The shark from JAWS and five other iconic movie animatronics!
You could argue that Jaws might not have been the success it was without the infamous malfunctioning of the animatronic shark, and there are very few conversations you can have about the movie without bringing Bruce into it! Here are some more iconic animatronics that shaped their movies…
The T-Rex (Jurassic Park)
This one malfunctioned too! The T-Rex was 20ft high and 40ft long, and could hold people inside it as they checked the hydraulics and glued the skin in place, but… there were issues with the hydraulics, which would get wet and shake violently! Not great for a movie with a major storm as a plot point! The animatronics even changed the perception of dinosaurs! The amount of research into how living dinosaurs might have moved helped many palaeontologists to look at dinosaurs in a different way. The ‘birdlike’ actions were a relatively new idea! The later Jurassic Park films from 2015 onward) have been criticised and the original T-Rex is often used as an example in ‘why real effects will always be better than CGI’ articles. It still looks fearsomely real today!
Monster (The Thing)
Possibly the only movie monster in history to be made out of mayonnaise, bubblegum and KY jelly at various points!! Looking like a viscerally disgusting mix of mechanics and animals, the monster in The Thing can shapeshift, turning into anyone, anything, or a nightmarish mass of concepts. The fact that the animatronic was ‘real’ and memorable is a huge part of why this film stays in your mind as one of the great horrors (like Jaws!)
Freddy Fazbear and his creepy friends (Five Nights at Freddy’s)
Animatronics are creepy enough! There’s even a word for the fear of them: automatonophobia! The movie Five Nights at Freddy’s plays on this fear! Based on a game set in the abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, where the possessed mascots go wandering at night, you play a security guard and your job is to keep an eye on them. The mascots kill anyone they see by stuffing them into a spare animatronic suit so as the caretaker, you have to be careful! The game was so popular it was made into a movie, with the same basic plot and starring Josh “Peeta Mellark from The Hunger Games” Hutcherson and Matthew “Shaggy from Scooby Doo” Lillard.
The sharks (Deep Blue Sea)
These ones even scared the actors! Stellan Skarsgård said in an interview that he jumped when one of them moved unexpectedly, thinking it was a real shark before rationality kicked in! And of course it’s Jaws that shaped the look of the sharks- the director Renny Carlin decided (wisely) to stay away from the great white as none could match up to Bruce. Instead, he made his starring scary fish mako sharks, which can jump 30ft out of the water and swim up to 74km per hour!
Gizmo (Gremlins)
It feels like a no-brainer to say that character designs are important in movies- the way a character looks, moves and speaks can make or break it! (Jar-Jar Binks, anyone??) “Fuzzy things that go from cute to creepy and still have to be funny” is a big ask- but the design for the mogwai species in the 1984 horror comedy Gremlins fit the bill! Merchandise themed around the main character, Gizmo, is still sold today- and growing up in the 1990s, I can tell you first hand that Gizmo was a very popular pet name.
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