Mr. Mercury, blobby text + water drops

There was a question on the After Effects-List about how to go from liquid to your original image using the built-in CC Mr Mercury filter.
Here are a few of the responses:

• Either create a fully covering blast of particles and fade to original or use Blobbylize instead, with Particle Systems II or such and fade in a solid alpha [from Jens @ Cycore]
• try precomposing your sequence and then just reverse your precomped animation.
• yes play it backwards. And do a crossfade. See the old case study... by Chris Meyer from 1998 [Chris and Trish have a ton of stuff buried at PVC]
• if you animate the blob birth and death sizes from small to well past the slider range of 2 to something like 5.4 for death size, the blobs go to form the original image.

There's not much solid info on Mr. Mercury in AE Help or at Cycore, but Andrew Kramer has nice quick tutorial, Video Copilot tutorial 57. Water Drops.