I think the engineers are ahead of you again. One of the uses of AI I've seen worked on is for just this sort of thing: an operator is seated at the terminal and can assume direct control of manipulators/arms while the AI purely functions as an autonomic nervous system for the legs, which the pilot steers using foot pedals, not unlike a driving simulator or (dare we say it) a video game. The most spectacular application of this tech is probably going to be the full-scale walking Gundam I hear Japan is working on.
A Hippie in the House of Mouse (Jim Henson at Disney, 1980)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
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@Shevek23
Awesome idea! I think it'll need to wait a couple of decades for that to pan fully out due to the sheer amount of data you're pushing and the limits of the bandwidths and latency at the time (as you mentioned), but it's hypothetically fully possible. I can even see Henson pursue such a thing just to do it if funds aren't a limitation. Feedback in particular will need some time to be properly integrated. But yes, everything you just described could be done.
Awesome idea! I think it'll need to wait a couple of decades for that to pan fully out due to the sheer amount of data you're pushing and the limits of the bandwidths and latency at the time (as you mentioned), but it's hypothetically fully possible. I can even see Henson pursue such a thing just to do it if funds aren't a limitation. Feedback in particular will need some time to be properly integrated. But yes, everything you just described could be done.
Meta-Discussion: Animatronics
Meta-Commentary: The Animatronics Revolution of the 1980s
Early in the 1980s, two companies are at the forefront of developing the art of animatronics: Walt Disney Productions and Henson Associates. Who will be the one to lead the revolution? One has billions of dollars in resources and has been the undisputed industry leader in the field for over 20 years. The other is a small studio of less than 100 employees that primarily makes puppets.
You might as well ask who was going to lead the home computer revolution of the 1970s: IBM, the industry leader for over 20 years with billions of dollars in resources, or a pair of hippies named “Steve” working out of a garage.
And yet by 1990, tiny Henson Associates would win an academy award for their groundbreaking animatronic effects work. Disney would get nominated for one with 1986’s Return to Oz…using Henson Creature Shop effects. So why wasn’t Disney, with their decades-long head start, the one to revolutionize the animatronics industry using the new tools available? Because, just as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were able to see the potential of microprocessor technology in a way that IBM couldn’t, sometimes “genius”, to quote Louis Tucker, “is a perception of the obvious which nobody else sees.”
Perception can change everything, and sometimes simply seeing the technology through a new set of eyes can make all the difference. In Jim Henson and Faz Fazakas’s case, it was the lens of puppetry that allowed them to make the leap.
Were Henson Animatronics Really All That?
Looking at the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie effects today, it’s pretty easy to dismiss them when placed alongside Iron Man or Groot, or even the nightmarish Michael Bay versions of the TMNT. And yet for the time they were astounding. Just as Mickey Mouse audibly whistling while he steered a boat in Steamboat Willie astounded audiences in 1928, so did the naturalistic fluidity of the motions of the eyes and mouths of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello astound audiences in 1989. The effects won Fazakas and Brian Henson an Oscar for a reason.
Now take a look at Disney audio-animatronics from the same year, say 1989’s The Great Movie Ride. You can find some vintage footage on the web. The audio-animatronics are certainly very good, but they’re also pretty stiff, and dare I say robotic? The mouths move in a stilted, unnatural manner. Their faces barely flex. Their heads stay nearly stone-still without the subtle tilts, turns, and nods that a living human will instinctively do. They are, honestly, not that far removed from their audio-animatronic ancestors in 1964’s Carousel of Progress[1].
Most Jim Henson animatronics from the era, on the other hand, will move in these small, fluid ways, giving them a naturalistic feel. It’s pretty easy to forget that Hoggle from Labyrinth is Shari Weiser wearing an animatronic mask remotely controlled by Brian Henson. The animatronics from The Storyteller were often just as amazing, and done on a smaller budget. Even back in the early 1980s you had the difference between the fluidity and realism of The Dark Crystal (1982) and the Gorgs of Fraggle Rock (1983), compared to the borderline creepiness of Welcome to Pooh Corner (1983-85), all of which mixed live action puppetry with remote animatronics. The Henson animatronics in general are more likely to escape the uncanny valley than the contemporary Disney ones (your mileage clearly may vary, of course). And these aren’t just my opinions, they were the opinions of the effects-experts at the time.
