…or Giant Floating Eyeballs, Part Three.

We got a question a while back asking when we were going to do the dragon theme again.

Dragon? Did we ever do a dragon theme? Contextually, the question was about the Giant Floating Eyeballs which we admit to never really theming, but it seemed time to lean in. If people think the eyes are a dragon, it’s a dragon.

Two things came to mind: We need new, improved eyeball animation and we need to blow smoke rings like a Heffalump.

To explain: Disney’s Winnie the Pooh attraction features Heffalumps and Woozels, one of which blows smoke rings at you as you pass by. This, obviously, is the coolest thing ever and it’s been our intention to build our own smoke ring machine and incorporate it into the next theme that calls out for smoke rings.

Dragons (again, obviously) must be able to blow smoke rings. But then we started working on the eyes.

We try our best to reference recent popular touchstones so that the kids have some hope of understanding the theme. Sometimes we pick a theme for the parents (like Indiana Jones) and just hope they showed the movie to their kids. This time, we knew there had been four How to Train Your Dragon movies, plus video games and other media. Point being, it’s about dragons.

Another thought was that the dragon named Toothless is black and therefore arguably hard to see in the dark. If all we have are eyeballs, we might be forgiven for not building the entire dragon. We were able to get a screenshot of Toothless and AI our way into about two minutes of animation.

Problem: Toothless does not blow smoke rings.

After building and damn-near perfecting the smoke ring machine, we planned not to use it. What we needed was a high velocity plasma blast effect!

Long story short, the plasma effect didn’t work on the night, so we quickly changed back to smoke rings. Shockingly, no one called us out on this departure from HTTYD canon. Criticism could not have mattered though, because the smoke rings worked way better than we thought they would. If the wind didn’t cooperate the effect could have been completely lost, but we got lucky. Rings of smoke were shooting so close to the sidewalk that we were afraid someone might jump off the stairs to catch them and land on their overly enthusiastic faces. If there is one lesson to be learned here though, it’s that Halloween needs more smoke rings.

When it came to props, we stayed true to the movies. Swords and shields with working hand grips were built, capable of fending off any foam and cardboard adversary. Designs closely followed the look and feel of weapons carried by lead characters; thus, guaranteeing that our visitors would quickly identify the theme.

The rest of the setup was pretty simple with a couple lighting scenes and three channels of audio played a little too loud, so as to prevent anyone from questioning our commitment to excellence. 228 kids later, we feel we had trained our dragon.