Bringing the Towering “Tet’niss” from Star Wars: Skeleton Crew to Life

Scaled versions of R2-D2, K-2SO and C-3PO, complete with one articulated arm that can wave, were added alongside a plaque listing the names of the Tippett Studio team in Aurebesh affixed to the puppet’s posterior. But Chiang was adamant that any callbacks remained disguised. “Doug was very specific,” Dubeau says. “He didn't want it to look like there was an X-wing sticking out of it. So, it's very well disguised.” Other elements include parts from the scrap walker seen in The Mandalorian Season 2 and panels from an X-wing starfighter. 

The final creation also shares some Tippett DNA with the rancor from Return of the Jedi. Phil Tippett used ball bearings coated in Sharpie to create the glossy eyes of the hand puppet lurking in Jabba the Hutt’s dungeon, and the crab’s four gleaming eyestalks are tipped with ball bearings as well. “I wanted to make Phil proud so we used a lot of his tricks,” Dubeau says. And just like the rancor, Mama Crab has a similarly sticky maw. “We really wanted to add something to show that there is a vulnerability to this creature,” says Morley. “There's got to be some soft parts somewhere so we chose the interior of the mouth. And in order to really sell that, we shot some slime in our hands and created strings of slime that we composited digitally into the mouth during the roars, just adding that little sense of organic wetness.”

“It was a fun process. It took a long time, but I think we wound up with a creature that nobody's seen before,” Dubeau adds.

Mama’s suspenders

By the time Mama Crab was fully loaded with her amassed wares, the final puppet weighed in at around 15 pounds and required a harness to hold her weight during animation. “It’s definitely the heaviest stop motion puppet we've ever worked on,” Morley says. “So heavy, in fact, that we had to build suspenders for it — that's that big metal rig that allowed for a nice, smooth animation and a lumbering type feel to the creature.”

“It very much has a Cirque Du Soleil feel to it,” adds Tom "Gibby" Gibbons, the stop motion animation supervisor on the project. “She can totally hold up her own weight. However, when you tighten her to the point where she can do that, it's very hard to move her.”

The final piece was crafting the landscape, a 3-D printed rock that the creature crests in the final shot before stabbing her pincers into the sand — dressed with corn starch and acrylic fixative — lurching toward her unsuspecting visitors. As Gibbons stepped in to bring her to life, the crew gave their creation her nickname: Tet’niss. “We name things around here a lot because it helps in the brevity of communication,” Gibbons notes. “Mama Crab got the name ‘Tet’niss’ because we had a lot of spiky, sharp things coming off of her all rusted…someone was bound to get tetanus if they weren't paying attention around her.”

“And it stuck,” Morley adds.

On set, Gibbons spent long days incrementally animating Tet’niss for her big debut. The final design has a metal armature and around 70 joints for a full range of motion. “And, in all honesty, most of them are moving all the time,” Gibbons says. “We often say it's a dance because the intention of the animator can get lost in the reality of the puppet. The puppet will only want to do certain things, and as the animator, you have to lean into that. And that relationship, for me, is wonderful. It keeps me on my toes as a performer, and it feels like I'm not the only one on the stage when I'm doing stop motion, more than with any other form of animation. It's wonderful once you've just given into it.”

Latin for trash

Tet’niss is not only an homage to Phil Tippett’s stop-motion legacy, but also the artistry that Ray Harryhausen used to bring similarly outsized creatures to his classic films. “A lot of us love Harryhausen films,” Morley says. “Clash of the Titans hit me at the right age. And the feeling of all those creatures and the way they move, the way they look, was just so magical. It was so great to be able to achieve that with Skeleton Crew. “

“What made the original [Star Wars] films as charming as they were was the fact that there was a lot of stop motion, a lot of puppets, a lot of masks and very physical things,” adds Dubeau. “And this is a perfect sequence for [stop motion]. It's a big monster coming over a rock.”

“There's just an internal romanticism I have for it, which gets easily wiped away by just the difficulty of doing it when we start actually doing the process,” Gibbons says. “But it's an art form that I really enjoy looking at and executing, whether it's animating or building for it. There is an inherent dust, dirt scratch, fingerprint element to stop motion. It may not even be visible, but…you believe in stop motion characters because they are in the real world, and we just recognize that on some sort of a level.”

Mama Crab remains proudly displayed as part of the Tippett Studio collection, complete with a museum-worthy plaque from CG modeler and fabricator John "JD" Daniel. It says Tet’niss the Mama Crab, Megapagurus detritiphorus. “We wanted to give it more of a scientific grounding,” Daniel says, concocting a genus and species that is essentially Latin for big hermit crab carrying trash.