So, why? Why did this little “puppet workshop” change the game?
Again, perception is key here. Like all master puppet performers, Jim and Brian Henson were very experienced in adding naturalistic motion to the creations. The slight turn of a head, the turn of a lip, or the narrowing or widening of the eyes can carry an enormous depth of emotion, thought, and intent. And as a puppet performer, Henson needed to make these subtle motions many times, dynamically, in direct response to outside events. He had to emote realistically with his wrist and fingers. And when his ever-expanding artistic vision demanded actions in his Muppets that no human with a puppet could realistically perform, like rowing a boat or riding a bike, ever more complicated remote means had to be invented to make the shot work.
The ultimate revolution came with a single tool: the “waldo”. It’s the tool only a soft-headed puppet performer could have thought of. The Henson waldo is a soft, mitt-like “mouth” connected to a series of electromechanical transducers. As the performer moves the “mouth” of the waldo with their hand – or tilts it, or pulls it back or pushes it forwards – the transducers convert the subtle hand and wrist motions into electrical signals that are transmitted, usually wirelessly, to corresponding servomotors inside the remote animatronics. Other motions, like eye blinks, eye turns, or eyebrow raises, can be controlled through simple joysticks.
Richard Hunt using a simple waldo on Fraggle Rock (image source “www.henson.com/jimsredbook”)
Advanced waldo in action to animate “Waldo C. Graphic”, the first all-digital puppet
From there, it’s all a matter of time and training, allowing the performer to master the subtle motions to give the naturalistic performance, either by him/herself or in conjunction with an actor wearing the animatronic prosthetic. It’s literal “remote puppetry” using technology originally developed by the nuclear industry and NASA.
In addition to The Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock, TMNT, and Labyrinth, Henson animatronics would go on to appear in TV (Dinosaurs, Bear in the Big House, Farscape, and many more) and movies (The Witches, 101 Dalmatians live action, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone, and many more). They still show up today, even with cheap, hyper-realistic computer effects dominating the effects industry.
What Happened with Walt Disney Imagineering?
So, if Henson was developing such fluid, naturalistic animatronics in the 1980s, then why wasn’t Disney, who had a 20-year head start? Again, perception. It’s often easy for the Big Name in the Business to get complacent and stop truly innovating. They get trapped in a cycle of groupthink and limited points of view. They start to ignore the wild, innovative ideas and go with the familiar, “safe” options. They make small, evolutionary changes, the next obvious step in what they did before, rather than pursue the riskier outside-the-box revolutionary ideas that can change everything.
It happened with IBM. It happened with Apple. It happened with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nokia, Motorola, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, Atari, Nintendo, McDonalds, Burger King, GE, Paramount, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Time, Life, Blockbuster, and so many more. Some say it’s happening with Disney and Lucasfilm today. It happened with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Card Walker, and Michael Eisner. At some point, had he lived longer, it may well have happened to Jim Henson.
It most certainly happened with Disney, arguably more than once, and, as this timeline should have made abundantly clear by now, not just with their animatronics.
And then there’s what I like to call the “engineer’s mindset”. Full disclosure, I am an engineer by trade, so I resemble these remarks. Engineers and technicians are often very process-driven people. You get a set of requirements and a budget and you design to it. In the case of Disney audio-animatronics, you have a simple cyclical pattern to design to. Your key challenge is timing. You have to have the audio-animatronic figure sit idle until the next carriage of visitors pulls up, and then go through a rote set of audio-synchronized motions on cue, and then go idle until the next carriage appears. It’s easy to approach this set of requirements with the same sense of emotionless systems engineering process one would give to designing the aileron controls for an airplane wing.
