For the last two weeks, I’ve been writing about podcast art I created for Muppet fan site ToughPigs.com and all the fun and opportunity projects like that specifically from ToughPigs have gone on to provide. Today, I’m talking about one of those opportunities, and how I was commissioned again by the very talented Matt Vogel. There probably aren’t many reading this blog who don’t know who he is, so here’s a quick refresher.
Matt began puppeteering for Sesame Street in 1996, and later joined The Muppets. He has inherited tons of legacy characters, mostly from the late Jerry Nelson. These include Big Bird, Count Von Count, and Mr. Johnson on Sesame Street. In 2011 he took over Uncle Deadly (also a former Jerry Nelson character) and Kermit the Frog in 2017 (initially created and performed by Jim Henson himself before Steve Whitmire puppeteered the amphibian from 1990 to 2016).
I am very honored that Matt has been a fan of my work for awhile too, and in 2020, Matt officially commissioned me to create podcast art for his first podcast, Below the Frame. I was ecstatic, so when he came a calling again earlier this year with a request for his newest podcast with cohosts Nate Starkey and Ashley Ward called Solve for Gen X, I was even more excited! Initially Matt was looking for something relatively straight forward like what I had created for Below The Frame, but as we discussed it more, I got inspired and mentioned that maybe we put aside the idea of a quickly recognizable graphic and just go for a big 1980s action movie poster. Matt loved the idea, and we started listing ideas, homages, and easter eggs that would look cool. As a Gen Xer myself, I was completely down to stuff a bunch of nostalgic references into the art as well! Matt shared the lyrics to the theme song he had written along with the actual music for inspiration and from there, I got way into the project.
For starters, Matt wanted all the hosts to represent classic John Hughes characters. For Nate, he suggested Judd Nelson from Breakfast Club and Michael Schoeffling from Sixteen Candles. I made Nate pretty much 100% "John Bender" with a fanny pack that both Nate and Matt really wanted included somehow. Ashley was meant to be a combination of Molly Ringwald from Breakfast Club and Jennifer Grey from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but the character of Jeanie felt more dynamic. Ashley also requested some jelly bracelets like Madonna used to wear to bring even more authenticity to how well these hosts know their pop culture. Matt was dressed in Emilio Estevez’s letterman jacket from Breakfast Club but instead of the wrestling tank top, he has Anthony Michael Hall’s button down shirt from Sixteen Candles. I also gave Matt some personal nods as well. While he requested the cereal box he's holding in the illustration be an homage to Count Chocula, I stylized the chocolate–loving vampire to have softer features like Count Von Count, and green skin like a certain banjo strumming frog.
Nate, Ashley, and Matt
The background is a pretty stereotypical design that people often associate with the 1980s. As someone who lived through it, I can't say it was quite as ubiquitous as it is associated with the 1980s now, although neon and rudimentary computer graphics were part of the landscape, my personal opinion is that they've come to be more representative now than they ever were during the actual decade. On top of that is a neon cityscape that is definitely more of an homage to the movie Blade Runner than anything else. However, my personal recollection from that time period was a yearning for all things tropical. Every Andrew McCarthy flick seemed to have (at the very least) a beach resort backdrop of some kind, Paul Simon's music video with Chevy Chase You Can Call Me Al felt very Caribbean vacation themed even if it was filmed entirely in a plain pink room, and Miami, Florida might as well have been the pop culture capital of the 80s! Incidentally, that's also why there are so many palm trees too.
I'm disappointed to admit that many of the background elements are stock images, but I tried to use those aesthetics as a balance of harmony to all the other elements I illustrated myself. A charged particle beam from an unlicensed nuclear accelerator shoots behind the hosts as a reference to Ghostbusters. While the planes and bombs are not period specific, they are meant to represent the fear brought on originally from the Gulf War during Operation Desert Storm
The background composition created from stock images.
The kid on the BMX bike (I illustrated him) represents both a very novel and popular mode of transportation back in the day, but its placement over an abnormally large moon is meant to evoke memories of the Steven Spielberg opus E.T. Hiding behind those bomber planes and being so immense in size, that moon may make one consider the Death Star from Star Wars more than the lunar body itself.
The space shuttle was my personal contribution as the Challenger disaster and Nasa in general (thanks to a trip to Kennedy Space Center as a young boy) were hugely impactful to my childhood. The arcade cabinet is a direct reference to Space Invaders and the popularity of arcades in general back in the 80s. Personally I would have preferred Rolling Thunder, but niche titles can't communicate a universal understanding quite as deliberately or quickly as the 1978 Taito classic.
While Henry Winkler as The Fonz from Happy Days and Lou Ferrigno as The Hulk occupy the screen of the TV as per Matt's request, the old, ornately designed television set is a direct homage to the one my grandmother had in her living room in Ocean Grove, New Jersey where I would very anxiously wait daily for The 700 Club to end so I could switch it over to Nickelodeon.
Matt had suggested a big old family type car that was representative of his family vacations be present as well. I used my dad's 1986 Lincoln Continental (that he eventually sold to me for a dollar) as my inspiration. While ours was a sophisticated tan, I made this one a Gremlin green like the one Matt had as a kid. The boombox is also based on the one my siblings and I used to play and record everything on back when we were kids. I wanted this to look a little more dynamic than the gray and pale blue one we had, but I went overboard and felt it almost looks like I used AI to make it. I absolutely did not use AI for this or anything else, but I didn't have the time to change it afterwards. I'm happy with how it came out but simultaneously disappointed as well with how gaudy the colors are.
I threw an explosion by the wheel well of the Lincoln to try and capture that 80s action movie feel like Die Hard, Commando, or Escape from New York. Finally, I tossed in a crowd of concert goers just so we all knew that despite any chaos happening, there's always time to party!
Matt's initial idea for the title design was more inline with the title for Back to the Future. I loved the idea, but I thought that would be a little too on the nose. Instead, once Matt had sifted through some initial concepts, I started to finagle the design to be more of an homage to the original Unsolved Mysteries television show title card. To sock it even further into the time period, I tossed a small rainbow flash over the top as a reference to the popular The More You Know series of public service announcements on NBC.
The final artwork
Thank you again Matt for such a super cool opportunity that was a ton of fun to do! And thank you to everyone else who checked out this post! Make sure you check out Solve for Gen X on YouTube and everywhere else you get your podcasts. Please follow me on Instagram, TikTok, Substack and X!