Carnival of Souls 2010: Tiki Attack!

After the success of the previous year's pirate-themed haunt, we decided to continue with the theme. Unfortunately, many of our stalwart volunteers from previous years were going to be unavailable (having kids, moving to other states, etc.), so we knew we had to cut way back on the number of volunteers we'd have to rely on this year.

That's not to say that we were going to give up on having something fun and different for our guests, though. Read on to see the fun things we did for our neighborhood kids in 2010!

The Tiki Show

My wife and I have always been fans of the "Tiki Room" at Disneyland and Disney World, so she convinced me that if we were going to have a tiki theme, we might as well go for it.

The problem, though, was that with so few volunteers this year, we had to have our show be largely automated. So, we converted our garage into a theater once more, but this time, rather than using hand-animated puppets, we tried to make our actors automated. To achieve this, we repurposed Skully and Bonehead from previous years, and hacked together a special edition of our Gordo digital puppet to serve as five actors in the show.

The remaining three actors - the tikis themselves, were designed to be easy to manipulate so that we could bring in people without much training. And we added in a final surprise actor that the puppeteers could control as well from where they stood.

Here is the final result - you can watch the show in its entirety:

As usual, music for the show was provided by the great guys at Midnight Syndicate with permission. This band makes great atmospheric, gothic-sounding music, and they allow haunted attractions to use their music for free (just go to their site and register).

The Tiki Wall

The first thing people coming to our haunt would notice was our animated tiki wall:

Here it is under construction in our backyard in the days leading up to Halloween:

The wall was huge and had no less then eleven animated creatures with sixteen animated elements total.

After finally retiring our Flying Crank Ghost, we repurposed the motor - yes, a single motor - to drive all sixteen of these animated elements using a complex series of linkages.

The linkages were created using coat hangar wire, rubber bands, counterweights, and pulleys. And a lot of experimentation. My brother and my dad must have spent a few weeks experimenting and testing new designs to get them just right, getting the biggest and most interesting motion while not straining the motor too much or making the motion unstable. Then, my mother joined them and they spent about as long designing and painting the actual tiki creatures.

Here is a list of the different animatronic features of the Tiki Wall:

• The yellow tiki on the far left waves his hand and lifts off the top of his head, revealing his tiki brain. Eww!
• The green tiki on the far right moves his eyes left and right, and his mouth opens and closes.
• Between them are three tikis which act out the "Hear no evil," "See no evil," "Speak no evil" trio by covering and uncovering their ears, eyes, and mouth respectively.
• All along the top of the tiki wall were six tiki monkeys, with two different designs. They sway back and forth with a jerk-and-pause kind of motion which is different from the constant, swaying motion of the other tikis, making them feel less mechanical and more alive.

Here is some video of the wall in action on Halloween night, with all the piratical decorations around it:

Yorick Makes His Debut

After many years in service, the foam facade for our super-popular Magic Mirror prop was really starting to show some wear and tear, and this year, we finally decided to give it an update.

Since the theme for our haunt is sliding towards pirates and tikis, we decided to re-theme the mirror into the wall of some ancient jungle ruins, and replace the classic Magic Mirror puppet with our Yorick skull puppet with the pirate theming turned on.

We were worried about messing with a classic, but in the end, it was a good change - kids liked the new version, but it still provided the same key interaction that made the original mirror prop so popular.

Midway

In addition to all the above, we continued offering our slew of fun carnival games for the kids to enjoy:

• Boneyard bone toss
• Cauldron catch
• Pirate plinko
• Walk the plank

And this year, we added a face painting booth, featuring the colorful cheek-painting stylings of Hannah, a local artist. (She also helped design and build the new facade for our digital puppet.)

Another successful year

Despite the lack of volunteers compared to earlier years, 2010 was another great success. Kids loved the show, and we had plenty of piratical carnival games and other fun things in place.