Furthermore, with limited budgets and short development timelines, combined with the natural engineer’s drive towards “efficiency”, there’s an inclination towards the “least necessary design”. Why have the figure’s face move in five dimensions when he really just needs to open and close its mouth time to the recorded dialog? Requirements met. Why “over-engineer” a solution? More moving parts equals more build time, more cost, more maintenance, and more things that can break.
Honestly, take away all of my hindsight and drop me in an Imagineer’s billet in 1982, and I would have probably done the same things they did. The environment you’re in matters. Had Fazakas gone to work for Disney in the ‘70s rather than Henson, he would never have developed the animatronic waldo. Instead, he likely would have designed things pretty much the same as the other Disney Imagineers of the day were designing. Had Jim Henson left the world of puppetry in the ‘60s to pursue directing, as he nearly did, Brian Henson likely would never have developed more naturalistic animatronics. Only a puppet studio could have come up with such an idea as the waldo for animatronics, and only someone with a performer’s mindset could have foreseen the need for such fluid, naturalistic performances in their animatronics.
And let’s be clear, I’m in no way suggesting that Fazakas and Brian Henson were “smarter”, “better”, or “cleverer” than the Disney Imagineers. Disney’s Imagineers were (and are) some of the best in the business, not just in terms of engineering, but in terms of design. There’s a reason why they were leading the pack for decades and why they’re arguably leading the pack today.
And Disney certainly learned over the decades. The new audio-animatronics today for, say, Davy Jones are breathtaking. The competition from Henson and, later, Universal Studios has been a healthy stimulus for them.
Breathtaking!
Apples and Oranges?
Oh, and one big caveat: designing audio-animatronics for a theme park ride is a different job than designing animatronics for a movie or TV show. Sure, on the surface they’re pretty similar: you put a realistic skin over a robot and make it perform a part.
But the devil is in the details: the audio-animatronic theme park figure doesn’t need the same level of dynamic motion as the movie animatronic. It has no need to dynamically respond to its environment. Take away the surroundings and the audio-animatronic will act in the same way every time. A small, fixed set of servomotors running to a fixed set of preprogrammed commands is typically enough. The movie animatronic, on the other hand, needs to “react”, often in very different ways, to what the other actors and characters do and to what events are happening on screen. They will need dozens of little servomotors for the myriad of different facial expressions, eye motions, and body motions to portray the different reactions.
Furthermore, the audio-animatronic figure has to last. When Frank Oz performed the Miss Piggy water ballet in The Great Muppet Caper, they had to use special waterproof fabric that lacked the flexibility of foam, and thus ripped easily. So, they built over 30 “Piggy heads” for the scene. They had the time between takes to swap them out. Any movie animatronic will have the same factors: if it breaks, you can replace or repair between scenes. Obviously, you can’t replace the audio-animatronic figure’s head every time the ride runs. You’d need to stop the ride, which is not acceptable.
And the audio-animatronic character will need to perform again and again and again, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. This means bigger, hardier motors and linkages. It means more durable materials that won’t tear or rip. Remember the Hoggle animatronic? Look up the state of the prop today. It has not held up through the years, though it was also not being maintained in any way, but left sitting on a shelf in a suitcase lost by the airline.
These mitigating factors may severely limit what can be done with an audio-animatronic figure, particularly in the 1980s when many of today’s advanced materials and software capabilities were not yet developed. It’s possible that what you see in 1989’s The Great Movie Ride is as naturalistic as could be done at the time, but I’m not certain either way.
So, What Does the Creature Shop Bring to Disney in 1981, or Vice Versa?
So, if it’s a different set of design criteria, does the Henson team really change anything?
Yes. They still bring a new perspective.
Even with all of the above limitations I mentioned, there are small things that can have a big payoff. The slightest tilt or nod of a head can make a huge difference. In our timeline, Disney’s Imagineers gave Dreamfinder a simple rubber hand puppet for Figment. The Journey into the Imagination ride featured rather simple audio-animatronics of the little dragon: one waving here, another doing an endless pirouette there. Nothing that really captures the, erm, imagination there in my opinion.
