Mouse Hunt - The animatronic ’Catzilla’ puppet at Stan Winston Studio

SUBSCRIBE on YouTube: and RING THE BELL! For director Gore Verbinski’s 1997 film, #MouseHunt, Stan Winston Studio built an oversized animatronic cat - dubbed ‘Catzilla’ - which had radio control functions and a telemetry controller. Six puppeteers operated the mouse and cat puppets on sets that were scaled up to make the animals appear the appropriate size. These mouse and cat performances not only had to be realistic and match the behavior of their real counterparts, but they also had to be comedic in nature. This was no small task, as illustrated in the old story of the actor who, on his deathbed, declared that ‘dying is easy… comedy is hard.’ If one had to be a bit of an actor to puppeteer the usual ‘must eat, must destroy’ characters that came out of the studio, one had to be a bit of a comedian to create a performance of a mischievous mouse and his feline foil. Fortunately, Stan Winston Studio had its share of in-house comedians. “In a way,” said Shane Mahan,