Home from work for the holidays, I was unavoidably confronted with the purple monstrosity. They were playing mini-golf, so I kept one eye on it. I was struck by the fact that Barney was waving his arms around, swinging the putter, catching balls, etc., and his mouth was moving at the same time, in rough semblance to the spoken words.
How do they do this? The arm movements certainly look natural (well, as natural as can be wearing a huge purple dinosaur costume), and there appears to be only one person in the costume (unless it’s two very short people, with the guy on the bottom having arms coming out of his head). The only things I can figure are a) strings moving the mouth from above (no sign of strings, and you’d think it would make it difficult for him to do those well-choreographed dance steps), or b) some sort of electric doo-hickey driving it, though it seems the weight of and speed with which the mouth opens and closes would preclude that.
Well, I guess the other option is that it’s a real, speaking purple dinosaur…
I asked this question of a couple friends who worked at DisneyWorld (they’ve played ‘Rafiki’ (large human-sized character) in “The Lion King” puppet show). Rafiki has moving lips (narrator of the story) and the performer is in contant motion, dancing and moving about on the stage. I thought it was some sort of computer chip in sync with the pre-recorded voice, but according to them, there is a set of wires conected from the gloves through the costume to the mouth on the mask, and several wires have to be connected when the performer gets dressed. The performer is constantly moving his fingers, making the mouth move in sync to the soundtrack, after lots and lots of practice (and hearing it in your sleep, according to them!). Now I am not an engineer, but it does sound pretty plausable to me, and a far step above the wire conecting Big Bird’s beak to his arm/wing, making his mouth move.
Um, the Barney person inside the purple costume and the Barney voice are two different people. The reason I happen to know this is because the Barney person, named David Joyner, happens to be “from” around these here parts, and the local newspapers regularly feature interviews with his grandmother, who still lives here. :rolleyes: “My grandson, Barney…”
Anyway, the voice is provided by a voice actor named Bob West in what’s called a “voiceover”, which is dubbed in. I believe that during taping, Mr. Joyner acts out what’s supposed to be happening, and the voice is added later.
The Lion King stage shows are different because they’re live.
And it’s only the one guy in the Barney costume, and he’s actually not as tall as you might think, nowhere near Carroll Spinney standards. It’s called a “body puppet” and it has gadgets and widgets inside the head for him to be able to flap the mouth open and closed by moving his chin. http://www.civilization.ca/membrs/arts/ssf/ssfdeeng.html#body
For live-action voiceovers like this, the voice is generally recorded first and then played on the set so the puppeteer can sync himself with the voice.
For cartoons, the voices are often (but not always) dubbed after the action is shot.
DisneyWorld runs two “Lion King” shows: the one at Animal Kingdom is ‘live’ singing and dancing, akin to the one on Broadway**, and the one at Magic Kingdom uses puppets to a pre-recorded soundtrack, with the Rafiki character being a normal-sized human in a costume.
**only saw part of this show, since the group I was with was whiny and “wanted to go on the ri-i-i-i-des, not see a dumb ol’ show”. The kids were great, it was the adults who were horrid.
