Designer Times
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42. Conan Serpent - Giant Fire-Breathing Animated Figure

Gary Goddard of Landmark Entertainment designed a stunt show for Universal Studios Tour......The Conan Swords and Sorcery Show based on Universal's very successful Conan The Barbarian movie. Gary asked Animated Show Productions to engineer and build (3) animated serpents. As I started concept designs for two of the simpler serpents, the focus was placed on a really big and fiery creature......(24) feet high and breathing an (8) foot tongue of real flame. This got my attention. This is the kind of wild stuff I like.

Gary's script called for a live stunt cast of buff body-builder types including an Amazon-like Red Sonja actress which would stage a horrendous fight to the death with a fire breathing serpent. One of the humans would return after death as a terrifying giant serpent which must be destroyed in an epic stunt battle with fire, lasers, smoke, fog, and all the other stage effects that could be presented. Animated (ASP) was to first concentrate on the big serpent with other EFX to follow later. ASP soon developed a great working relationship with Universal Studios Tour (UST) thru their show project manager, Larry Lester. We, as former Disney folks, found UST to welcome us to their team with great enthusiasm.

Tom Reidenbach did a great snake styling job, while the shop made a massive model for casting up the skin and building the fabulous looking horned head. When the whole creature was later painted, our whole shop had produced the most dramatic giant animated creature yet seen. Dave Schweninger and his control guru, Steve McIntyre of Anitech systems provided a super sized control package for operating the creature during the show.

As the size of an animated figure goes up, things get heavy real fast. The flexible skin can be so heavy it will tear apart from gravity if the design is just a scale-up of a regular sized figure. The size and power of hydraulic or pneumatic cylinders rise to very powerful magnitudes. Control problems can be quite scary with large motions near live actors on stage, to say nothing of big tongues of fire shot at them. Dave Schweninger of ASP choose pneumatic power to control the serpent. This meant that we would try to use springs to hold the figure upright when the air pressure was off. Trying to control (24) feet of gyrating snake would take some clever controlling.

Since a snake is 100% flexible, we would have a zillion mechanical joints to do this realistically, each motion requiring a controllable cylinder. So I saw the whole big creature as a tall pivoting pole on a gimbal base with a big serpent head stuck on top. The skin would hang supported every couple of feet in a flexible hoop ring and cable tether arrangement. This way we could just tip the serpent fore, aft, and sideways from the lower gimbal and let the skin-hoop ring stuff just flop around. Just like a couple of tons of naturally flailing snake steak.....free animation as we say.

The head, being about (6) feet long, would be quite conventional except for the fire breathing feature. Asco, a fire EFX company, along with fire EFX guru John Rogers was developing all the show fire stuff, which was quite large and spectacular. John had a clever serpent fire nozzle that was configured for a very low-efficiency mixed flame.....no good for your blue flame oven but perfect for an orange flame dragon's breath.

When the serpent rose up out of a pit, the mouth would open as two long fangs extended. The tips of the fangs carried spark plugs which would ignite the natural gas from the fire nozzle into a flame torch about (3) foot diameter and blow this fire about (8) feet toward the actors. The actors must be standing on a safety pad that enables the flame to fire only when they are in a safe position. Once during rehearsal, an actor was in the wrong position and got slightly toasted. The actor then said "watch out, that thing will turn you to ashes". Thus the serpent was known thereafter as "Ashley", it's stage name for years.

As we were designing the animated serpent figure, Universal had already dug a deep elevator shaft to contain the serpent until it's que to rise into action. Problem was, UST had no elevator for the serpent, and no structural mountings for such an elevator had been cast into the concrete shaft. I was told to invent an elevator to fit what they had and fit the serpent onto it. This is where I learned all about UST, Larry Lester, and super fast track jobs. Like the early days of Disneyland, everyone just jumps in and does what needs doing with no complaint (or explanation).

We built the elevator and started the installation only to find that the concrete forms at the bottom of the shaft had bulged inwards due the weight of wet concrete. My elevator guide rails were designed for straight walls. We jack hammered a lot of hard concrete and drilled thru a ton of interfering steel rebar to get this whole thing into the pit.

Participating in a UST fast track site job with Larry Lester was a new education. Most of the guys on the construction site are employees of low bidders. We found that you can't turn you're back if you lay down a tool or piece of equipment. It's gone immediately. Our management refused to buy a Knaack security tool box like every other sub-contractor. I bought one anyway and suffered the management chew out.....we never lost anything after that.

Larry Lester had a simple way of managing a job site. Since every craft is trying to occupy the same place at once, he was the space referee and you'd better not upset him if you wanted a fair access for meeting your installation dates. He used a roll-around chalkboard every morning to give out orders.....no committee, no coordinators, no printed forms, just Larry barking every morning from this board pushed around in the dirt. He never furnished detail schedules printed by upper management, he told every sub to coordinate with each other. Master plans were not his responsibility, only performance dates. I never forgot the field lesson in cooperation without whining.

During the part of the show where a couple of live actors are killed with a sword, their bodies topple into the snake pit, which is now ringed with fire. The audio produced a long horrible scream as the dying Barbarians fell hundreds of feet to their deaths. They can't be impaled on the serpent's sharp horns, so I designed a retracting stunt pad for the actors to hit, then bounce off quickly as the pad slid away allowing the serpent to rise up about (42) feet from the full down storage position.

The serpent would rise dramatically and search the stage for it's victims while shooting bright laser rays from it's eyes. When it saw the remaining humans, Ashley then pumped out these bright tongues of orange flame. Ultimately, the mortally wounded creature was stabbed in the throat ( a sword goes into a sword pocket) then sinks writhing and screaming back into the pit as flames and smoke shoot skyward. I cried the first time I saw this happen on opening night. Poor thing, she was my baby.

Ashley was by far the largest and most spectacular animated figure in the world at that time. I had thought that Disney's New York World's Fair Abraham Lincoln Animated Figure was the niftiest thing I had ever worked on, but that (24) foot tall fire breathing Serpent taught me even more about animation design. Little did I know then that the next creature was to reach (30) feet in height.

oOo

Next month: King Kong Head - Monster size - proof of concept