Earlier this week, America’s most popular rat-fronted pizza restaurant and entertainment venue announced a plan to phase out some of its animatronic performers, and admirers of Chuck E. Cheese’s iconic leering robots are in mourning.
Honest Abe is lying about being human. The people who handle Walt Disney World’s Animatronics have built an all new, slightly frightening Lincoln that makes the perfect facial expressions for reacting to the upcoming talking Trump in the Hall of Presidents.
If you were a child of the ’80s, if there wasn’t a Chuck E. Cheese’s location in your town, odds are you celebrated a birthday or two at Showbiz Pizza while the animatronic band Rock-afire Explosion performed. To some, it’s a creepy memory they’d rather not revisit. But to others, it’s a piece of pop culture history…
You can pretend you’re there to marvel at the Egyptian antiquities, but deep down the only reason anyone visits a museum is to check out its dinosaurs. And while a towering T-rex skeleton is impressive, the Melbourne Museum just opened a new exhibit featuring shockingly life-like animatronic dinos.
I always thought that Michael Fassbender's severed head in Prometheus was so perfect an realistic that it had to be just him with his body in a green suit. Or perhaps his real face filmed and projected on a 3D model. Surprisingly, it's an awesome animatronic head made by special effects wizard Gustav Hoegen.
It's not often that you get a chance to see the place where your childhood memories were literally built. It's kind of like peeling back the curtain on your dreams and finding the architects of them busily at work, pulling the strings, painting the scenery, and creating the characters you will vividly remember decades…
The thing dancing in this video is not a person. It's a humanoid installation piece, featuring facial recognition technology that allows it to focus on and follow you with its gaze. And yes, it is freaky as all hell.
Pacific Rim's "Rollie Pollies" are the bug-like parasites that hang out on kaiju bodies. Visual effects house Spectral Motion posted a video showing how these critters went from concept art to scuttling in the builders' hands.
Jurassic Park III may not be your favorite movie in the series. But that doesn't mean its effects weren't fantastic. In fact, the somewhat random third entry in the series boasted the biggest animatronic 'saur yet: the Spinosaurus. Stan Winston Studios recalls the details of that behemoth's construction, and it's…
As a young pup watching Jurassic Park, I was in terrified of the T-Rex, fearful of the Raptors, in awe of the Brachiosaurus and annoyed of that little spraying dinosaur. But probably above all, I felt for the Triceratops. It was hurt! It was dying! It was so incredibly detailed. Stan Winston School revealed how they…
Jurassic Park was awesome. Jurassic Park in 3D is awesome layered on awesome. And the tech behind the scenes? You can probably see where this is going.
I wrote about Visionary Effects awesome—and freaky—animatronics work before. The second version of their robotic eye with dilating pupil is even more impressive and way freakier. Just amazing. I wish I had a pair of these on my living room walls. [Thanks Visionary Effects!]
Disney is hard at work bringing about the Robopocalypse. Behold the throwing bots, the brand-new batch of robots Disney can't wait to unleash into their parks. This new line of androids can throw a ball back and forth with a human guest and even juggle! Disney hopes they'll raise theme park audience participation to…
If there's one thing scarier than encountering a Predator in a dark jungle, it's encountering a skinless cyborg Predator. Amalgamated Dynamics, the special effects firm that provided the creature effects for the Alien vs. Predator movies, stripped the skin off their Wolf Predator and demonstrated what this guy looks…
This is really, really, really impressive. The folks at Disney Research Zurich have just unveiled what they call a "new physical face cloning method" that allows them to fabricate an artificial human face (for use with an animatronics model) at mind-blowing levels of detail. The modeling methods are incredibly…
This is half fascinating, half scary, and 100 percent freaky: Disney has invented a process to clone real humans into silicone-skinned robots. Their method analyzes the face of a target using 3D motion capture cameras. Then it calculates the precise shape, density and composition of a synthetic skin that accurately…
Hey hypothetical insane billionaire, do you have five large burning a hole in your tissue box pocket that just needs to escape? Have we got the purchase for you — a musical band of four leering animatronic yokels, courtesy of that miracle machine eBay. Mount these guys on your flatbed hovercraft and show those stuffed…
Ray Bradbury is a self-professed "Disney nut" and, in 1965, found himself dismayed by an article in the Nation decrying Disneyland as vulgar entertainment. In response, he penned a love letter to Disneyland, defending Walt Disney as a man on the cutting edge of making robots seem human.
1992 was a simpler time. Bill Clinton was elected, The Bodyguard came out, Windows 3.1 was released. It was also a time when puppetry and animatronics still had a place in fantasy films.
Because who doesn't want to own a dinosaur? Hammacher Schlemmer is offering you this gargantuan, 20 foot Triceramonster that looks like it stepped out of Jurassic Park. The first one. The other two don't count.
