The Back room of AVG Productions Incorporated resembles a cross between a metal shop and a dreamscape. There is the sound of baleen hammers smacking against steel tubing; sparks cascade from welders' torches. In the center of the room looms a 26-foot-tall king with eyes like cue balls, whose head swivels and turns into a dragon. Nearby, a "crab officer" with movable pincers stands at attention. Off to the side is a 15-foot shark, whose toothy jaws open and close with vise-like smartness. Elsewhere, animated shrimp figures and flute playing fairies contribute to the general aura of disarray. "You see this girl?" Alvaro Villa, president and founder of the Valencia, California, company points to a mermaid. "This girl is a sea monster," he explains. "She flips her head and becomes a sea monster when the king dragon get,s mad."
Welcome to the world of robotic entertainment. In this world, the robots do not weld car bodies or sort computer chips. They sing, dance, recite, deliver one-liners and otherwise amuse or entertain. You have probably seen some of these figures in restaurants or at your favorite theme park. Billy Bob, the guitar-playing bear, still performs with his animal friends at some Showbiz Pizza Time Theatres around the country. Visitors to Monster Plantation at Six Flags Over Georgia take boat rides through a swamp teeming with computer-controlled dragons and ogres. At Universal Studios in Los Angeles, visitors on the tram tour are attacked by a 30-foot mechanical King Kong, saliva dripping from his teeth, the odor of bananas on his breath. Then there is Walt Disney Company, the pioneer of programmable robotic figures, which has more than 500 electronic entertainers at its EPCOT Center in Florida alone, from a yarn-spinning Ben Franklin to talking broccoli. The Colombian-born Villa got his start at Disney, but eventually defected to build his own monsters. An inveterate tinkerer, he actually saw his career launched much earlier in his native Medellin with a cartoon character. A relative returning from the United States brought back a Mickey Mouse book that set the young man dreaming about fantasy worlds. As a teenager, he was always making money fixing irons and toasters. "Any mechanical or electrical device that wasn't working I would take apart," he recalls. In 1961, at age 21, Villa came to the U.S. intending, he says, to get a pilot's license. His mother said he would end up in electronics. Female intuition won out: Villa soon went to work for a southern California high-tech firm. Although a school dropout, he finagled his way into college to study electronics by telling administrators his diploma was "on the way up from South America." In 1969, Villa joined Disney's Imagineering department as a technician. AVG (for Alvaro Villa Galvis) Productions began in 1978 when Villa landed a consulting job at Universal Studios. Gross revenues for fiscal year 1979 totaled about $215,000. Last year, AVG which employs 50 people did close to $10 million in sales. The company is cashing in on the demand for animatronic" figures aimed at entertaining and educating people both here and abroad. For instance:
The dragons and mermaids at AVG are part of a 30-character attraction being built for China. The animated ride, the first of its kind in that country, will be the centerpiece of an amusement park on the Ming Tombs reservoir outside Beijing. Visitors will be taken through an underwater world of robotic octopi and lobsters and end up at a palace of supple dragons.
Sequoia Creative Incorporated, a Sun Valley, California, firm, is building an animated pollution monster for a theme park in Metz, France. With skin of dimpled aluminum and laser-like eyes, the figure will be part of an action-theater show stressing the perils of polluting the earth.
