Via Evanier, I see that the final bits and pieces of the late Forrest J. Ackerman’s collection of movie memorabilia have gone under the auctioneer’s gavel. I’ve written before about Forry’s legendary collection, how it was reputed to be the world’s largest and how he would generously show it off to anyone who came calling on a Saturday afternoon, how plans to base a museum around it never seemed to come together and how in recent years he was forced to sell off the bulk of it to pay for his mounting medical expenses. I understand that the items that remained were his most cherished ones, the ones he couldn’t part with while he was alive, including Bela Lugosi’s Dracula ring, which Ackerman personally wore every day, and a replica of the Robotrix — a clear ancestor of C-3PO — from the silent classic Metropolis.

This news makes me deeply sad. To think that a man spends his entire life gathering around himself the things he loves only to have them scattered to the four winds upon his death… well, it all seems like rather an exercise in futility, doesn’t it? I suppose you could see it as these items returning to circulation now that Forry’s no longer using them, and hope that they’ve all gone to good homes with owners who love and appreciate them the way he did. Forry himself might have even wanted it that way. But I still have a problem wrapping my head around the way a person’s hobbies and interests just… evaporate. If your collection ends up being broken apart anyway, if the people you leave behind have no interest in saving it and loving it as you did, why collect it in the first place?

Maybe what I really have trouble with is some deeper truth about death, which I learned about at a pretty early age but never fully accepted. I’m definitely a “rage against the dying of the light” type. Or maybe this is some kind of familial guilt because I’m not terribly interested in my father’s hobbies and have lately been wondering what I’d do with his little junkyard if he suddenly left us.

One final tidbit from this item: Forry had no heirs, but he apparently made arrangements in his will for some 17 beneficiaries, including a waitress from his favorite restaurant, a place called the House of Pies. That small act of kindness and decency for someone who I’m guessing was kind to him nearly makes up for the injustice of his collection not finding its way into a museum, intact, as it should have.

In other auction-related news, Retro Thing notes that the Hollywood Wax Museum, an incredible vortex of kitsch located just down the street from Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles (next to the Guinness Wolrd of Records Museum and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, naturally), is auctioning off much of its collection of wax figures that purport to be replicas of your favorite entertainers. I say “purport” because the Girlfriend and I visited this place back in ’99 and still laugh about the unbelievable awfulness of nearly every single likeness in the place. While Madame Tussaud’s and the sadly defunct Movieland Wax Museum are known for the authenticity of their figures and the settings in which they stand, we found the HWM to be a slapdash affair of poor craftsmanship and obscure theming (why, for instance, would Cyndi Lauper be hanging out with The Beatles?). Half the figures seemed to have heads that were way out of proportion to their bodies, and the other half appeared to be suffering from skin conditions. And none of them bore more than a passing resemblance to whomever they were supposed to be.

Don’t believe me? Feast your eyes on the HWM’s version of Charles Emerson Winchester III from M*A*S*H. I don’t know who modeled for this, but I doubt it was David Ogden Stiers. Or consider Cyndi Lauper, who looks more like a drag queen masquerading as Cyndi Lauper than the real thing. How about a beefy Will Smith, looking more like Mike Tyson than Agent J?

I have fond memories of visiting the Movieland Wax Museum with my parents when I was a kid, and think it’s unfortunate that wax museums seem to be going the way of black-and-white television. But if crap like this is most people’s experience of the form, no wonder it’s dying off…

For the record, I’m not clear on whether the HWM is closing down or just liquidating some old figures to make way for newer atrocities.