Thread: Your new animatronics; how well did they hold up?

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For those of you who purchased new animatronic props this year from wherever, how did they perform for you? Any problems or did they work as expected. If you can, list what you bought and how it worked for you.

Last year we bought the Guardian of the Grave and a Resurrection Mary, (From Spirit Halloween). We used them for the first time this year. The G og the G sleeves just did not want to stay attached to the top of the headstone and the slightest wind would knock him around. We ended up removing him before Halloween night. Either we will have to use his mechcanical parts and remake the rest of him and his headstone or just chalk it up to a lesson learned...he just did not work well.

Resurrection Mary worked like a charm.

Well, I've never bought any animatronic props but I have built some, here's how they are holding up.

Rocky, ran for hours both at my Halloween party and on ToT. The only issue being he got kind of loud, maybe some WD-40 would do him good.


FCG, built in 2010. ran flawlessly in 2011, although I did put a slightly heavier head on him this year, and he was a bit slower to raise the head all the way up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Z4nywhVqs

Electric Chair Scene. Used a PicoBoo Plus controller, ran three red incandescent bulbs through a lightning box (color organ), had a sander for vibration mounted under the sheet metal that was the chair seat, e-crackers in the "fuse box", strobe under the head hood, and more strobes to light the whole scene after sequence played out. Worked AWESOME! ran through the sequence at least 300 times. One time the e-crackers sounded kinda funny after they cracked, but that was it. Next time, flawless...


AxWorthy, well, while the pulley system worked great and never popped off. I did manage to smoke the motor on ToT. She only ran for about 45 min, and at that point you could see the steam rising off the motor. (next year, better, stronger motor!)

well this year we bought Lifesize Dr. Shivers, Lifesize Ghostface, John Doe,and The animated Grave Digger. Everyone else worked great! Especially John Doe!!! But we had so much trouble with Tekkys Grave Digger from Spirit! We had to send him back 2x because each time he came to us broken!!! The 3rd guy they sent us everything worked on him (crosses fingers) except his face is a little pushed in. I told my husband that we were going to keep him because the next one they would send us was probably gonna be broke too! We contacted Tekky about this problem and they never got back to us!!!! Some great customer service!

I bought the jumping spider from spirit and it was terrific throughout the night. I also have the tombstone lifter and crawling zombie from spirit that have made it through 3 halloweens now. So far so good.

Jumping spidder worked perfect.
I bought the animated zombie from spirit but he is in the box for next year.

My Distortions Unlimited Frightronics had no problems again this year. I leave the Rocking Granny out all the time. She has been rocking away everyday for 3 years with no trouble. They cost more than a Gemmy but they have all metal parts on a metal frame so there isn't as much to worry about breaking.