Today I officially stumbled on the gold mine - the personal blog of the "Inventor of the Animated Mechanical Advertising Robot"
http://clarence-douglas-malcolm.blogspot.com/
I got it from my local Menards, they had three styles, light green, dark green, and dark green with a heavy black mat base that wasn't very flexible,
I went with the light green of course, 'cause it was thinner and a lot more flexible, and it was on sale for .30 cents a square foot!
Cool, I didn't realize you were making the mechanicals too. Didn't you buy a Pennywise clown to use for that?
I'm sure if one were up to speed on modern robotics/animatronics, making all this would be a piece of cake. What I'm doing is pretty nonsensical, but I guess if I had more sense I wouldn't be collecting clowns to begin with