What the Henson team could bring to Disney animatronics is the same thing at which they excelled at the time. If anyone could have developed an advanced, interactive Figment in 1981/2 it was the Henson group, particularly Brian and Faz. Same for the audio-animatronics in general. A few subtle little turns or nods can add just that small little bit of natural motion to further humanize the figures. Disney has done exactly this in more recent years (e.g. Davy Jones).
There’s also certain to be a synergistic effect. The Disney Imagineers will bring to the Henson team new advances in computer synchronicity, advanced sound and projection technology, and rugged designs that can hold up over time. It was like with computers in the 1980s: IBM had the big, clunky things that none-the-less had the brute strength to do the processing you needed to run company spreadsheets and databases at work, while Apple had the small, sleek, romantic home systems that anyone could use and which opened up all new avenues for home computing.
Eventually, the two competing computer companies learned from one another, improving the quality and versatility of both. Likewise, Disney eventually learned from the competition brought by the Henson Creature Shop, ILM, and Universal Studios. I foresee the exact same thing happening with Disney and Henson in this timeline, but at a more cooperative rather than competitive level.
[1] Not to bash any of these rides, mind you. The audio-animatronics are great for their time, just, by comparison to what the Creature Shop was doing at the time, they’re somewhat stiff and limited.
Early in the 1980s, two companies are at the forefront of developing the art of animatronics: Walt Disney Productions and Henson Associates. Who will be the one to lead the revolution? One has billions of dollars in resources and has been the undisputed industry leader in the field for over 20 years. The other is a small studio of less than 100 employees that primarily makes puppets.
You might as well ask who was going to lead the home computer revolution of the 1970s: IBM, the industry leader for over 20 years with billions of dollars in resources, or a pair of hippies named “Steve” working out of a garage.
And yet by 1990, tiny Henson Associates would win an academy award for their groundbreaking animatronic effects work. Disney would get nominated for one with 1986’s Return to Oz…using Henson Creature Shop effects. So why wasn’t Disney, with their decades-long head start, the one to revolutionize the animatronics industry using the new tools available? Because, just as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were able to see the potential of microprocessor technology in a way that IBM couldn’t, sometimes “genius”, to quote Louis Tucker, “is a perception of the obvious which nobody else sees.”
Perception can change everything, and sometimes simply seeing the technology through a new set of eyes can make all the difference. In Jim Henson and Faz Fazakas’s case, it was the lens of puppetry that allowed them to make the leap.
Were Henson Animatronics Really All That?
Looking at the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie effects today, it’s pretty easy to dismiss them when placed alongside Iron Man or Groot, or even the nightmarish Michael Bay versions of the TMNT. And yet for the time they were astounding. Just as Mickey Mouse audibly whistling while he steered a boat in Steamboat Willie astounded audiences in 1928, so did the naturalistic fluidity of the motions of the eyes and mouths of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello astound audiences in 1989. The effects won Fazakas and Brian Henson an Oscar for a reason.
Now take a look at Disney audio-animatronics from the same year, say 1989’s The Great Movie Ride. You can find some vintage footage on the web. The audio-animatronics are certainly very good, but they’re also pretty stiff, and dare I say robotic? The mouths move in a stilted, unnatural manner. Their faces barely flex. Their heads stay nearly stone-still without the subtle tilts, turns, and nods that a living human will instinctively do. They are, honestly, not that far removed from their audio-animatronic ancestors in 1964’s Carousel of Progress[1].
Most Jim Henson animatronics from the era, on the other hand, will move in these small, fluid ways, giving them a naturalistic feel. It’s pretty easy to forget that Hoggle from Labyrinth is Shari Weiser wearing an animatronic mask remotely controlled by Brian Henson. The animatronics from The Storyteller were often just as amazing, and done on a smaller budget. Even back in the early 1980s you had the difference between the fluidity and realism of The Dark Crystal (1982) and the Gorgs of Fraggle Rock (1983), compared to the borderline creepiness of Welcome to Pooh Corner (1983-85), all of which mixed live action puppetry with remote animatronics. The Henson animatronics in general are more likely to escape the uncanny valley than the contemporary Disney ones (your mileage clearly may vary, of course). And these aren’t just my opinions, they were the opinions of the effects-experts at the time.
