Blog #3

In reading the chapter four of our puppets book, what I found amusing was that the Royal de Luxe theater company made huge giant puppets for their shows and works.. The Sultan's Elephant was a show created by the Royal de Luxe theatre company, involving a huge moving mechanical elephant, a giant marionette of a girl.  Francois Delaroziere was a Frenchman who designed the huge elephant. It was made mostly of wood, and was operated by 22 manipulators that were using a mixture of hydraulics and motors. It weighed as much as 7 African elephants, which is around 50 tons, and also it is 20 feet tall.  The elephant had hundreds of moving parts and scores of pumping pistons, just to give you an idea; there were 22 pistons in the trunk of the elephant alone.  The giant elephant had more than 56 square meters of reclaimed poplar was combined with steel ribs to create the elephant's sturdy skeleton.

I found this really funny fact about the elephant you might not think its all that funny but here it goes, The elephant no longer exists: Helen Marriage of Artichoke, the company that produced the London performance, said "Royal de Luxe were so fed up with being invited all over the world to perform The Sultan's Elephant, they just destroyed it.”  The reason I really like the puppet production group Royal de Luxe is that they strive to make these huge puppets that people want to see all over the world, and they had to destroy the elephant puppet because it got too popular.  It gave me a chuckle, but yes their puppet work with the giant girls that they made, and also the giant man they made for the puppet show called the A Giant Dropped from the sky in Nimes, France, in 1994.