Tales from the Archives: Bringing Lady Liberty to Life - Eric, netflix 2024
From New York Icon to 80’s Television Puppet
Some puppets get their big moment on screen. Others spend weeks being designed, sculpted, engineered and finished, only to make the briefest of appearances. Our Lady Liberty was one of the latter.
Created by Stitches and Glue for Netflix’s Eric, she remains one of our favourite characters from the production — despite not getting nearly as much screen time as we might have liked.
Set in 1980’s New York, Eric centres around the world of children’s television and the fictional puppet show Good Day Sunshine. This gave us the opportunity to create an eclectic collection of characters that felt as though they belonged to that particular period of television puppetry.
Among them was our own rather glamorous interpretation of one of New York’s most recognisable residents — the Statue of Liberty.
Bringing A Little bit of New York to Good Day Sunshine
-
Bringing A Little bit of New York to Good Day Sunshine -
From Illustration to Puppet
Lady Liberty began with the wonderful character artwork of Poppy Kay Illustration.
The intention was never to create a miniature replica of the real Statue of Liberty. Instead, the design took those instantly recognisable elements — the crown, raised torch, robes and tablet — and translated them into the visual language of the Good Day Sunshine puppet world.
She had a strong silhouette, but also bags of character: enormous expressive eyes, gloriously graphic lashes and a rather fabulous pair of pink lips.
Our job was to take that two-dimensional artwork and work out how she could exist in three dimensions — and, importantly, how she could perform.
CReating Lady Liberties Patina
One of the most enjoyable challenges was finding a way to recreate Lady Liberty’s distinctive oxidised appearance.
We wanted to capture the richness of the familiar blue-green patina without losing the deliberately soft, tactile and slightly 80s-inspired aesthetic of the Good Day Sunshine puppets.That meant green was never going to be just one green.
A considerable amount of work went into hand dyeing the fabrics used to cover the main body structure, creating a tonal range that could be brought together across the costume. Rather than a single flat colour, we could introduce subtle shifts in shade across the robes, helping to suggest the mottled and weathered appearance of an oxidised surface.
The flocked areas received the same treatment. Different flock fibres were carefully mixed to create our own combination of oxidized green tones. Getting that mixture right was particularly important: the flocked sculptural elements and hand-dyed fabrics were completely different materials, but they needed to feel as though they belonged to the same character.
Together, the varied flock and dyed textiles created the wonderfully uneven finish we were after.
There was something we particularly liked about the contradiction of the whole process. We were recreating the appearance of a monumental copper statue using some of the softest materials in the workshop — fabric, foam and flock. Up close you can see the different materials, textures and colours. Step back, and they come together to create Lady Liberty’s familiar patina.
Bringing Her Face to Life
Mechanically, Lady Liberty was deliberately kept relatively simple.
Her mouth was trigger operated, giving the puppeteer direct control over her speech and expression.
The head was also articulated and able to rotate, adding another layer of character to the performance.
It’s surprising how much life can be created with relatively little movement. A turn of the head combined with a well-timed mouth movement can completely change the attitude of a puppet.
Rather than filling the character with unnecessary mechanisms, the aim was to give the performer the movements that mattered.
Sometimes simple really is best.
Lighting the Torch
There was one other feature that we couldn’t really leave out.
Lady Liberty needed her torch.
The raised arm and flame are such an important part of the Statue of Liberty’s silhouette that they immediately help sell the character, even before you see her face.
We took that one step further by making the torch illuminate.
It was a relatively small addition to the build, but a lovely finishing touch — particularly once Lady Liberty was under the studio lights.
Welcome to good day sunshine
Although Eric is very much a story about 1980s New York, there’s a little bit of filmmaking trickery behind Lady Liberty’s appearance.
We didn’t actually shoot her scene in New York.
For this particular sequence, we were in Budapest, filming on a studio set dressed as the Good Day Sunshine puppet studio — the fictional children’s television programme that exists as the show-within-the-show in Eric.
And that feels rather appropriate for Lady Liberty.
We’d created a puppet version of an American icon, to appear in a fictional 1980s New York children’s television programme, which was itself being recreated inside a studio in Budapest.
That’s the magic — and occasional geographical confusion — of filmmaking.
A Brief Moment In The Spotlight
For all the work that went into creating her, Lady Liberty sadly doesn’t get a huge amount of airtime in the finished series.
Such is the nature of making puppets for film and television.
A character can go through illustration, development, sculpting, engineering, fabric tests, dyeing, flocking, fabrication, finishing and rehearsals — and you can never be entirely sure how much of that work will ultimately make it through the edit.
But that’s also one of the reasons we enjoy revisiting these characters in Tales from the Archives.
It gives us an opportunity to show what you don’t necessarily get to see on screen: the decisions, experiments, materials and craftsmanship hidden beneath the finished puppet.
Lady Liberty, in All Her SPLENDOR
Looking back, Lady Liberty remains one of our FAVORITES from Eric.
She wasn’t an overly complicated puppet mechanically. Instead, much of the character came from the combination of Poppy Kay’s original design, the sculptural forms, hand-dyed textiles, carefully mixed flock, graphic facial details and a handful of simple, well-chosen movements.
Add an illuminated torch and some fabulous eyelashes, and our little piece of New York was ready for her moment in the spotlight. She may only appear briefly in the finished show, but we think she deserves a little more time centre stage.
So here she is — Lady Liberty, in all her splendour.