So, why? Why did this little “puppet workshop” change the game?
Again, perception is key here. Like all master puppet performers, Jim and Brian Henson were very experienced in adding naturalistic motion to the creations. The slight turn of a head, the turn of a lip, or the narrowing or widening of the eyes can carry an enormous depth of emotion, thought, and intent. And as a puppet performer, Henson needed to make these subtle motions many times, dynamically, in direct response to outside events. He had to emote realistically with his wrist and fingers. And when his ever-expanding artistic vision demanded actions in his Muppets that no human with a puppet could realistically perform, like rowing a boat or riding a bike, ever more complicated remote means had to be invented to make the shot work.
The ultimate revolution came with a single tool: the “waldo”. It’s the tool only a soft-headed puppet performer could have thought of. The Henson waldo is a soft, mitt-like “mouth” connected to a series of electromechanical transducers. As the performer moves the “mouth” of the waldo with their hand – or tilts it, or pulls it back or pushes it forwards – the transducers convert the subtle hand and wrist motions into electrical signals that are transmitted, usually wirelessly, to corresponding servomotors inside the remote animatronics. Other motions, like eye blinks, eye turns, or eyebrow raises, can be controlled through simple joysticks.
Richard Hunt using a simple waldo on Fraggle Rock (image source “www.henson.com/jimsredbook”)
From there, it’s all a matter of time and training, allowing the performer to master the subtle motions to give the naturalistic performance, either by him/herself or in conjunction with an actor wearing the animatronic prosthetic. It’s literal “remote puppetry” using technology originally developed by the nuclear industry and NASA.
In addition to The Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock, TMNT, and Labyrinth, Henson animatronics would go on to appear in TV (Dinosaurs, Bear in the Big House, Farscape, and many more) and movies (The Witches, 101 Dalmatians live action, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone, and many more). They still show up today, even with cheap, hyper-realistic computer effects dominating the effects industry.
What Happened with Walt Disney Imagineering?
So, if Henson was developing such fluid, naturalistic animatronics in the 1980s, then why wasn’t Disney, who had a 20-year head start? Again, perception. It’s often easy for the Big Name in the Business to get complacent and stop truly innovating. They get trapped in a cycle of groupthink and limited points of view. They start to ignore the wild, innovative ideas and go with the familiar, “safe” options. They make small, evolutionary changes, the next obvious step in what they did before, rather than pursue the riskier outside-the-box revolutionary ideas that can change everything.
It happened with IBM. It happened with Apple. It happened with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nokia, Motorola, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, Atari, Nintendo, McDonalds, Burger King, GE, Paramount, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Time, Life, Blockbuster, and so many more. Some say it’s happening with Disney and Lucasfilm today. It happened with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, Henry Ford, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Card Walker, and Michael Eisner. At some point, had he lived longer, it may well have happened to Jim Henson.
It most certainly happened with Disney, arguably more than once, and, as this timeline should have made abundantly clear by now, not just with their animatronics.
And then there’s what I like to call the “engineer’s mindset”. Full disclosure, I am an engineer by trade, so I resemble these remarks. Engineers and technicians are often very process-driven people. You get a set of requirements and a budget and you design to it. In the case of Disney audio-animatronics, you have a simple cyclical pattern to design to. Your key challenge is timing. You have to have the audio-animatronic figure sit idle until the next carriage of visitors pulls up, and then go through a rote set of audio-synchronized motions on cue, and then go idle until the next carriage appears. It’s easy to approach this set of requirements with the same sense of emotionless systems engineering process one would give to designing the aileron controls for an airplane wing.
Furthermore, with limited budgets and short development timelines, combined with the natural engineer’s drive towards “efficiency”, there’s an inclination towards the “least necessary design”. Why have the figure’s face move in five dimensions when he really just needs to open and close its mouth time to the recorded dialog? Requirements met. Why “over-engineer” a solution? More moving parts equals more build time, more cost, more maintenance, and more things that can break.
