The largest animatronic ever made for a movie
Long before the dominance of CGI in movies, producers and directors relied on animatronics to deliver their visions of the weird and wonderful creatures of either this universe or that from beyond our usual human understanding. Once merely called “robots”, animatronics are essential to the history of cinema.
Over the years, we’ve seen some mesmerising animatronics in films, from the birds in Mary Poppins (the first in a motion picture) to the terrifying extra-terrestrial entity in John Carpenter’s The Thing to the equally creepy Chucky doll in 1988’s horror classic Child’s Play.
When it comes to the largest animatronic ever made for a movie, though, there is only one winner, and it’s a true behemoth. It’s the Spinosaurus from the third instalment in the Jurassic Park film franchise, released in 2001. It was built by the legendary Stan Winston Studios, designed by Mark ‘Crash’ McCreery.
The animatronics used in the first two Jurassic Park films had been a great success, and for the third movie, Steven Spielberg wanted to make them even bigger and faster. John Rosengrant of Stan Winston once noted, “There was a lot to live up to. At the same time, we wanted to come up with new designs and pump some energy into the old ones.”
Between the second and third films, archaeologists discovered a Spinosaurus skull, so the dinosaur made its way into 2001’s film, too. McCreery admitted that the team thought that the movie was going to be the last Jurassic Park effort, so they “just went for it”, making the animatronics as big and bad as possible.
The final product measured nearly 45 feet long and weighed over 25,000 pounds. The Spinosaurus features in a famous scene in which it faces off against a T-rex, so according to designer Tim Nordella, “The Spino had to be faster, splashier and better than the T-rex. The producers wanted something that was going to actually kill the T-rex, in fact, so it had to be a more formidable character than the T-rex was.”
That final scene was the last time the animatronic would be used, so the production crew again delivered some serious violence. The Spinosaurus actually managed to rip the head off its Tyrannosaurus counterpart with just a single slash of its claws, placing the animatronic into the eternal canon of cinema history.
Check out the Spinosaurus animatronic from Jurassic Park III below.