Visitors to a new education center scheduled to open this spring at the St. Louis Zoo will be lectured by Charles Darwin. The pneumatic naturalist will sit, stand, and describe his theory of evolution. "Robotic entertainment is never going to be a huge industry because the figures are all custom built," says John Wood, vice president of Sally Industries in Jacksonville, Florida, which made the Darwin figure. "But all of the people in the business have enjoyed good growth over the past few years." Driving much of that growth is the craving for new playgrounds overseas. While the theme-park industry has matured in the U.S., many other countries are building fantasy lands and amusement parks quicker than a roller coaster drop. The most feverish activity is in Asia, where booming economies and the success of Tokyo Disneyland have spurred interest in Western style leisure activities. New parks and recreational resorts, for instance, are currently being built or under discussion in Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia. While not all of them will have musical mermaids, many are placing orders for robotic entertainment. Most theme parks try to balance thrill rides with animated attractions. "People get tired of the same old roller coasters," says David Schweninger, president of Sequoia Creative. The demand has proven salutary to the handful of companies that make the figures. Many of them went through hard times in the mid-1S80's, when a number of restaurant chains that had been using fiddle-playing raccoons and other animated characters to lure customers a big part of the industry's business began to close their doors. The rebirth of activity is evident at AVG headquarters on the rumpled hills north of Los Angeles, where workers are busily trying to finish the attraction for China. It comes on the heels of a "Sinbad the Sailor" project the company did for Lotte World, a theme park in South Korea that featured animated gargoyles and a three-headed, smoke-breathing dragon. "Animation is coming back," says Villa, whose firm is one of the industry leaders. "The Orientals are looking all over the U.S. for companies with this technology." Also evident in AVG's bustling workshop is how collaborative an effort making android entertainers is. This should not be surprising since the figures created have bones of steel, brains of silicon and nerves of pneumatic tubes. The construction process begins on a blank sheet of paper, with the sketches of artists and a script outlining the characters and story. Sculptors then make small models, which they later expand into full-size figures. From these, design engineers diagram the mechanical and electronic components that will be needed. Then it's over to the craftsmen. They mold plastic and fiberglass limbs and create rubber "skin that can be stretched over movable frames. Inside the robot, air valves and cylinders that power the movements are installed, along with the circuitry that activates them. Next come the cosmetic touches hair, fur, clothing. Finally, the show is programmed to coordinate the robotic movements, lights, sound and other special effects. "There are a lot of skills involved," says Maurice Aboulache, who heads AVG's animation department. "No one person could build a complete figure." On the foreign projects, something else is needed: an understanding of different cultures. In divining the characters and special effects for China's underwater dragon palace, for instance, AVG animators had to do extensive research on Chinese myths and legends. Despite all the work, today's robots are far easier to make than they once were. When Walt Disney's Imagineering division introduced the first major audioanimatronic figures at the 1964 New York World's Fair notably "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln" it had to orchestrate movements with a series of disk-like cams painstakingly created though trial and error. Today, computers do the same work, though the modern robots are not necessarily more lifelike. "It took years to program a figure," says Villa. "The first ones worked very well. It was just extremely time-consuming to build them." Indeed, advances in computer technology allowed some Disney animators - Villa prominent among them - to split off from the company and begin building their own electronic entertainers. "It was too hard to rise up in the organization internally," says the 49-year old engineer. "I thought I had a better chance of going it on my own." AVG started out modestly: three people in a one-room building. Within four years it employed 120 people. It was sending animated coffins and Draculas to Universal Studios, singing parrots to the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, and Rocket J. Squirrels to Bullwinkle restaurants across the country. Then the lean years set in. Some evidence of the times can still be seen at the plant in Valencia. In 1982, Villa was hired to build a lifelike robot of Andy Warhol, the chalky doyen of pop art. However, funding for the project eventually ran out. Warhol's likeness now sits unfinished in the back room, a mass of tubes, swivels and pistons. Nearby, a mechanical Ho7ard Hughes, donning a gray fedora, rests incomplete for similar reasons. To cope with the austerity, the company diversified into industrial robotics. It produced machines that stitched rugs and car upholstery. Although AVG still dabbles in the field, its main thrust remains animation, special effects, and theme-park design. On his office wall, Villa keeps three patents he received while at Disney. On his desk is a toy robot. They are reminders that, yes, here is a serious scientist in pinstripe but inside lurks a starry-eyed youth. "This business has the advantage of not being boring," says Villa. "It's like working on your favorite hobby all the time. I am still playing with toys just more expensive ones."