Honestly, take away all of my hindsight and drop me in an Imagineer’s billet in 1982, and I would have probably done the same things they did. The environment you’re in matters. Had Fazakas gone to work for Disney in the ‘70s rather than Henson, he would never have developed the animatronic waldo. Instead, he likely would have designed things pretty much the same as the other Disney Imagineers of the day were designing. Had Jim Henson left the world of puppetry in the ‘60s to pursue directing, as he nearly did, Brian Henson likely would never have developed more naturalistic animatronics. Only a puppet studio could have come up with such an idea as the waldo for animatronics, and only someone with a performer’s mindset could have foreseen the need for such fluid, naturalistic performances in their animatronics.
And let’s be clear, I’m in no way suggesting that Fazakas and Brian Henson were “smarter”, “better”, or “cleverer” than the Disney Imagineers. Disney’s Imagineers were (and are) some of the best in the business, not just in terms of engineering, but in terms of design. There’s a reason why they were leading the pack for decades and why they’re arguably leading the pack today.
And Disney certainly learned over the decades. The new audio-animatronics today for, say, Davy Jones are breathtaking. The competition from Henson and, later, Universal Studios has been a healthy stimulus for them.
Apples and Oranges?
Oh, and one big caveat: designing audio-animatronics for a theme park ride is a different job than designing animatronics for a movie or TV show. Sure, on the surface they’re pretty similar: you put a realistic skin over a robot and make it perform a part.
But the devil is in the details: the audio-animatronic theme park figure doesn’t need the same level of dynamic motion as the movie animatronic. It has no need to dynamically respond to its environment. Take away the surroundings and the audio-animatronic will act in the same way every time. A small, fixed set of servomotors running to a fixed set of preprogrammed commands is typically enough. The movie animatronic, on the other hand, needs to “react”, often in very different ways, to what the other actors and characters do and to what events are happening on screen. They will need dozens of little servomotors for the myriad of different facial expressions, eye motions, and body motions to portray the different reactions.
Furthermore, the audio-animatronic figure has to last. When Frank Oz performed the Miss Piggy water ballet in The Great Muppet Caper, they had to use special waterproof fabric that lacked the flexibility of foam, and thus ripped easily. So, they built over 30 “Piggy heads” for the scene. They had the time between takes to swap them out. Any movie animatronic will have the same factors: if it breaks, you can replace or repair between scenes. Obviously, you can’t replace the audio-animatronic figure’s head every time the ride runs. You’d need to stop the ride, which is not acceptable.
And the audio-animatronic character will need to perform again and again and again, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. This means bigger, hardier motors and linkages. It means more durable materials that won’t tear or rip. Remember the Hoggle animatronic? Look up the state of the prop today. It has not held up through the years, though it was also not being maintained in any way, but left sitting on a shelf in a suitcase lost by the airline.
These mitigating factors may severely limit what can be done with an audio-animatronic figure, particularly in the 1980s when many of today’s advanced materials and software capabilities were not yet developed. It’s possible that what you see in 1989’s The Great Movie Ride is as naturalistic as could be done at the time, but I’m not certain either way.
So, What Does the Creature Shop Bring to Disney in 1981, or Vice Versa?
So, if it’s a different set of design criteria, does the Henson team really change anything?
Yes. They still bring a new perspective.
Even with all of the above limitations I mentioned, there are small things that can have a big payoff. The slightest tilt or nod of a head can make a huge difference. In our timeline, Disney’s Imagineers gave Dreamfinder a simple rubber hand puppet for Figment. The Journey into the Imagination ride featured rather simple audio-animatronics of the little dragon: one waving here, another doing an endless pirouette there. Nothing that really captures the, erm, imagination there in my opinion.
What the Henson team could bring to Disney animatronics is the same thing at which they excelled at the time. If anyone could have developed an advanced, interactive Figment in 1981/2 it was the Henson group, particularly Brian and Faz. Same for the audio-animatronics in general. A few subtle little turns or nods can add just that small little bit of natural motion to further humanize the figures. Disney has done exactly this in more recent years (e.g. Davy Jones).
