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Happy-Bugnalow-robot-movie-production-wooden-toys

Toy Robot Movie Production Troubles

It’s been well established that toys come to life under certain circumstances (ie: when placed in magic cupboard, or when the kids leave the room); our toys are no exception. Our animal toys are mostly content to graze around the living room or nap under the shade of the couch. The fairies buzz around the potted plants. The cars usually zoom around, always underfoot. But the robots? Oh boy those robots.

The robots are restless and always working on something. Of late they have taken up movie-making. They built their own equipment and took over a corner of the garage for production. They fooled around with physical props and sets, but couldn’t get the look they were going for. So up went a green-screen for later CG work. Everything was going well . .

toy robot movie production

I made it clear the movie was their project, and I also made it clear they could only have the garage for the weekend. I thought this was plainly stated in the contract. Whoever wrote the thing and whichever bot signed it were two different beings. I brought this to their attention (again) late Saturday evening. Wow! Drama!

Lot’s of yelling squeaks and bloobs and bips (I struggle to understand them when they talk fast). I caught every third or fourth word – lot’s of blame and name calling. But to their credit they worked out their differences, and then worked through the night. They finished up garage photography the next day and my wife and I were able to move the car back in.

The robots finished their movie. It had a limited release in all the art-house theaters (poster below). It’s a big hit as far as small movies go. Robot Lords from Cosmic Space is due for home theater release later this year; certain to be a cult classic.

Pick up your own robots and make your own movie today!

Vintage Looking Sci-Fi Movie Poseter With Robots

Happy-Bungalow-boy-floating-away-with-balloons

Boy Holds Too Many Balloons, Floats Into Sky

toy posed reenactment of child floating into air holding balloons

5 cents each or 15 / 50 cents. “I’ll take sixty please.”

The balloon barker was a large fellow. He could hold two hundred balloons and not budge an inch, but the Attleson’s boy? The Attleson’s boys was thin as a bean stalk. He handed over his money, took those balloons in his two hands, and ZIP! Off he went into the air.

It was a steady breeze that day so he made it a good two miles before he thought to let go of a balloon or two.  He loosed a few more and finally landed in John Southwick’s sorghum field. If you can believe that.

If you can believe it.  Our grandmother believes it.  She swears by this story, says it happened when she was a kid herself.  Though she lost the newspaper clipping, and wavers on being at the scene or simply hearing about it second hand.

Still, it’s a FUN story, One of our favorites, and we’ve recreated it here in toy story-telling form.

Want to act out your own adventures with toys?  Well, click here to purchase some.

toys pose for fanciful story of boy flying into air

Wood Vulture Toy

Okay, who doesn’t love to look at the pretty peacock?  And elephants, bears, and horses will always rank high on our favorite animals list.

Alas, the world is a diverse place with diverse needs.  The vulture may not be the loveliest or the most loved, but it is very important.  Though we will say that this wooden vulture toy is pretty darn cute and will turn a head perched in your playroom or lounging on your desk.

Pick up your own wood vulture toy from our online toy shop today!wooden vulture toy

wood toy giraffe

Giraffe Toy

The Giraffe

aka Mr. Long Neck

aka Stretch

aka How’s The Weather Up There

We just love giraffes here at the Bungalow.  At our local zoo you can feed the giraffes a little giraffe cracker.  Right out of the palm of your hand!  How cool is that?

Happy Bungalow’s giraffe is crafted from hickory, sanded smooth, and finished with a beeswax polish we make ourselves.  Pick up your own giraffe toy from our online toy shop.

giraffe toy

wood toy animal warthog

Wood Animal Toy Warthog

Introducing the warthog!  Now, to be honest, we haven’t had a lot of demand for a warthog toy, but now that we’ve made one, people just love them.  They are so darn cute!  Real-life warthogs,

[insert 80’s movie record screech]

Q:  Wait, where’s the warthog?  I only see is a rhino.
A:  Well, you know, rendered in wood, warthogs and rhinos look strikingly similar.  We create all our animal patterns from scratch, tweaking real-life animal profiles to conform to the realities of wood toys.  So you can call it a warthog or a baby rhino (as paired with our purpose-crafted rhino toy).  We call this little wooden animal fun.

Take home your own wood animal toy warthog from our online toy shop today!wood animal toy warthogLooking for a wooden toy rhino?  Pick it up here.

wood toy rhino toy for boys

Wooden Toy Rhino

Most animals are better admired from the far.  The rhinoceros, weighing “a million pounds” and armed with “giant sword horns” is certainly an animal better admired from afar.  Even without the exaggerated quotes from small children.

This rhino toy was one of Happy Bugnalow’s first animal toys and still one of our most popular.  We craft our rhino from red oak, carefully sand all corners smooth, and finish it off with a beeswax polish we make ourselves.  As with all our toys, it’s made to be passed along to another generation.

