E.T. AND ME

In the Christmas business, many companies acquire licenses from other companies to use their products to make still other products.  That is how you get Disney Christmas Ornaments or Star Wars or you name it.  The company I worked for at the time  had the exclusive rights to the E.T. franchise and asked me to design an ornament they could manufacture in China, once they received the go-ahead from the Steven Spielberg/Universal Pictures people.

I got to work, using bits of this and that, trying to recreate a feeling of the scene from the film where E.T. was hiding in the closet.  And adding a bit of my own whimsy to the back of the ornament.  My prototype was sent off to China where they tweaked it (with a better E.T. than I could come up with) and returned it to us.  Then, off to the Spielberg/Universal camp.   After a week or two we got the OK for things to move forward.  So, back to China.

Then came the problem.   The cost.  My company felt it was too prohibitive in the cost range they wanted and would therefore  be a hard sell.  Unhappily, the project was scrapped.

But I still have the one and only  E.T. ornament in my own collection and even though it is a bit bedraggled now, I thought you might like to see it.