capone, cars, girls and college, it might be the last victory that practical effects had over CG, Syd Mead, a golden gun, they can be pretty rough with the models, Pep the dog, the Mothman Museum, a big epic road trip of many mountains, Richard Gere and a Kodak Brownie.

“I was that kid about ten rows back… and the screen was so giant… it was really just an overwhelming experience.”