Ford Cruller

Ford Cruller is the deuteragonist of the Psychonauts series. The founder and former leader of the Psychonauts before the battle against Maligula shattered his psyche, he served as Razputin Aquato's mentor and mission control in Psychonauts, before his past with The Psychic 7 was explored in Psychonauts 2.

Appearance
Ford Cruller is a lanky, elderly man with pale green skin. He has a square head with asymmetrical, sunken blue eyes, bushy white eyebrows, a triangular orange nose, small orange ears, a white mustache, and a jutting chin. Although he is balding, the remaining white hair puffs out in a wild horseshoe hairstyle, elongating the size of his head by half on either side. He has four fingers on each hand, and a bacon tattoo on his left forearm.

When in control of himself, Ford wears the standard uniform of a Psychonauts agent: a long-sleeved, ribbed, forest-green jumpsuit, emblazoned with the organization's logo on the left breast, along with dark green gloves and shoes.

Due to his split personalities and occupations thereof, Ford wears many different costumes and accessories across both games. His janitor persona in Psychonauts wore a a long-sleeved red-and-black plaid shirt, a short-sleeved blue jumpsuit, and pink bunny slippers. The admiral persona added an orange safety vest and a white sou'wester hat, while the chef persona added a tall toque blanche, a red-and-white checkered neckerchief, and a white apron reading "Kiss my food." The ranger persona wore the plaid shirt, high-waisted green shorts, a red vest with badges, a bolo tie, tall green socks, and a wide-brimmed campaign hat bearing a brain logo.

In Psychonauts 2, Ford's alternate identities wore more elaborate costumes. His barber persona wore a red-and-white striped vest and orange suspenders over a white dress shirt, a red bowtie, pinstriped red pants, a brown leather apron, and white-and-black saddle shoes. A comb and a pair of scissors stuck out of his hair. As the bowling lane manager, Ford wore a red-and-pink polo with a black nametag, a white belt, brown tartan pants, and blue-and-red bowling shoes. As the mail clerk, he wore a navy blue vest with a name badge over a white dress shirt and a red necktie, a navy blue peaked cap with a gold postal service emblem, blue jeans, and grey shoes. As the gravedigger, Ford wore a brown newsboy cap, a red plaid shirt under a long leather coat, dirt-encrusted blue overalls, and brown shoes.

A wood carving in Psychonauts and memory vaults in Psychonauts 2 depicted Ford Cruller as a young man. He had black hair, styled neatly compared to his later wild mane, and a slim black moustache. His eyes were more symmetrical in size and placement. He routinely wore a sweater vest over a button-up white shirt with a tall collar.

Notable Psi-Powers and Skills
Teleportation

Astral Projection

Major Relationships
Razputin Aquato

Lucrecia Mux

Otto Mentallis

The Psychic 7

Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello

Backstory
As a young park ranger, Ford Cruller discovered the psitanium-rich land which would eventually become Green Needle Gulch. He constructed impenetrable psychic illusions over the area to study its paranormal phenomena in peace. Over time, he recruited a team of renowned psychics to join him: inventor Otto Mentallis, hydrokinesis specialist Lucrecia Mux, author Cassie O'Pia, herbophony specialist Robert Zanotto, zoolepathy specialist Compton Boole, and musician Helmut Fullbear. The Psychic 7 became close friends, united in the goal of pushing the limits of the human mind with innovations such as Otto's Astralathe.

During the team's time in Green Needle Gulch, Ford fell in love with Lucrecia Mux. When her home country of Grulovia was invaded, Lucy left her friends to aid the war effort with her psychic powers, unaware that the Astralathe experiments opened a deep, primal part of her mind that left her vulnerable to radicalization and violence. Ford and Lucy exchanged letters for a time, as Lucy became Gzar Theodor Malik's right hand and enforcer, Maligula, and the severity of her patriotic rhetoric began to frighten Ford.

Ford and his team were called upon by world leaders to vanquish Maligula, after she broke the Valermo Dam and drowned hundreds of peaceful protesters, including her own sister, Marona Aquato. In the ensuing Battle of Grulovia, Maligula felled each of Ford's friends, including Helmut Fullbear, who was plunged into the frozen lake, before Ford finally subdued her. While Ford restrained Lucy, Helmut expelled his brain from his body using sneezing powder, landing at Cruller’s feet.

