Ha...small world. (and here's some trivia for you 80s kids)

I've met Bob Kling (the butter sculptor) a few times a couple years ago after a Star Wars toy show in Mexico City.

He worked at Kenner toys from the early 80s until they closed and then moved to Hasbro. He did a lot of sculpting work on the original Star Wars line and most of the Kenner toys released into the 90s (Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park including the giant T-Rex and even the box-office hit Waterworld among a ton of others.) If you remember the Late Night with Conan O'Brien clip where Con-ney went and had his own GI Joe figure made, Bob was the guy who did it.

He started doing those butter sculptures during the Ohio Fair with a bunch of people who worked in the toy sculpting design at Kenner toys which was based in Cincinnati. They found it to be a fun summer break to hone their craft and work in a much larger and weird medium than the normal wax they were used to. He told me it was a total cluster fuck trying to get it done before it melted and doing most of the work in a freezer.

And its interesting that one of the people who helped was an Erin Swearingen, it was probably her dad, Jim, who was the lead designer on all the original Star Wars toys.

So if you were a kid and had a Star Wars toy as a kid or most of the cool toys from the 80s, it was probably Bob who sculpted it from scratch (not butter).