Baby Bantha
For more information about our animatronic baby bantha and the list of wonderful helpers, please see the text below these images.
In April of 2022 we decided to pursue building a full size bantha from Star Wars (see our gallery for “Bonnie the Bantha). This was something that we have wanted to build since 2015. The idea of tackling a full size Star Wars creature has been the subject of many "what would we like to make next, to push ourselves and add more abilities?" conversations.
As soon as we began building “Bonnie” we liked the idea of building a baby (or two … oof ;) ). With debuting Bonnie in July of 2022 at Fan Expo Denver we decided we would try to debut the baby at Fan Expo Denver in 2023 and we pulled it off.
From the date we decided to tackle building the baby, that gave us just under 7 weeks to design and build the baby and get it ready to debut at Fan Expo Denver on June 30th, 2023. Just like with Bonnie the year before, the show was a huge success. The patrons absolutely LOVED it. We saw over 4,000 people come through our booth over the course of the show. And just like the year before, so many people thanked us with pure, sincere gratitude for having this display at the show.
We were extremely happy to meet Vivien Lyra Blair, who played young Princess Leia in the Disney Plus show “Obi-Wan Kenobi”. She and her mom were wonderful. We also had the pleasure of meeting Dee Bradley Baker who voiced the clones in the Star Wars cartoons among many other character voices.
We would like to thank all of the wonderful people who assisted us with this project:
Kathy Pierce, Cal Pierce, Jenny Shumaker, Devin Dyke, Erik Ross, M. Lance Frank, Matt Haslam, Masume (Joanna) Takeda, Caleb Blakeman, Mike Grell, Dylan Kirkpatrick, Jakob O’Grady.