ET just sold for $2.5 million. Here are cinema's most iconic animatronics ever made
The original animatronic model used in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 sci-fi classic, ET: The Extra Terrestrial was sold at an auction for a whopping $2.56 million over the weekend.
A part of the “Icons and Idols” Hollywood sale organised by Julien’s Auctions in collaboration with Turner Classic Movies (TCM), the mechanical model alien was one of more than 1,300 artifacts from Hollywood, including the staff used to part the Red Sea in Cecil B DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, which sold for $448,000, as well as a black wool dress owned by Marilyn Monroe for $256,000.
Starring Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore, ET follows the story of a stranded alien, who with the help of a few suburban kids, makes its way back to its own kind. The film went on to win four Academy Awards, including one for Best Visual Effects.
Special effects expert Carlo Rambaldi, who designed the aliens for Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was hired to design the animatronic for ET.
Created over three months at an estimated cost of $1.5 million, Rambaldi's own painting "Women of Delta" led him to give the creature a unique, extendable neck, while its face was inspired by those of Carl Sandburg, Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway.
Here are a few of the most iconic animatronic puppets and models from cinema:
The Great White Shark from Jaws
The 1,400 kg pounds of plastic nicknamed ‘Bruce’ (after Spielberg’s lawyer) was what made one of the most formidable cinematic terrors of all time. Notoriously prone to failure, the hydraulic system in the shark model once exploded and its skin tended to discolour and break down in the saltwater.
The Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park
Two life-sized T-Rex animatronics - a 37-foot long, full-sized animatronic, and a more precision-based one built only from the torso up - were constructed by Stan Winston Studios to be used on sound stages for the famous Main Road attack sequence from Spielberg’s 1993 classic. The studio created highly detailed full-scale sculptures of the dinosaurs before moulding foam rubber skins that went over complex robotics.
The Queen Xenomorph from Aliens
Though HR Giger’s iconic alien design for Ridley Scott’s Alien was essentially a suited performer, James Cameron’s Aliens, levelled up in size and scale with its massive 14-foot-tall animatronic Queen Xenomorph. The mechanical monster was animated with cables and hydraulics, and required a crane for support. Two puppeteers inside the device operated its arms and 16 moved the rest of it.
The alien from The Thing
A tenth of John Carpenter’s budget for the 1982 horror sci-fi classic, The Thing, was spent on Special Effects artist Rob Bottin's creature effects - a mixture of chemicals, food products, rubber, and mechanical parts turned into an alien capable of taking on any form. The hostile shape-shifting extraterrestrial organism was a combination of a foam-latex puppet, featuring radio-controlled eyes and cable-controlled legs, as well as mechanical jaws and miniature monster models.
The T800 from The Terminator
The chrome exoskeleton of the T800 humanoid cyborg from James Cameron’s 1984 action blockbuster is one of the most recognisable creature designs in the history of cinema. A state-of-the-art full-sized animatronic puppet based on Jim Henson's technology was used as a stop-motion model to imitate Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movement in the film.
Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars
The sleazy, slug-like antagonist from George Lucas’s genre-defining 1977 masterpiece, was a one-ton puppet that took three months and half a million dollars to construct, making it one of the largest to be used in motion pictures at the time. The latex, clay and foam animatronic puppet was originally modelled after Orson Welles and annelid worms and required three puppeteers to control.
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