The documentary, I Am Big Bird, about the life and career of original Big Bird puppeteer Caroll Spinney was better than expected. It has lots of take-aways about the early years of the Muppets, Sesame Street in particular, and the lives behind the characters they bring to life. But more importantly than any of that noise is that the doc finally frigging reveals the Birds secrets of operation publicly for the first time. Which is a big deal. To me… Cuz I finally learned how Big Bird works which has been a life long knowledge goal.
Think about it…
If this isn’t the sort of thing that you’ve ever pondered, you’d be forgiven. But as someone who has always been interested in animation in any form (puppetry being the animation of physical objects *in real time*, vs animation of real objects on film like stop motion, or animation of drawings which are cartoons) – the mechanics of how they did this thing always amazed me. Firstly because he is so huge – 8 feet tall – and secondly because he is so animated.
For this to blow your mind half as much as it did mine, you first have to engage your brain in the topic and make some guesses for yourself. How do you think this works?…
Big Bird is a roller skating wiz…
Big Bird shows emotions… (*Warning: This is on my list of soul crushing sad-makers. clip from Follow That Bird from the scene in where two carnie hustlers trap Big Bird, paint him blue (because his friends from Sesame Street are looking for an 8 foot tall *yellow* bird – so they have to disguise him so he doesn’t match the missing-persons descriptions – and make a fortune charging a fee for performances)
So how is this all done?… Big Bird uses two hands, has a fully articulated long neck with a big mouth at the end of it, expressive eyes, and he is frequently shown from all angles in full frame to show that there are no cables or wires or extensions helping pull off the illusion. It’s all done in-suit by one puppeteer… How????
My final guess was: There’s a secret zipper at the base of the neck under the feathers and the back opens up. You climb in, stepping into the legs and raise one arm up and one human hand into a wing. That part isn’t terribly difficult to imagine so far…
Getting more difficult: what is moving the other hand? …
Especially early on in the first couple years of Big Bird stuff, you can tell one wing is just kindov hanging out, which gives away the illusion if you’re looking for it. Senator Bob Dole was a veteran who lost most use of his right hand, so when he was doing public events, especially when he ran for President against Bill Clinton in 1996, he had a pen he could grip in that hand so 1- it wouldn’t look so weird and 2- would give a visual cue to people who instinctively reach for the right to shake hands with. Big Bird would use the same trick sometimes and conceal the lame wing by giving it something to do so that it looks natural to not have it gesturing around.
But other times when it is moving without anything in the hand – what is going on? I could never detect any strings pulling from above, the way you can see the cowardly Lion’s tail in the Wizard of Oz (the higher the resolution, the more blatant the wire on the thing is)
Okay – but how does the puppeteer see anything?… A typical mascot costume whose character-head is significantly taller than any human head will have a big obvious mesh panel in the chest or neck for the performer to see out of. Is there one of those in Big Bird that the dude inside has to peek through the feathers of? If so it would be peephole style with a greatly distorted and obfuscated view that likely wouldn’t let you discern much more than shapes and shadows. That’s pretty dangerous. But how else could it be done?
In the “Secrets of the Muppets” episode of the Jim Henson Hour that Nickelodeon replayed a few years after that short lived show went off the air, I was fascinated to learn that the performers inside of the Gorgs in Fraggle Rock see wtf is going on via “Gorg vision” – their name for they system they developed to that allows the human within to see outside through the Gorgs actual eyeballs.
Is this how Big Bird works too? The person inside is watching a monitor that periscopes the birds-eye-view?
The reveal: The Mechanics of Big Bird…
From the ground up: Big Bird is pants with the legs and feet-shoes to start.
His top body is lifted over the leg-pants.
One arm controls one hand and the other arm is raised above the head to puppet the mouth, as expected. For Carol, this would be his right-hand that is raised into the head and left hand operating Birds’ left wing.
His eyes – amazingly – aren’t remote controlled like I thought and aren’t mechanical at all. The eyelids are raised and lowered by a lever in Birds’ skull controlled by the pinky of the mouth-puppeting hand that is always resting on it and takes 5 lbs of pressure to move.
The opposite bird hand moves with an internal string – a “fishing wire” that goes up into the neck and down to the other hand counter balances the wing without a human hand inside it for mobile walking shots. A second person operates the left hand on closeups. Inter-cutting close-ups and long shots tricks the eye into not seeing when the hand is fully functional and when it is just moving up and down from the pulley-counter-weight.
Now it gets really nuts: how does the puppeteer see anything? The answer is, they don’t. Not directly, that is. There is no mesh peeking through the feathers and no camera looking outside of the costume. The puppeteer has to look directly downward at a small screen attached to their belly via an “electronic bra” and watch a live feed of the camera recording the scene. I don’t know how this was possible in the 1970s but I’m guessing it was an over-the-air signal sent to that monitor device – but how did they make it small enough to fit into the belly box I wonder? Remember that as far as the size of electronics goes – it wasn’t until the early 2000’s that we figured out how to fit more digital data than 1 megabyte onto a floppy disk the size of a drink coaster. Recording equipment and batteries were all huge and heavy throughout the 80s and 90s.
Within the translucent glow of the yellow belly, the performer also has their script that they read next to the monitor of themselves. Yeesh.
The person inside has a wireless microphone connected to the recording setup and that too is a feat of engineering because how did it not pick up any old-timey-electronic buzz or hissing from the monitor belt way back when?
Are you not amazed?
Think of the physical toll all of this requires. When I first learned that Muppet performers don’t crouch down Punch and Judy puppet-show style and instead lift the characters above their head – I did that thing you do when a character swims underwater for a period and you hold your breath along with them to see if you would die (or if the scene is even physically possible) and I’d hold my hand up and perform along with the scene. -It gets tiring… even if you’re not holding anything – raising your hand in the air takes some oomf out of you.
And the forced downward look. geez! that’s gotta be murder on your neck. My neck hurts just looking down at my phone for too long. And I’m guessing you can’t hardly move your head at all while performing because otherwise we would see the beginnings of a chest-burster alien from Aliens moving around Big Birds chest. and – again, guessing, but – if you move your head at all and let the fabric of the costume hit the microphone then you ruin the audio with a SHHCCCCHHHHH sound in the middle of a line and would have to start over.
And this is all in addition to the roller skating, jumping, hopping, skipping, running, and multi-cast interaction in a scene you have to do.
Dude… Big Bird is the fkking MAN…
Update: Here’s a clip from the documentary explaining the above components:
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