The purveyors of all things cute and furry at the Jim Henson Creature Shop rarely face the types of challenges they encountered on Lost in Space: redesigning the Robinsons' iconic Robot, and breathing life into the film's bizarre alien character, Blorp, an entirely computer-generated creation. But the tide has turned at the Creature Shop, where the diligent Henson elves have augmented their trademark line of fuzzy animatronic puppets with powerful hydraulic robots and complex CG lifeforms.
Verner Gresty, the Creature Shop's creative project supervisor on LiS, oversaw the fabrication of the Robot make that two Robots. During a four-week design phase spearheaded by LiS' production designer, Norman Garwood, Gresty's crew was encouraged to make suggestions on the Robot's look. "It was nice to be allowed to comment," Gresty says. "At one point, the first Robot had wheels as opposed tracks, but then we discussed various configurations of the tracks, which could be suspended and hinged in different ways. We basically all arrived at a consensus: if it looks right, it is right. The design we finally issued was a practical solution that did actually work. At that point, I started up a computer-aided design department and bought five CAD stations with all of the software. We built the Robot in the computer before we made a single piece."
Gresty describes the pre-space disaster, "powerloader" version of the Robot, dubbed "Big Blue," as looking "almost like an American football player. He's about 8 1/2' tall by 6' wide, and weighs about 3,000 pounds. The external cladding initially was going to be vacuformed over a master pattern, but I found that I was losing all of the curves and crease-lines, so we molded everything and cast the pieces in fiberglass. The Robot's central chassis was made up of aluminum plates to save weight, although the main leg joists were 3 1/2'' slabs of solid aluminum. All of his big movements were hydraulically powered at medium pressure: about 2,000 pounds per square inch. We used a combination of rotary hydraulic actuators and rams so that all of the axes on his arms worked. His upper body spins a full 360 degrees, and he raises and lowers by some 2 1/2' from the legs, which have angles like a poised desk lamp."
After the first Robot is destroyed, Will Robinson cobbles together a second automaton from bits and pieces found in the Robot Repair Bay. "That's why the new Robot has familiar elements of the TV series' Robot," Gresty explains. "And he's painted a combination of nice soft silvers, more like the original. When you see him from the front, he's kind of cute and cuddly, but he's got this big hydraulic arm behind him, like a scorpion's tail, which can pick people up."
More impressive than the Robots' appearance was the fact that, aside from the character's lack of real artificial intelligence, Gresty's team succeeded in building entirely self-contained mechanisms which could either be puppeted using telemetry systems, or programmed with up to two hours of repeatable actions. He explains, "We designed custom software to drive them, based on some very solid motion-control software that was not prone to crashing. The first Robot is quite a robust item, with about 60 control channels. It took four people to puppeteer it directly on the controls. For all of the stunt scenes, we had record and replay capabilities on all channels, so the Robot could repeat moves within a few millimeters which meant no surprises for the stuntman while doing multiple takes."
At the opposite end of the effects spectrum was Blorp, a yellow Rhesus monkey-sized alien with blue patches, a large head, big ears, huge eyes, six nostrils, and three-fingered hands ending in sucker tips. The creature is an updated version of the TV show's simian alien, Debbie the Bloop, who was portrayed by a monkey in makeup. For the cinematic version of LiS, the Henson Creature Shop's CG producer on the film, Aurelio Campa, headed a team that created the chameleon-like space monkey entirely in CG.
Interestingly, Blorp began as a mechanical puppet for close-up head and shoulder shots done practically on the set, which would be augmented with a CG counterpart for wider shots of the frisky creature jumping around. "Ultimately, we decided to do Blorp entirely as CG, because we felt audiences have become more sophisticated and just wouldn't buy the animatronic version," says LiS' overall visual effects supervisor, Angus Bickerton.
None of the extensive animatronic work went to waste, however. "We scanned our Blorp sculptures into the computer, and used those as the basis for our CG model," Gresty says. "Also, footage of our complex rod puppet provided a reference for the moves and expressions of the computer-graphic version. But obviously, our digital artists were able to do a lot more with skin squashing and stretching in the CG world."
The most exciting aspect of creating Blorp was the adaptation of the Henson Performance System, an Academy Award-winning puppetry device, to directly input the animation of the creature's facial features. Thanks to Henson CG supervisor Hal Bertram, puppeteer Mack Wilson could use this hand-puppeteering tool to record Blorp's facial animation in real-time, just as one would while operating an animatronic puppet.
