robotic dinosaurs are boring - Dinosaur Toy Blog -

Quote from: dyno77 on February 16, , 08:23:40 PM
One of the most unimpressive exhibits are those of robotic or animatronic dinosaurs standing mostly static and only moving there jaws and arms and maybe they body....
I read an article long ago stating that by the early s ,they would have robotic dinosaurs that could move on their own,so this clearly never happened....instead they seemed to have regressed ..
Id rather have life size sculpture or mural ,because it would have more life than boring robotics...
I know for the most part they are for younger fans ,but this is no excuse...
I dont know why they cant use the same standard that they use in films....but at the same time im aware that the industry isnt a big deal as it once was in the past...still its no excuse to have robotics with the same movements as they had decades ago .....
I am aware of a few exceptions but these are few and they are usually animatronic puppets with someone in the puppet...it does add something and is an improvement but far off from what was promised decades ago....

As a HUGE fan of the early animatronic dinosaur, in particular those created by Dinamation and/or Kokoro I never found them boring. As a kid I felt  I was seeing REAL dinosaurs..we also never had fossil displays, I didn't see my first dinosaur skeleton articulated until the early s.  The shows back them were productions. They had elements of theater and felt like a circus. Artists did their best to create some thing that looked life like and realistic.

Jurassic Park started putting an end to that in 93' when the animatronics seemed dated by comparison. Oddly the Jurassic Park Ride at the time wasn't much better.

The field of robotics has made improvements.  The Big Dog four legged robot ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNZPRsrwumQ ) would be a great base to start with, but no one could afford it hence the military applications.

There hasn't been much change other to get cheaper and cheaper due to those issues mentioned above. Museums have very little in the way of budget.  So they rent instead of buy usually. 

There was supposed to be a huge endeavor in the Middle East to construct a state of the art animatronic dinosaur park, but the oil business there isn't what it was and it was slowly shelved along with a slew of other projects including a new Universal Studios theme park.

One museum has a Trex on display that recognizes the color red and will follow you with it's vision for a bit. A little unsettling to be sure. 

Disney created a dinosaur character pulling a wagon that walked and interacted on it's own , the power supply was kept in the wagon it was pulling, but it disappeared from the Animal Kingdom park sometime ago and hasn't reappeared.

Many of the better companies, like Dinamation went out of business.  There is one U.S. based company that bought a lot of their stock and is touring but I haven't had the chance to see them in person. 

What you are mostly seeing now is Chinese , Philippines or other robots created in those areas without a lot of thought or care except to put out a product as cheaply or quickly as possible.  They have contacted me personally offering a Trex for 5k.  The shows that tour using these are usually weekend affairs, similar to the lower cast of carnivals and sideshows offering similar fair. They buy these pieces put on a quick show and leave town with as much money as they can get. Often they display broken, damaged and just terrible looking pieces.  If one gets too damaged it's thrown in the trash and they buy another.   When this is the market your not going to get fantastic new technology.

Universal Studios recently refurbished their CA park ride with some new more advanced animatronics and the park in China also received a fantastic ride/land. 

All of this is a bit depressing to be honest and of course it gets worse as the people who barely look up from their phones get younger and younger.   Sure they may not do what a film does but I would hardly call any of them truly boring if you have a little imagination.
A few jumbled not-enough-coffee thoughts on the subject:


I am with @Blade-of-the-Moon ; Dinamax animatronics coming to the kids' science museum in the nearest big city were a highlight of my young life, and I badgered my poor parents into driving an hour or more so I could see them. Maybe kids are less easily impressed now than they were in the 80s, but I have certainly been around kids going ape over Dinamax's modern day equivalents.

There is a company here in Nashville called Animax that makes custom animatronics for theme parks and such. They had some videos with Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame showing the process of building some very impressive JP/JW-style animatronic dinos, I assume for Universal Studios theme park. I posted links to the videos here, but nobody responded. The videos have since been taken down from YouTube, likely at Universal's insistence, which is a shame as they were very interesting.


My point is that there are different grades of animatronic dinosaurs out there. Sophisticated animatronics are not only more expensive up front, they are also more delicate and more demanding of power and other infrastructure, which makes them unsuitable for traveling exhibits. Simple and robust are the criteria for anything that must be broken down, transported, and set back up every few months.


One of the points brought up in the videos is that animatronic dinosaurs for display are in some ways more difficult to build than their film counterparts, as film animatronics must only operate long enough to get their shots completed and display animatronics must work every day for years. Film animatronics can also include only the parts that will be seen on screen, and the necessary tangle of hoses and cables can be exposed as long as it won't be in-shot; not so for display animatronics.



My current workplace is a zoo; we will be hosting an animatronic dinosaur display later this spring. Workers are currently building boardwalks and pads. I believe the dinos are being supplied by Billings; if so, I've seen their work before and they have nice sculpts, even if the movements are of the limited sort the OP dislikes. I hope I get to see some of the installation process.

Quote from: Halichoeres on February 17, , 07:35:56 PM

Quote from: Newt on February 17, , 12:26:37 PM
I posted links to the videos here, but nobody responded.

I think that means people liked them. Here on the forum, as elsewhere on the Internet, approval or support can only be expressed with 'like' buttons (regardless of whether a site actually has 'like' buttons); nobody will bother to respond to something with actual words except to correct someone, dunk on them, or wish death on their family. Silence means that at the very least nobody found the post objectionable.

Or it could also be that people just don't know what to say. I personally don't want to say things like "I like that" or "cool". I feel like unless I have something meaningful to say or contribute it's better for me to just say nothing at all. It has always seemed like good forum etiquette to avoid commenting otherwise, since people have to click and scroll to read a comment it seems like the comments should be worth that effort. I've even been on forums where that sort of thing was discouraged. I can understand how it's disheartening when your effort isn't rewarded, I've been there, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don't think perceived disinterest in a thread has anything to do with social media. Indeed, my experience with such things predates social media. I don't know how many articles and studies I posted on fish keeping forums without ever getting a comment, and that was 15-20 years ago.

Anyway, in this instance I'm not here to "dunk on someone" or correct them, I have something of value to share. A video I recently watched called The Decline of Dinamation that was very good and certainly relevant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYx2aHA-dVI

Also, I don't think animatronic dinosaurs are boring, even if their movements are limited, I just think it's cool to see life size reconstructions of extinct animals. Of course, quality counts. This thread reminds me that I have pictures of some robot dinosaurs I visited in the 90's that I've been meaning to share here. I suppose I should get on that.

EDIT: One final thought. Yes, I understand that a simple comment like "thank you for sharing" has value and I try to comment more often because of that. I was merely offering a perspective.

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