Mmm, yummy! This little fella gets a lot of screen time. Originally, he was going to be bobbing about in the sewer halfway exposed and be fished out. A sewer worker was going to say "C'mere...I think it's a kid!", and you were gonna think it was Chuy. Hence, our calling it the "Dead Boy". Of course, things changed. For the better, always, right? In the scene where sewer-boy (he's currently in a lot of ads for Prada) says "It's a lobster, right?", we dabbed at the body with syrup and then put mealkworms (stand-ins for maggots) in the syrup. They hated the syrup. And Mira hated the mealworms! Apparently, despite her crash course in entomological studies, she remained a bit squeamish at interacting with real bugs. So her character being at unease in that scene wasn't all acting! For the scene where F.Murray Abraham (who told some neat stories about Dick Smith on "Amadeus") dissects this juvenile Mimic, Guillermo wanted real guts. While we could have made up some fake guts, it would have cost more and taken longer. So we went out and found the sickest mushrooms (enoki), fruits (cherimoya flesh!), fish (trout entrails), sweetbreads, brains, and other yuck. The drawback was, it stunk up the place! We were filming at my alma mater LMU, and the corridors of the science building REEKED of our offal. We weren't real popular on the set that day. But, there again, we got some good expressions from the actor because we created the proper "atmosphere"! And when F. Murray probes the body and tells us "These are perfectly formed organs...", he's right! They were perfectly formed trout gills! There were two different generations of design of this by Tyruben Ellingson, the last of which was really kick-ass. Erik Schaper did a fantastic job of sculpting it and painting two copies of the critter. It was made of unplasticized silicone, cast from a silicone mold (scary, because unless released correctly, silicone sticks to silicone!), and it had a passively jointed (yet mechanically limited) armature, along with a firm polyfoam core (it had to float). The face claws on this little guy were patterned after an earlier set of face claws; in fact, when Mira puts the Polaroids together in the subway station, it's of these earlier face claws. A major face claw revision on the big Mimics came down at the last minute, after we had finished these "Dead Boys". Since these were supposedly immature, and warped and wrinkled and softened by their soaking in the water, we decided not to revamp these face claws as well. This juvenile recently had a little appearance on the "Keenan Ivory Wayans Show", when Mira appeared. No mealworms this time! Check out some of the early "Dead Boy" designs, by Tyruben Ellingson:   Didn't you say you did cutesy stuff as well?! Take me home. Forget that! I wanna check out more MIMIC stuff on the image map! Home What's New | Features | Commercials | Resume | Realistic | Whimsical | Scary | Animatronics Prosthetics | Puppets | Publicity | Waldo® | TCS Fun | FX FAQ | Feedback | Reference | Contact Us Except where noted, all contents are the property of The Character Shop, Inc. and copyright 1995-2006