Wilt

[jekylljuice]

At the risk of sounding a little slow here, I didn’t really notice Wilt’s physical blemishes until I was a few episodes into the show. Well, I did notice them, but what I mean is that I didn’t actually pay them a great deal of conscious attention at the time. I didn’t get to see the pilot episode (in which Wilt makes direct reference to his lack of left arm or functional left eye) prior to the release of the Season One DVD, and in the earliest stages of my Foster’s fandom I was still trying to nail down the exact premise and concept of the show, so back then I pretty much took all the character designs at face value (as Dan points out, a lot of the imaginary friends have quite bizarre designs, so who’s to say what’s normal and what’s not?). Strangely enough, it was only when I noticed Wilt’s facial scars that it occurred to me that the deal with his arm and his eye might be connected and, as I became more interested in and attached to the character himself, I got thinking about exactly what the story behind them could be. I speculated that he’d been in some kind of accident which had disrupted his past as a champion basketball player, which wasn’t too far from the truth, though in my version of events I was always pretty hard on his creator - I just assumed that he (or she, for all we knew until last November) had been the one who’d intentionally made Wilt feel inferior and had dumped him, hence why they showed no interest in turning up to any of the creator reunions. I’m kind of ashamed to admit that now, given how nice Jordan turned out to be when we finally met him.