Fishbone, 43, whose St. Louis-based On the Wall Productions has sold 100,000 of the inflatables in the last three years, mainly through catalogs and museum shops, thinks the dolls are perfect emblems of our angst-ridden times. "A lot of people have a certain level of panic in their lives," he says.
Fishbone and his wife and partner, Sarah Linquist, 42, weren't always into Munchie-see, Munchie-do. They are actually serious muralists. In 1991 they created a series of cutout displays based on famous paintings—including Munch's. "Everyone said, 'That's great,' " says the New Jersey-born Fishbone, who uses only his surname professionally.
Soon, he says, "the idea of an inflatable just popped into my head." The initial run of 12,000 dolls was a hit—and sales soared when the actual Munch painting was stolen for three months earlier this year. "We've done somewhere between $1 million and $1½ million gross in a little over 2½ years," says Fishbone, whose other offerings include the Mona Lisa, a Pin the Ear on Van Gogh party game and a Little Happy Guy inflatable, an antidote to the Scream. "Moneywise, we do much better than we could do painting murals."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