There’s also certain to be a synergistic effect. The Disney Imagineers will bring to the Henson team new advances in computer synchronicity, advanced sound and projection technology, and rugged designs that can hold up over time. It was like with computers in the 1980s: IBM had the big, clunky things that none-the-less had the brute strength to do the processing you needed to run company spreadsheets and databases at work, while Apple had the small, sleek, romantic home systems that anyone could use and which opened up all new avenues for home computing.
Eventually, the two competing computer companies learned from one another, improving the quality and versatility of both. Likewise, Disney eventually learned from the competition brought by the Henson Creature Shop, ILM, and Universal Studios. I foresee the exact same thing happening with Disney and Henson in this timeline, but at a more cooperative rather than competitive level.
[1] Not to bash any of these rides, mind you. The audio-animatronics are great for their time, just, by comparison to what the Creature Shop was doing at the time, they’re somewhat stiff and limited.
Unless they can avoid the great hardware saturation i doubt it, people forgot the crash was an issue of platform holders being unable to filter all the trash and being unable to offer something unique their platform, that is why ended up with dozen of consoles with thousands of copies of the same games unsold, people just saw the same thing like home version of arcade games they could play at thome, plus jack tramiel astroturfing campaings for his cheap commodore did not do wonders when you could get a pc as cheap a console too.
I'm the one wanted those superheroes movies to never happen at all?
I will certainly discuss videogames and also home computers "with a little help from my friend" Kalvan.
Yes, lots of factors behind the Crash of '83. Can't blame it all on E.T., for example. You'll be seeing Jack T. sooner than you think. As to the MCU, well, 30 years of Butterflies will ensure that the MCU as we know it will never appear. However, superhero movies may still make a triumphant return.
ET was just Atari doing another fumble, just one cost millions for them and warner, that was not the straw broke camel back but more the shit cherry in a shit sandwich
Or would it be shit Reece's Pieces? Either way, ET was the symptom of the '83 crash, not the cause. Warshaw on a quixotic quest to single-handedly build a game in under 120 days. It might have been a game changer (no pun intended) had he had time to do it right. Pure Hubris all around..
And the irony was, the worst bone of contention of that game (the context sensitive button) , would be put to excellent use and be the defining feature of The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time!
That is a weird way to name z-axis camera, I thought the only good thing was the semi random way the phone pieces were.
If anything conker was how you do context sensitive button (in hilarious way)
I haven't gotten this far in the timeline but I still have to ask, am I the only one who could see Cyndi Lauper in a live action film of Jem sometime in the mid to late 1980s?
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But than you would take away a well beloved character (or two) if you did that.
Could be interesting
Nope.
Yep.
PS: Multi-quote using "highlight-quote" and the "+ Quote" buttons and "Insert Quotes" can let you put everything in a single post.
I know but I was writing these as I was binging your timeline. The bad thing about binging anything is the inevitable crash as you catch up and now have to wait for your next hit.
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Probably not, there are some very important reasons:
1) Figment must act as person, therefore it is much better, when puppetteer has the same (or very similar) first person experience as Figment. You can not transmit the overall situation to some controlroom, there is no way to send the smells of the parfumes, the wind, heat, general mood etc.
2) The most important one is cameras. Someone can say, that there could be cameras in the eyes of Figment. Yes there could be, but Figmet is a puppet and puppetteer has no need to see through his eyes (he is not a walkaround muppet), The puppeteer needs to have an outside view of Figment and professor, such a outside view can be created with CCTV. But CCTV images of professor and Figment need large infrastructure: lots of cameras, because professor walks around and sophisticated surveilance centre to switch between cameras. That's all why the puppetteer couldn't originally sit at the table.
3) Wizard Gellzz in his simplicity is an ingenious solution to a complex problem - there is no need to create additional infrastructure, what certainly brings additional problems - and the cheapest and most secure.
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I completely agree with all of this and I imagine in the 3+ decades The Great Wizard Gellzz/Gellzeya and later the Wizard's Apprentice would become beloved characters at Epcot.
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