To celebrate the 100 year anniversary of Hallmark, artists within the company transformed blank crowns into one-of-a-kind tributes to their licensees. Licensing Creative Account Manager Christine J Taylor created five crowns to honor the Star Wars characters she grew up loving as a kid.
Starwars.com chats with Christine about her Star Wars crowns and why the Force has been strong with Hallmark for over 16 years.
As the Licensing Creative Account Manager at Hallmark, what do you do?
Licensing Creative Account Manager, yeah, I am sure you are thinking, "a what?" It's a title. One time someone summed it up as "the person who Star Wars-izes Hallmark" and that is a pretty accurate assessment. I basically am the link between Lucasfilm and all of our Hallmark product development teams for the creation of any of our Star Wars Hallmark product from concept to design. I work with a few other movie and TV licensed properties as well.
How did the Hallmark Crown Project to celebrate Hallmark's 100th Anniversary come about?
I am not sure who in the company thought of the idea to do them, but basically they made white bodied crowns available and put out a call for submissions to the entire Hallmark creative community asking for us to submit our owns designs with no real restrictions. Our licensing team got together and talked about making sure our licensed properties were represented. No other artist volunteered for Star Wars-- which I thought was crazy -- so I volunteered to make sure Star Wars was well represented. Of course, when my fangirl mind started rolling I got a bit overzealous and made five.
How many crowns are there?
There are 250 total crowns submitted by artists, designers, writers, etc., company-wide. The white-bodies are just resin molds, but the artist-submitted crowns are made out of all kinds of mediums. Some are really clever and witty, and others are just beautifully ornamented. Our licensing group submitted about 20, which besides Star Wars, included The Simpsons, several Marvel characters, Peanuts, Harley-Davidson, Wizard of Oz, and of course several of Mickey Mouse, because he was the first Licensed character we ever did on our product back in the '30s. Hallmark's founder, J.C. Hall and Walt Disney were good friends and created the first licensing agreement together.
What materials did you use to make your Star Wars crowns?
As for my crowns, they are made from several different things from costume parts to other Star Wars toys parts, Plaster of Paris, fur fabric, paint and lots and lots of adhesives! For the "Long, long, long time ago" crown I just reformatted a best selling Star Wars card and used some of our Hallmark Keepsake ornaments (miniatures). The original card says, "A long, long, long time ago..." and on the inside it says, "You were born." I simply changed the inside to "Hallmark was born" and placed it on the inside of the crown.
Since sound is such an important part of the movie and our Star Wars product like sound cards and ornaments, I just had to add sound in all five of them. I was able to get sound chips made and an engineer help me wire them, then I just built little "pedestals" for them to hide the device. So, Darth Vader breathes, Chewbacca roars three different Wookiee sounds, Leia says her famous, "Help Me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope" and Yoda has two favorite quotes, "Do. Or do not. There is no try" and "When 900 years-old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?" The "Long, long time ago," of course plays the theme.
Darth Vader! Seriously, I felt defeated by the dark side while creating him. He was kinda of the hardest to figure out exactly what I was going to do until I turned the crown upside down and realized the arches and placement of crown tips loosely resembled his face mask. So then I really needed to find a helmet or a template to get it on right. I couldn't find anything existing that was the right size.
I used things I had around the house like my Darth Vader cookie jar, but that was too big, then I searched for my Darth Tater, but I couldn't find him quickly in my endless bins of toys I collect (and I really didn't want to mess him up). Chris Spitale at Lucasfilm Licensing saved the day by sending me a big Darth Vader bobble head. I used his head as a template/mold. It was the closest in size, though a bit too small, but eventually I was able to adjust it after sawing off some of the crown and using several layers of different types of plaster and lacquer paint.
