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"OPERATION: DUMBO DROP" |
"Operation: Dumbo Drop" is actually based on true
events which took place 1968, in the tiny Vietnamese
village of Dak Nhe. After the village's prized elephant
is caught between the cross-fire of the American and the
North Vietnamese soldiers, and accidentally shot, the
villagers threaten to withdraw their support for the
Americans. Captain Sam Cahill, played by Danny Glover,
and Captain T.C. Doyle, played by Ray Liotta, decide to
lead the project, in a race against time, in getting a
new elephant to the village before the town's sacred
holiday. Thwarted in their efforts to move it by ground,
they decide to drop it in by parachute. Sounds
easy... For three months Lazzarini and his crew worked
diligently, constructing eight life-sized elephants for
the film, using state-of-the-art materials and
technologies. "This is literally the biggest project
we've worked on to date. Finding room in the shop to work
around eight full-sized elephants was a little tough!" At
the end of three months (an incredibly short amount of
time for this type of project) The Character Shop created
2 animatronic and 6 fiberglass versions. The animatronic
replicas had real-time controlled movement of their
heads, ears, eyes, blinks, mouths, tails, and remarkably
life-like, sinuous trunk movements. They also had soft
skins and incredibly realistic paint jobs, with thousands
of whiskers individually hand-punched into them. The
fiberglass versions were hollow shells, with floppy ears,
trunks, and tails. Lazzarini says of a visit by Tai to
his workshop "The replicas looked so realistic, they
fooled the real elephant!"
Also see our Animatronics
Page for a look at Dumbo
under construction
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1995-98
"OPERATION: DUMBO DROP"
The last time an elephant soared through the air was in
1941, in Walt Disney's animated feature, "Dumbo". Well,
Disney has done it again in this summer's release,
"Operation: Dumbo Drop." The film includes a scene in
which an elephant is dropped out of an aircraft, in free
fall, at an altitude of 8000 feet! Of course, this
couldn't be done with a real animal, so to take on the
incredible feat of duplicating one animatronically,
Disney turned to special effects wizard Rick Lazzarini
and his company, The Character Shop, who created
remarkably lifelike full-size replicas of the film's
largest and heaviest star, Tai the Elephant.
Once the replicas were created, Lazzarini and a small
crew traveled to Thailand for six weeks of shooting. Two
fully animatronic elephants were controlled by a
custom-configured computer playback system, and
programmed using Lazzarini's proprietary Waldo®
input devices. The animatronic elephants were tethered to
either a helicopter or crane for shots that the real
elephant couldn't perform, but that still required full
movement of the animal. The six static elephant replicas
were actually dropped in free-fall for wider shots. It's
a good thing that multiples were made, as the parachute
failed to open on three of them, sending them crashing to
the ground! "Hey," Lazzarini laughs, disavowing
responsibility for the pulverized pachyderms, "I just
build the elephants, I don't pack their chutes!"
Pondering packing a pachyderms' parachute poorly?
Pity. Prepare for pure peril!
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