Not Your Ordinary Wooden Puppets

Marionettes custom made for Team America: World Police act out an irreverent plot thanks to servo technology and wireless controls. Eyes only for you — Designers at Chiodo Brothers Inc. devised animatronic modules for puppets in the Paramount Pictures film, Because female puppet heads were slightly smaller than those for males, some of the electronics had to go in the torso with a wire bundle that fed through the neck joint. Puppet heads before faces and hair are applied. In the event of problems with the animatronics, technicians could unbolt a plate in the back of the puppet head to access the electronics. Most theatergoers who watch the all-marionette cast of probably don't appreciate what's going on behind the flexible foam latex skin. Master puppet producers Edward, Stephen, and Charles Chiodo made 95 generic mechanical heads that, by changing the makeup and hair, constituted more than 300 individual characters in the recently released film. Marionettes are each controlled by 8 to 10 strings made from specially formulated Dacron dyed a medium gray so the strings wouldn't be too distracting in the finished film. But the most sophisticated work went into the animatronics behind the puppets' facial expressions. Each head contains nine servomotors that are more typically used in radio-controlled model airplanes. The motors (from ) make the jaws move, shift the eyes so the puppets can look around, move the brow, and change the position of lips so puppets can not only lip sync to spoken lines, but also smile and frown. The Chiodo brothers and their employees devised custom linkages to get the various parts of the face to move up and down or contort as necessary. can be contrasted with those in the British TV series of the 1960s called puppet heads just didn't move as much; they blinked,