My 3 favorites:
Colonel Sanders/KFC chicken for fingers.  very versatile.  (eg. the Colonel feels so lonely, he makes himself a life sized chicken wrap to embrace 抱)
Hitler for taskmaster.  (Usually I imagine a gay man in a Hitler get-up)
and of course, Mr. T.
These personifications take on their own life as you learn new Kanji and add more stories.  I have found personifications to be some of my strongest stories. 
I just think of the Colonel and I start laughing.  But I also find myself craving his chicken now...

BTW I'm not sure if you already tried this, but the easiest way I find to insert kanji is just to copy and paste.  Or if you know the reading, you can change your keyboard input mode to Japanese and type it in hiragana then hit the space bar that should work too.  Hope that helps..

I think that for a character to work as a primitive, that you want to pick someone with such deep associations that the person has become a metaphor for their unique characteristics.  Not just any character will do - you want ones that are ICONS for what they are.

Rizzo's story for melancholy 憂 as Hamlet was a stroke of genius; It doesn't recur that often (so far for me only in tenderness 優) but when you do encounter it, "Hamlet" captures a huge chunk of strokes in one easy to remember package.

Not a specific person, but a specific group: "Haibane" works really well for me to remember the 羽 feathers primitive.  I almost always reach for Haibane when building a story for a kanji with 羽 in it, because I have such strong associations with those characters after watching Haibane Renmei.

I had a string of stories where I took 者 to be Tokiko Mima from "Key the Metal Idol".  That one didn't work out in the long run - the early stories worked very well and stuck,  but that primitive gets used a lot, and it seemed that Tokiko ran out of steam. I found that Pinocchio worked out better...and of course Pinocchio is the Ur story that KtMI was based on.  Much as I liked Tokiko, she wasn't the root metaphor in my mind for a puppet becoming human - Pinocchio was, so he works better.

I'm following the pack and using Spiderman for 糸 with some misgivings, just because I've never been that interested in the comic or movies, so I don't share as rich a set of associations with that character as I'd like.  But he's enough of a cultural icon I'm hoping he'll work out for me.

I realized my Sam Beckett idea would have been very difficult in practice and I don't need to make things harder than they already are.

So I've decided to use... Harry Potter!! I think it's a good choice, the magical universe easily allows weird stories to still make some sense. And having read the books several times I have a lot of material to use as inspiration. The movies have provided me images that I can use when visualizing my stories. But most importantly, it's easy and fun to make up stories involving Harry Potter.

I've used him already in a few stories but never as a primitive personification. I'll just have to adjust them slightly to avoid confusion. None of them required Harry specifically, so I'll just replace him with Ron or another Hogwarts student in those stories.

Codexus wrote:

So I've decided to use... Harry Potter!

This should be a popular choice! I guess you can work a story/mnemonic with a wizard and pretty much any kind of primitives   Also there is plenty of material from the movies to work on.