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Intrepid Waldo blogger Michael Liss recently met up with two members of the creative team behind The Waldo Ultimatum. The movie trailer parody was featured prominently on sites like Funny Or Die, College Humor, YouTube and MySpace, racking up over 6 million hits. In part two of the conversation with producer Brad Fox and director/co-writer Matthew Hoos, they go behind the scenes of producing the viral video.

Michael: When you developed The Waldo Ultimatum, where did the Bourne/Waldo connection come from?

Matthew: That came straight from the mind of Eric Toth, one of the guys in the sketch group The Imponderables, a long-time collaborator of mine. It just popped into his brain. He went to see The Bourne Ultimatum and I got a call about five minutes after he’d left the cinema. He said, “There’s a lot of running and hiding and stuff.” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s a good movie.” And he says, “Well, imagine if you took Bourne out, and put Waldo in.”

It was brilliant, hysterical. Because then you can explore the motivations behind the pictures in the book. Who is this guy, and why is he hiding? Or is he hiding? Is he being sought after? And the fact that everybody looks for him is a clear indication that he’s probably the most wanted man in the world. Why? Immediately, the hysterical notions started to flow. It was ridiculous from that point on.

Brad: You can take a character who’s a cipher and give him slightly different motivations, and then it’s funny, because those aren’t the motivations anybody would ascribe to Waldo in the books. But they work remarkably well.

Matthew: With our comedy in The Imponderables, we try to take things that people are familiar with and turn them on their end, force people to look at them through a bizarre lens. This was the perfect opportunity to take an iconic character, and a movie that people were very well familiar with, and mash them together to create this thing that was ridiculous, but has enough context that it makes sense. If you try to think of what a Where’s Waldo movie would actually be, odds are it would be somebody looking for Waldo, probably on a very grand scale. Which is essentially what we created.

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In the past couple of years, Waldo has been popping up everywhere again. Art student Melanie Coles received international attention when she created a 54-foot Waldo on a rooftop somewhere in Vancouver, waiting for the next Google Earth satellite images to capture the image and create a real-world search for our hero. A San Francisco Waldo flash mob attracted hundreds of costumed revelers. And Toronto sketch comedy group The Imponderables put their own spin on the character, making the mash-up parody The Waldo Ultimatum, a spoof film trailer in which Waldo steps into the role of secret operative Jason Bourne.

The Waldo Ultimatum became an online viral hit, and was featured prominently on such sites as Funny Or Die, College Humor, YouTube and MySpace, racking more than an estimated 6 million hits. The video also received notoriety from such traditional media outlets as Entertainment Weekly and VH1’s “Best Week Ever.”

Intrepid Waldo blogger Michael Liss recently met up with two members of the Waldo Ultimatum creative team at the Toronto office of their production company Rocket Ace Moving Pictures. Producer Brad Fox and director/co-writer Matthew Hoos weighed in on the making of the video, the role of fan art and open license agreements in the digital age and all things Waldo. What follows is the first of three blog posts from their conversation.

Michael: What does Waldo mean to you guys? Why is he a compelling character?

Matthew: I hadn’t started thinking of Waldo again since my youth until we started this project. For me, the iconic status that this little man with glasses and a sweater has taken on is astounding. Everybody, everywhere knows who this guy is. He may go by different names in different parts of the world, but it seems to me that people of our generation, people of an older generation who read the books to us, and now kids who are being read the books by parents our age, all have this easy connection with this figure. He somehow managed to clench a spot in the collective consciousness.

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