This movie is an all-time classic. I guess some people feel it is too dumb, but I’ve never met them in person.
I stumbled onto this video from creators,the Chiodo brothers (pronounced Kyoto) that gives some insight into the filming and production.
It is really cool hearing these stories of how they pulled off certain effects. I liked at about 11:30 where they talked about the cool light effect from the tornado. Turns out it was a fairly simple rig of mirrors on a turn table.
Here’s a bit of a peek into the special effects of the film.
This featurette shows a bit more of the clown suits in action. I searched around for quite a bit and couldn’t find any animatronic breakdowns of how the suits worked. I’ll keep looking!
One thing I did find is where someone (Tom Spina Designs) was preserving and restoring one of the original latex heads.
You can go to their site for more images of the process, but here’s a quick before and after to see how they’ve done.