Take home your own wooden toy rhino from our online toy shop today!wooden toy rhino

Happy Bungalow

Wooden Toy Safety Warning

So we had a little incident here a few weeks ago; apparently you can have too much fun!  A few hundred toys were gathered, creating a sort of critical mass of fun.  There were a dozen or so rainbows emanating from our living room, and we’re pretty sure we saw a real life fairy.

To be clear, no irreparable damage was done, but the folks from NASA and the NOAA asked us to put a new notice on our toys:

“Playing with Happy Bungalow Toys may open a rift in the PLAY-FUN continuum.”

But we really don’t see the harm in honest play, so we added:

“Please play with joyous abandon!”

Interested in some living room science?  Pick up some toys in our online toy shop.wooden toy safety warning

first wood toy

Throw Back Thursday – Bunny

Today we throw it back to just about the first Happy Bugnalow toy ever prototyped.  I think it was just about the first thing I ever made on a scroll saw.  This was made when Happy Bungalow was just starting up.  We were ordering a few pieces of new professional grade equipment, but still trying to make it by on the thinnest shoe-string budgets.  So this little animal was cut on a piece of pine that was hanging around the shop.

scroll saw rabbit

I drew from (cartoonish) memory the shape of the animal.  I was happy that others recognized the shape was a bunny, but disappointed in how lame the thing looked.  So I set about drawing animal profiles from real animals (usually from pictures, but occasionally from real life as in our bison toy).  When we fist started there were two primary animal lines:  farm and safari.

Since we’ve added to our shop woodlands animals, dinosaurs, and mythical animals (think unicorns).  In addition we’re working on adding water animals, Australian animals, and just about every other animal that can be rendered in wood.

scroll saw rabbit profile

Reproducing real life animals into small wooden form took some tweaking.  Legs were too thin, bellies to bulgy, and the like.  Legs are the biggest problem.  Like, have you ever seen how thin a horse’s legs are?  Or a chicken’s?  In the beginning there was a lot of tweaking and fussing to get the animals just right, but now,  I think we’ve made close to one hundred different animals so far, we usually nail it down pretty quick.

So kids, remember – what they say is true.  Practice Makes Perfect!  Or just a lot better.

farm animal wooden toys

woodland animal toy porcupine

Wooden Procupine

Everyone knows what a porcupine looks like.  All needles and gnarly sharpness.  You know, like this:

porucpine in the wild

source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:African_crested_Porcupine_-Hystrix_cristata-.jpg

Except (as I’m guessing is the case in real life), such a creature rendered in wood doesn’t make for such a smooth experience.  So in the interest of not making a 10 MOST DANGEROUS TOYS list, we smoothed out the spikes.  Which takes away the wooden porcupine most distinctive feature, but leaves the little guy open to more imaginative play.

 

wooden porcupine toy

And imaginative play is all right by us.  Call him a porcupine, a sloth, or a snarled up house-cat – just don’t call him spikey!  Cut from hickory wood, sanded extra-smooth, and finished with our own beeswax polish, you can find Happy Bungalow’s wooden porcupine toy in our online toy shop.

Castle toy prototype

Throw Back Thursday – Castle Model

Last time on Throw Back Thursday . . .

digital castle bookend model

We dug up an early prototype of a castle bookend.  Well, here’s the computer model that preceded it.  Pretty neat looking, and probably pretty fun too, but none of them ever made it into production (read more about why in the original post).

I’ll ramble on a bit about computer models and prototyping.  We do all of our 3-D models in Sketchup.  It’s a free program that is super-handy, and relatively easy to learn.  I’m not the best self-taught computer person, but I figured out the basics of Sketchup in a day or so.  A few projects later and I was competent enough to do interior architectural models (I wasn’t always a toy-maker you know).  With computer models you can know exact dimensions, work out potential problems, and generate cut lists (how many and how long of pieces of wood you’ll need).

prototype castle bookend

Though, I like to work on the fly, working from simple sketches and physical protoypes (see an example in a post about toy car design and a bit about toy car construction).  So we don’t produce too many digital models anymore.  I will say though, if we were working on any sizable pieces, we would turn first to a computer model.

You can see in the built prototype that most everything is the same as the digital model.  The little dowel people were simplified and the upper windows were more real, but the physical castle was the same.  I probably went through 5 different hinge types for the little draw bridge.  That was tricky.

The Kids ended up with the castle prototypes, there’s a half dozen of them.  So we would hook all the individual wall pieces together (nothing was glued) and make super giant castles.  Never a roof though.  Inside the castle would sleep cars, princesses, blocks, and whatever else was around.  This was in the days when our oldest was figuring out how to go to sleep in a big kid bed by herself, so a lot of play time was devoted to putting her toys to sleep.

Liz and I don’t miss those battles of getting the two year old to go to sleep at night, but we sure do miss that play-time.  In case you’re wondering, we have discovered the secret to getting little kids to sleep at night – give them a sibling to sleep in the same room with.