Welcome to WISHNIKS.COM, my page for my Wishnik projects, new and old, and all things Wishnik!
(Original Trolls, too.)
In case you didn’t know, I’m Steve Sullivan — a.k.a. author/artist/designer/editor Stephen D. Sullivan.
Among the thing you’ll find here are images from the Wishnik films my brother Mark and I made back in the 1970s. I’m in the process of scanning and restoring those films, and hope to be able to share them in some form in the near future. (The images on this page are from those films.)
With a little “double horseshoe” luck, there may be some other new (and old) projects coming as well.
How much stuff ends up connected to this page depends on you! Share this page! Make it popular!
What is a Wishnik?
Wishnik is the name of a particular type of troll dolls/action figures made in the 1960s– though my family always called any troll figure a Wishnik. The Wishniks we played with bear little resemblance to the recent CGI cartoon trolls you may be familiar with.
Our Wishniks were rich and poor, kind and greedy, big and small, superheroes, detectives, and villains — and almost all were adventurous. The male Wishniks were named for their hair colors — though I couldn’t tell you how that started, now.
The female Wishniks (and there were only a few, because we were boys, and I think many of them were inherited from our female cousins) had normal, short human names, like Kathy. I’m not sure how many of those names (beyond Kathy) I could remember now. Thank heaven the earlier boys had easy-to-remember names! (Though the double-headed Wishniks were sometimes called “Double Head” as well as (more often) Double Hair — and if needed, further subdivided by double hair color, like “Blue and Green” Double Hair.
Our Wishniks’ world — Wishnik Island — included other toys that were of similar size, including the Uglies (Dam Things), and especially the “Lucky Schnooks,” which we called Grimlens. Because of an old album we had, The Wishnik Album, our Wishniks all talked in high, chipmunk-like voices. The Grimlens talked like Boris Badinov, and they came in various colors designating the kind of (elemental) powers they had.
For reasons of storytelling (maybe I’ll tell you some day), the larger Wishniks became (the now politically incorrect, though then merely insulting) “Big Fats,” including even the big Wishniks who weren’t originally part of the group and had been respectable judges and so forth. The original “Fatses,” Blue Hair and Orange Hair, took their insulting nickname as a badge of honor, and even started their own renowned detective agency, wrote their own books, and had their own film. (Orange Hair had a previous career as the superhero, the Great Green Wasp Troll.)
That’s enough of a primer for now. If the page proves popular, there’s plenty of Wishnik info to come in the future!
Please share this page, tell your friends, and — if you can — support Steve’s work via the link at bottom.
I hope you’ll enjoy this page, and look for future adventures of our Wishniks!
This site and all info and images on all pages © 2024 Stephen D. Sullivan. All Rights Reserved.