Mr Blank Toys: Chewie Rolo

This past weekend was the big release of Mr Blank Toys’ newest art toy, the “Chewie Rolo”. If you missed the release on Friday the 13th, you’re not out of luck yet because I still have a few left! Head over to the SHOP and snatch one up!

I had an original 1977 Chewbacca figure sitting on my table, when it occurred to me how much his head looked like a piece of candy… like a chocolate-covered cherry, or a sugar coated gum drop, or… a piece of ROLO! And that’s when it hit me, all I had to do was mold his head and cast one copy, then carve that down with a flat topped head and it would easily resemble a piece of Rolo candy!

The first mold was of the Chewbacca figure’s head only (and I plan to use that same mold again later to make the sugar coated gumdrops). Then, once that first cast-resin piece was sculpted I made another mold of it so I could cast multiples. Of course just a little tiny piece of candy wasn’t enough, I had to take it further and create the Rolo candy packaging. I searched online and came across a candy collector’s wet dream of a website: CollectingCandy.com!!

Jason Liebig from Collecting Candy has been archiving candy wrappers in categories that go as far back as the 1950’s and stretch across the globe. Pretty much if you can name a candy, he probably has it archived in multiple ways on his site. Check the site out and read his blog to learn more than you might have ever cared to know about the history of candy! The wrapper of interest to me though was the 1976-77 Rolo wrapper, see the “Rolo Roundup” article on the Collecting Candy blog.

I pulled Jason’s Rolo candy wrapper archive scan into photoshop and recreated packing that from first view might look like it was real, but when you inspect the elements of the design closer you will see that I changed basically everything about it! Of course first thing you may notice is the name “Chewie Rolo”, that was simple enough I just had to add the word “Chewie” in and make it look like it had always been there. Next was the ingredients list, all the ingredients listed on my design are names of ingredients actually found somewhere in the Star Wars universe, see Wookieepedia. Not that it would taste anything like a Rolo if you were able to mix them together, but still I paired up similarly sounding ingredient names to replace the names of actual ingredients on the label. There’s a couple other small changes like “US Distributor: Hershey Foods Corporation, Made in England” got changed into “DS-1 Distributor: Empire Foods Corporation, Made in Space” and the ® Trademark Registration is now a little miniature Death Star… All just small changes but it made all the difference for this piece!

With the packaging label made I was able to recreate a tube of Rolo candy by wrapping a piece of wooden dowel in special order gold candy foil and then wrap the label around. This gave me more to put in the blister bubble than just a small tiny piece of fake candy cast with an off white resin (Smooth Cast 321) with Brown tint (SO-Strong® tint) mixed in to just the perfect amount to make it look like real chocolate. I did also use a few other candy wrapper scans from Collecting Candy for the candy ad on the back, which was a rip-off of an old Charms candy ad … And with that it was done!

The Chewie Rolo was then releases on Friday the 13th, because I truly believe that every Friday the 13th should be celebrated with candy like Halloween, then it might not be such an unlucky day for everyone!