Someone may have answered this at some point, but a cursory glance around reveals little evidence.

Did he pass away? Move on from the world of pies/mess? (Which would seem a shame and odd, only in that he was sort of the original king of the hard-to-find/cataloguing everything) Still around? In hiding?

I was spring (fall) cleaning over the weekend and I've got at least a dozen of his tapes, plus some WAMTEC and Noel's House of Pies and Phoebe stuff from the 90s. I want to transfer it all onto some kind of other medium besides VHS, but that's a whole other thing...

Some of my earliest and favorite pie memories are courtesy of his tapes and I sort of miss/cherish it. Sure, the last few years of Chega Mais and others have helped supply a good deal of new stuff, but for my money you can't beat older clips like the lovely game show models who got pied on "Treasure Hunt", the "They Wore Bagels at Night" short film clips (still amazing) and so on.

Anyway, just curious.

JY

P.S. Was anyone else an avid collector, to the point where they remember the clip that has two "bratty teenage" (although they look about mid 20s) girls exchanging pies in some kind of a night club? THere's a guy on stage singing something with the lyrics "...21st century man" (but i don't think it's the T-rex song?). Anyway, it's a WONDERFUL tit-for-tat, one of them is in pigtails i think and the other dressed more like a schoolgirl/nun? One of them blows a bubblegum bubble i think. GREAT pushed/smashed in face pies. I've never seen the clip since, but it looked to be from a movie or at the least a late 70s/early 80s filmed-on-film television show of some kind. It had the atmosphere of "The Nutt House" but is definitely NOT that. I think i still have the printed-out lists of what all the clips were from somewhere, but i did not find them as of yet... Anyway, super obscure ask i know, but this is a FANTASTIC CLIP that i hope someone has somewhere.

1) The Admin should move this thread to the Messy forum....because it is not off topic and is definitely ON topic.

2) I don't know for sure, but I am pretty sure Hurley Coward (not his real name) is still alive. I am probably one of the few people (along with Rob Blaine) who ever met him face to face, because he came to my wam shoots in 1992 and drove down from Orlando and personally scripted and directed 5 of the pie scenes we shot that year. He had a good reason to remain anonymous and go underground and disappear from the wam scene,,,,and he only told one person his reasons for keeping his identity a secret and that person was Rob Blaine....so Hurley's secret life died when Rob Blaine died in 2000. Lenny and a few others I know also knew his real name, but his background was shrouded in mystery and only Rob Blaine knew the full story. When I met Hurley in 1992 he looked about 7 years younger than I am.....so that would put him in his mid 50's today....so I am sure he alive today, but prefers tp keep a low profile.

3) Transferring (digitizing) old VHS tapes into DVDs or digital files is a piece of cake these days. I still keep a dozen of my old VCRs for this purpose. You can buy a cheap $30 box where you can connect AV composite cables (red, yellow, while) from your VCR and the signal passes thru the box and outputs to a USB cable that connects to your PC where you can capture and burn your media into DVDs etc.

4) I don't recognize that vintage pie scene you mention, but if you move this post to the main Messy Forum there are several people who are vintage pie experts that will probably know it.

MK

Thank you for responding!

You have whetted my appetite re: Hurley and the old days, but i shall respect the anonymity etc. and simply appreciate that he's still out there somewhere.

And i also appreciate the info on the conversion box -- i definitely need to get one, i've got probably 20-30 tapes (mostly WAM/pies) that I would like to convert and possibly get rid of the tapes (stay tuned as I may be offloading to someone who wants hard VHS tapes).

oh, and i thought about putting this in Messy but with the "coed/male/female" markers i was just like "eh, someone might complain" and so i put it here.

Thanks again!!

Ah, yes... the mysterious Hurley Coward. I recall many communications via primitive dialup email with him in the 1990s. What a joy getting his "Pie Mafia" newsletter brought me, in classic black and white. His memory is the stuff of legends.

Hurley had very good skills as a graphic artist because most of his newsletters were decorated with his cartoons and other graphics.....sort of a wam version of Mad Magazine. His graphic skills and encyclopedic knowledge of slapstick scenes in the media were very much appreciated in the 1990's. He was "the source" for all things related to the history of wam in the media.

Sadly the same fate happened to Hurley as happened to myself after the 1990's....i.e. with the advent of The Intenet in 1995, and the birth of Youtube in 2005 the need for WAM Gurus like Hurley was replaced by simple mouse clicks on the internet, because after 2005 you did not need ask anyone to find wam clips, all you had to do was click on Youtube to find all that you wanted to find.

Hurley and myself were like 2 old "Encyclopedia Salesmen".....i.e. you don't see them today because who needs them.... nobody needs them when you can find everything you want to know by clicking on the Internet.

Mind you.....artificial intelligence has not been developed to the point where it can fully replace humans......i.e. I have a voice commander from Comcast on my cable tv system....and it can recognize dozens of voice command when I search for things on tv....but it still cannot find any decent wam scenes on tv for me.....if I ask for pies it still lists various cooking shows and misses "The Great Race"...ha ha If you really want to have some fun...try having a wam conversation with Siri on your iPhone.

MK

Well, then, there is clearly only ONE proper answer: SHUT DOWN THE INTERNET!

I think I know what scene you mean. It is from a movie called "Toga Party" (for no apparent reason), which is also referenced as "Pelvis."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076534/?ref_=tttr_tr_tt

I agree, their quick tit-for-tat pie fight is pretty amazing, and I am pretty sure it would be lost to history completely were it not for Hurley.