Returning to Green Needle Gulch with both Lucy and Helmut’s brain, Ford turned the Astralathe on Lucy once again, building a wall deep within her subconscious and sealing the Maligula persona away behind it. Having restored Lucy’s personality but aware that she wasn’t safe from the consequences of her crimes, Ford resolved to hide Lucy from the world. He implanted an elaborate construct in Lucy’s mind, to change her identity from the inside to that of her dead sister Marona. He took Lucy’s orphaned nephew, the young Augustus Aquato, and hypnotized him via the Astralathe to accept Lucy as his mother. Content that Lucy was safe in her new identity, Ford implanted a deep-seated hydrophobia in the pair before leaving them to their own devices as a false mother and son in a small family circus.

Knowing that he couldn’t move on from Lucy or live with the knowledge of what he did to her, Ford returned to Green Needle Gulch and used the Astralathe on himself. He shattered his own mind, creating a multitude of uncontrollable split personalities, forgetting everything about Lucy, Maligula, and the abandoned brain of Helmut Fullbear.

With Lucy and Helmut presumed dead and the Psychonauts declared heroes, Ford joined Otto Mentallis in the groundbreaking of the Motherlobe. As the other founders sans Otto isolated themselves, Ford lead the Psychonauts for an unknown duration, though his slipping sanity soon discredited him. He was eventually banned from the Motherlobe due to his instability, though not before working in the mailroom, the bowling alley, and establishing a hair salon.

Ford was relegated to menial tasks at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, bouncing between his alternate personas of park ranger, fry cook, boatman, and janitor. Discovering that he became more stable near the large psitanium deposit beneath the camp, he built an underground lab to monitor psychic threats around the world on his own. He found new loyalty in young agents Sasha Nein and Camilla Vodello, becoming their dispatcher even as the Psychonauts organization proper continued to disregard his status reports.

Roles
Psychonauts

When circus runaway Razputin Aquato arrived at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, Ford took a shining to the budding young psychic. After Raz discovered Ford's underground lab, Ford privately trained him in pyrokinesis, telekinesis, and invisibility. Otherwise teleporting across camp to fulfill his duties as scoutmaster, janitor, and cook, he gave Raz the ability to summon him for assistance via a strip of bacon, his favorite food.

That night, every camper at Whispering Rock was kidnapped and robbed of their brain by Morceau Oleander and Caligosto Loboto. Ford collected their bodies in his observation room for their safety. He appointed Raz as his field agent after agents Nein and Vodello were kidnapped as well, confessing the truth of his broken mind and the fact that he was only sane within the walls of his lab.

Ford sent Raz across the lake to Thorney Towers Home for the Disturbed to rescue Sasha, Milla, and Lili Zanotto, and thwart Oleander's world domination plot. As Raz scaled the asylum and traversed the minds of the Inmates, Ford remained on psychic speed-dial to advise him on obstacles and enemies. He teleported Raz back to the lab upon request so Raz could collect supplies and drop off recovered brains, which Ford installed back into the heads of the campers with a funnel.

After Raz rescued Sasha and Milla, they engaged Oleander in a psychic battle. Ford arrived, levitating into Thorney Towers with a stabilizing chunk of psitanium strapped to his back, and turned the tide of the battle by hitting Oleander with sneezing powder. Although knocked out later in the battle, Ford still psychically aided Raz through the Meat Circus.

After the defeat of Oleander and Loboto, Ford, still strengthened by psitanium, honored Raz with a speech commending his heroism before bestowing him with the title and uniform of a Psychonaut. The psitanium proved unreliable shortly thereafter, reverting Ford to his dotty cook persona and rendering him unable to participate in the Rhombus of Ruin mission.

Psychonauts 2

Following orders from Truman Zanotto, Raz summoned Ford to the Psychonauts' headquarters via a strip of honey pepper boar bacon, seeking his help as the person who supposedly killed Maligula twenty years prior.

Ford appeared as a construct in two other minds aside from his own-- as the harsh food critic Faun Cruller in Compton's Cookoff, and the jovial violinist Vision Quest in PSI King's Sensorium.

Behind the Scenes
Ford Cruller is voiced by David Kaye, who also voiced Linda the Lungfish, several lungfish denizens in Lungfishopolis, and the ride operator in Fatherland Follies.

Trivia

 * Each of Ford's four alternate personas in Psychonauts 2 wears an accessory the same vibrant shade of red that appears across Lucrecia Mux's costumes, creating a deliberate visual connection between the two.