The Story of Lil' Brad: Origins

Lil' Brad's story began at my day job working in tech support at a large financial software company.  For those of you who don't work in Corporate Amerika, there are lots of conference calls.  My team had a daily call with our "partner site", which is a polite way of saying a call center we paid to deal with the unpleasant task of actually talking to our customers.

 Anyway, as one of the leads on the team, I would frequently ask questions of our call center agents during these calls.  Many times the response to my questions was.. dead air, crickets, nada.

 So to make the situation less awkward (or more maybe) when no one would answer, I started answering my own questions in a high-pitched, obviously fake voice "Yes, that's right Bob", "I completely agree Bob!", "We'll get right on that, Bob", etc.

 Over time, the high-pitched voice morphed into a loose impersonation of our CEO, who was named Brad and had a noticeable Southern accent, that I of course greatly exaggerated to comic effect.  My team started calling this character "Lil' Brad".  As the joke became part of our daily patter, it evolved that Lil' Brad was a ventriloquist dummy that I forced to say these agreeable statements.  

 Lil' Brad became frustrated with his limited duties as my "yes man", and began acting out: he would berate my co-workers for their poor performance, stupid or incorrect answers, and generally make trouble at opportune moments in the daily call.

 After months of this joking around, I decided we needed a "real" Lil' Brad ventriloquist doll to take the gag to the next level.  The search for a suitable dummy began.













Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Story of Lil' Brad: Finding the Right Dummy

Image
Our CEO was an All-American looking blonde-hair-going-gray, blue-eyed, very fit man in his middle years. (Note: I am only referring to the CEO in the past tense to indicate Lil' Brad's past - Brad the real-life CEO is very much alive as of this writing.) As I looked at dummies on the various websites, I didn't see any that had the right look.  The entry level (<$100) pull-string dummies were generally dark-haired with dark eyes (e.g., Charlie McCarthy, Danny O'Day, Jerry Mahoney [w hy are they all Irish? another topic perhaps]  ).   Even at the higher price point of semi-pro dummies that had a control stick for the mouth and head movements, I did not see any blonde dummies.  [I believe the tendency toward dummies with dark hair and eyes is due to the most popular and enduring characters from the Golden Era 1930s, 40s and 50s having those kind of features. Light-colored hair and eyes would probably would not have shown up very well under the bright...
Read more

Building Brad: The Reconstruction

Image
The Rebuild To summarize the previous posts, my goal was to convert a ventriloquist doll to look like our company's CEO, Brad.  I knew I didn't just want to repair Lil' Brad back into a working entry-level pull-string dummy with no head movement (no nodding up and down, no turning side to side).  I wanted a figure that moved like the ones I saw on TV and in films. The term I was looking for (and found) is "semi-pro".  This generally indicates a figure that has a hollow body with a control stick inside to make the mouth and head movements vs. the entry level stuffed body with only a pull string coming out of the neck to open and close the mouth. As mentioned above, this is what I was starting with: a soiled, worn-out looking "Tommy Talker" doll with an old homemade suit and the yellowed remains of a what was once a fancy, frilly shirt.  Oh, and a broken jaw.. :|   (Note: Tommy Talker was actually a 26" tall doll, but I will ...
Read more