A Week With Wally!

Auto Assembly 2004 was the first time we had been joined by a Transformers voice actor, Wally Wingert. Wally had not only joined us for the weekend of the convention, but spent several days in the UK before and after AA and I had the pleasure of being able to spend some time with him. I'll update this diary over the next day or so about Wally's week in the UK...

Wednesday, 5th May 2004

Arrival

Wally arrived in the UK at Birmingham International airport at around 2:00 pm after what must have been an exhausting 12 hour flight, first from Los Angeles to Amsterdam, then from Amsterdam to Birmingham. However, he had a massive smile on his face when he walked out of the terminal and it immediately answered my question of whether or not we were having a bearded Wally at AA!

After dropping Wally off at the hotel, we had a quick chat before leaving him to sleep off the jet lag and arranging to meet up later for a meal...

Where's Wally?!

I went to the hotel for around 8:00 pm to meet Wally only to find that he had disappeared! In the UK for less than 6 hours and we'd lost the guest of honour! How was I going to explain that to all the attendees?! I went to his hotel room and knocked on the door for a while to no response. Called reception and asked them to put me through to his room and still no luck! It turned out that Wally couldn't really sleep and decided to go and explore Birmingham for himself!

He finally wandered back into the hotel at about 8:15 pm so we went off for a pizza and just spent the next few hours in Pizza Hut going through the menu one by one chatting about everything from music to Transformers, and everything in between! One side note - if you ever see Wally at another convention (maybe at a future Auto Assembly), ask him one thing... how did he manage to eat ice cream with a fork?!!

Thursday, 6th May 2004

It's London, baby!

Today was rather special. Not only was this trip Wally's first time outside of America but today was also his 43rd birthday so we wanted to make the day memorable so we decided to go down to London. He wanted to do a few of the usual tourist things and do a bit of clothes shopping as well, but we had a few other places to visit on our list as well...

"HELP! I need directions..."

One of Wally's passions is that he is a massive fan of The Beatles, and in particular Paul McCartney (and if you ever get the chance to visit Wally's website, you'll hear a stunning performance of Wally singing as Paul). One of the most well-known images associated with the Beatles is THAT album cover of the fab four walking across Abbey Road, so once we arrived in London, we set off to find it...

The tube ride was fairly short but we managed to find our way eventually. It was a fairly low-key place and while everyone in the area knew where it was when we asked for directions there were no signposts as such and nothing to draw attention to the fact that this is where the Abbey Road studios were, let alone where the famous crossing was. Even when we actually found the road, we still weren't comvinced we had found the right place. Luckily, earlier in the day I had given Wally a birthday card a presents (all with a Beatles/Abbey Road theme) and the card featured the original album cover) so we used that photo as a reference to find where we were heading and we managed to find the Holy Grail for all Beatles fans!

As you can imagine, Wally's main ambition here was to walk across Abbey Road and I think we spent about an hour taking photos of him walking across the road! Silly, but good fun. And just to do things properly, for a couple of shots on his own camera, he took his shoes and socks off and did the walk barefoot just as Paul did on the cover!

We met a couple of American tourists there (who just happened to work in the movie business) and chatted with them for a while, and also a group of kids from Australia. They can't have been more than about 20 years old but it was cool to see them fully appreciating why they were there. They even managed to wait for gaps in the traffic and they had the time to pose and stand still in the road for some great shots! That wasn't the end of our day in London though - there was a lot more to come although I think the next 30 minutes or so of our journey away from Abbey Road had Wally talking like Paul McCartney and singing Beatles songs...

"I need red leather pants...!"

It was a strange thing to hear someone say in London, especially when they are being serious, but that's what Wally was saying all afternoon! We spent most of the afternoon in Camden Town markets looking for a pair of retro 80s-look red leather trousers that Wally was looking for to help complete the look for a new TV pilot he is working on called "Livin' On A Prayer" - a mock reality TV show following an 80s tribute band. Finding the trousers was easier said than done though!

We went into pretty much every shop you could think of, and every market stall without much luck, while avoiding everyone trying to sell us all manner of strange items (including the odd one or two trying to sell us drugs!). Quite a few saw dollar signs and their eyes lit up as soon as they heard Wally's accent, but we managed to steer well clear... until something caught Wally's eye...

In a dimly lit upper floor of one shop, Wally found exactly what he was looking for. A pair of red side-laced leather "pants" as he called them. Rather than being retro in look, these were actually from the 80s and had obviously been lying around since then. I think we were the first humans to venture into that part of the shop in the last two decades. We took them down to get a price and the shop owner seemed a little too keen to sell them, offering to halve the price immediately! Wally wanted them to be held for a little while promising to return and the over-eager shop owner was very insistent on wanting a £10 deposit...

