When looking at videos and photos from the marketing campaign for the 1993 SNES classic Star Fox, one question comes up time and again: "What happened to the puppets used in the game's marketing?"
It's a question, we admit, we've been curious about here at Time Extension for a while now, and one we've always wanted to set out to answer. However, it wasn't until recently that we finally decided to embark on a mission to discover the truth, feeling we finally had the time, patience, and enough leads to potentially get to the bottom of things.
Just in case you're somehow unfamiliar with the Star Fox campaign we're talking about or are need of an explanation, basically, sometime in the early '90s, as NCL (Nintendo Co., Ltd.) was getting ready to launch the original SNES title, it worked with an unspecified company to produce a set of live-action puppets of the original Star Fox team, including Fox, Slippy, Falco, and Peppy.
These representations of the characters would end up featuring heavily in print ads, in-store promos, the game's official box art, and the cover of a strategy guide, before disappearing completely in the decades since, inevitably leading many to wonder what had become of them. Were they now wasting away in a Nintendo archive somewhere in Kyoto, or had they been destroyed? That's what we were hoping to find out, so we gathered all the information we could and began sending out emails to potential leads, starting with the Star Fox developers themselves.
"The last time I saw them was about 15 years ago in a storage kind of room within Nintendo," Star Fox programmer Dylan Cuthbert told us. "I think so, at least; my memory is a little vague. Imamura-san probably knows more. No idea what happened to them after that, though."
Meanwhile, the Star Fox Takaya Imamura replied to us in Japanese, stating that he had never actually seen the puppets in person and that, as far as he was told, they had been destroyed, casting doubt over their survival.
With our first couple of sources giving us slightly conflicting information, it was at this point that we knew we had to cast our net a little wider and contact the puppet creators themselves, but that inevitably was much easier said than done.
That's because, to our knowledge at least, the actual creators of the puppets had never actually come forward to claim credit for their work, with the only clue we have about their identity being an old image of Godzilla Minus One director Takashi Yamazaki posing with a Fox puppet in the early '90s, which suggested it could possibly be the work of the Japanese FX company Shirogumi.
With the help of the Japanese-to-English translator Liz Bushouse, we drafted an email to send to Shirogumi (and a few of its past employees), asking it to confirm whether it was responsible, and quickly got a message back from the studio stating the worst:
"Thanks for your email. The Fox puppets created at our company were made by gluing fur and feathers to natural rubber, so they deteriorate simply by being exposed to air. Because of that, we had to destroy them after production was finished."
To us, this was fairly definitive, but it begged the question: what did Cuthbert believe he saw in the Nintendo archives back in 2011?
It was at this point that we ended up taking a closer look at the puppets in question and came to a realisation we probably should have made a lot earlier: that is, that the models used in the box art were actually different from the puppets used in the cockpit scenes during the in-store demo, with the latter lacking the ability to stand by themselves.
In addition to that, we also found evidence of a model kit released at the Japanese event, Wonder Fest, four years before Cuthbert's sighting, based on the look of the 1993 Fox model, offering another potential candidate for what the programmer saw on his visit to the Nintendo HQ.
We contacted Cuthbert again with these findings to see if we could further jog his memory, but sadly, he couldn't remember any more specifics: "Hmm.. maybe it was a different set of models I saw then. My memory is hazy for sure. It’s all a long time ago."