We spent the next couple of hours looking and didn't manage to find anywhere else selling these trousers so we ended up back at the same shop and Wally was convinced that these were the trousers he wanted but he wanted to try them on first. The shop owner wasn't too accommodating at first, but then tried to usher Wally to the back of the shop and said he could try them on there. Not in a changing room, just in the back end of the shop!! Eventually, Wally went up to the hidden upper echelons of the shop while the shifty trader spent the next 15-20 minutes trying to sell me everything from jeans to t-shirts and everything else in between!

Wally eventually came downstairs deciding that he wanted to buy them and the shop owner decided to take advantage of the "naieve" American! He tried increasing the price from the original amount he quoted, and then offered a small discount if Wally paid mostly cash. He was extremely persistent in getting Wally to get all the money out of his wallet and I think he finally took the hint when I kept telling Wally that we should leave that he dropped the price back down to normal. Wally finally bought the trousers and left a happy man.

Once we left the store, Wally revelled in the fact that, had he bought these trousers on eBay, they would have cost him around $500 each, but he got two pairs - one red and one white - for the equivalent of $650 and they were brand new in perfect condition. And as they were going to be used for his new show, they were tax deductable as well!!

"A well-travelled Observer..."

A friend of Wally's back home runs a small-town newspaper called The Observer and one of the regular features sees photos of various celebrities in different parts of the world seen reading the Observer. As you can imagine, Wally brought a copy with him and as well as getting photos of him reading it walking across Abbey Road, we also made a final stop in London after our shopping trip...

The final leg of the day saw Wally doing a typical tourist thing and visiting Buckingham Palace. After negotating the pigeon-filled streets of London, we made it and Wally proceeded to pose for as many photos as we could take. Wally ended up doing his Tony Clifton impression (a character created by the late comedian Andy Kaufman who is a fat, overbearing lounge singer) declaring that he wanted to be let in to the palace to see the Queen and we started to make plans for a full appearance in costume for Wally's next UK visit!

Some of Wally's visions of the Palace were shattered - he must have thought that it was possible to go right up to the Palace guards (and I bet none of them could have kept a straight face if he had started!), and with Wally's fascination with costumes, we spent a while thinking of 101 uses for a bearskin hat!

And the day still wasn't over... actually, the rest of the day in London was fairly sedated. We made our way slowly back to Euston to catch the train back to Birmingham, stopping only for Wally to pose for a photo next to a noticeboard in one of the tube stations just because it had the date wrtitten on it (click here!). We finally got on the train and then spent a rather noisy journey with a woman sitting at our table who spent two hours coughing heavily from London to Birmingham.

We spent some time chatting about voice work and Astro Boy, and Wally had a short sleep on the train but annoyingly, he woke up just as I was getting my camera out! Oh well, there was always another day...!

Friday, 7th May 2004

Probably my least favourite day in terms of spending time with Wally as we hardly had the chance to talk during the day. It's always the same really with pre-convention prep-work and I spent most of Friday getting everything ready at home, although I managed to talk to Wally a few times during the day. Fortunately, Wally was able to keep himself reasonably amused in Birmingham after acquiring some Scooby Doo 2 posters from the nearby cinema...

Friday evening was a bit more fun though (!) as I managed to have a chat with Wally in between tearing my hair out while setting up the registration desk and everything else in the Main Hall. I think quite a few people were surprised when they saw Wally come in and start talking to me not knowing who he was at first. Once they realised that it was Wally and that he was so relaxed and informal, the attendees who had come along early to help out began to realise that Wally's appearance was going to be something special...

We chatted away for a bit about Wally seeing Van Helsing and what he'd been up to during the day but for me most of the day was a bit of a blur...!

Saturday, 8th May 2004

Coming soon...

Sunday, 9th May 2004

Coming soon...

Monday, 10th May 2004

Coming soon...

Tuesday, 11th May 2004

Had to see Wally off at the airport today. It was a really early start as Wally's flight left Birmingham at 8:00 am so I had to get up at 3:00 am, left my house at 4:00 am to pick Wally up at 4:30 am from the hotel. We managed to get a few hours in at the airport chatting away over a final breakfast before seeing him off, and - would you believe - managing for the first time to get our photo taken together! It has to be said that I was somewhat sad to see him go.

Simon Plumbe