A funny story about this prop....With the success of the early episodes, one of the shows producers was introduced to me by my friend, Kevin Peter Hall, (Predator) and we were asked to come up with a new Ziggy. The original was made from 2 or 3 layers of acrylic painted with model paint with a couple of flashing LED's and a watch battery, pretty unsophisticated, but many props are.
Well, it may be difficult for many of you to comprehend, but at this time, sophisticated electronics in props, well, where not. You had a small selection of affordable chips and most of the movie electronics guys where more hobbyists than professional electronic engineers. With no internet, they had to rely on what information they could pick up in hobby magazines or from other movie guys. It seemed you could find a guy who could design some sophisticated circuit, but it was poorly built and poorly soldered, so a wire would come loose on set and you would be screwed. So on most props, you tried to avoid this type of complexity.
As an example, on "Cocoon", the 1985 Ron Howard film, one of the alien props was a 3 foot tall "box" with a huge number of electronic functions and servo powered doors. At one point it is suppose to go crazy and scare Steve Gutenberg. One of these things was a series of bright flashes, like an alarm. The boss suggested flash bulbs, but the electronics guy insisted it could be done with strobes. Well it was made with strobes and on set it failed and as this was the main gag, production was not happy. So our on-set guy went to Walgreen and bought 20 Polaroid flash bars and a couple of cameras, gutted the cameras for the flash bar mounts, wired them to a nail board and made the gag work. Side note: Flash bulbs worked better, as their "flash" is longer than a strobe and the strobe's flash is so fast, it can often happen between frames when the movie camera's shutter is closed.
Back to Ziggy,
The shows producers wanted Ziggy to have a lot more function. Like more blinking lights, more variation of these blinking patterns and some type of readout to display words and numbers. Oh, and it couldn't be any bigger!
So given all this illustrated above, I was hesitant to take on a project like this.
But, I had met a guy who was working for a company who specialized in prototype electronics for the military and they were looking for new industries to work in, given the ups and downs in Government work. I called him and explained the issue and what we were asked for. He came back to me with a yes and a design idea. Thy would use an EPROM chip, so all of the functions could be programmable. At the time this was a WTF moment, because none of the electronic guys I had ever worked with in film, knew or could do this at the time. Again, you need to understand, the film business was (and a bit the same today) very inbreed. Movie people very seldom look outside to what "real" industry is doing for ideas.
Well I went to the producers and said we could do it and it would cost $2000. Well this wasn't outrageous cost for a prop, but pretty high for a TV show prop. But given all this thing would do, I had been stunned when the electronics guys said it would be so cheap!
I pointed out, that there was no way we could make this thing a 1/4" thick like the one they had, but they said, as long as it fits and a shirt pocket, they where OK.
So, we built a vacuum form pattern and made a clear body which mounted on a acrylic back. I built a battery holder for a "J" battery, since this was the only easily available cell that had the voltage and life we needed, and was simple to change. (Rechargeable batteries at the time where slow and short lived, so replaceable batteries where almost a must)
Well the electronics guys delivered this amazing board, all custom printed and super compact. (1990 folks) This
may have been normal in "real" industry at the time, but in the movie biz, this was unheard of, and never on a TV show!
Most of the time, these circuits where built on simple "bread board" perf material, with dozens of little jump wires going from chip to chip and worst than a string of old Christmas lights. Just handling the board to build the prop often resulted in broken wires, usually under the insulation, resulting in hours of time finding the brake. So you couldn't package things too tight or complex, because you were almost guaranteed to have to pull it apart a couple of times to find some bogus connection and every time you pulled it apart, you were at serious risk of damaging another connection.
Well we were stoked, this electronic prop was worlds ahead of anything we had seen or any of my friends had seen.
The producers at this point had been calling daily asking to see the new Ziggy. Against better judgement, I took it to show them, before the battery holder was complete, so we had it hooked to a larger battery with jumpers. But no matter, these people didn't get to their position by being idiots, they'll understand the battery thing......
This is what we made (as it looks today)
We get to the Quantum Leap production office on the Universal lot and the 3 or 4 producers walk in.
We set up and we show them how with this new "Ziggy" you can:
Program the blink pattern of the 15 LED's in an infinite number of patterns
Program any of the 12 buttons to operate any function
Program the 2 line LCD readout to display anything you want!!!
and do this all with a laptop, on-set in minutes!!!!!
and it still fits in a shirt pocket!
Some of the producers are impressed, but they are all glancing at this women, who was, I think, the "one who wore the pants" in that group.
She says, Well its really big. I said, well getting all that function in a small package is very difficult and this is actually pretty amazing for prototype electronics.
She responds, Well that may be, but it's still very big, and what about that big battery thing? (I had already explained the temporary battery when I was setting up, so I explained it again.) She still insists it to big. I drop it into my shirt pocket. Well this is what we agreed on, I say.
She reaches over to here desk and picks up her Casio Spanish/English translator device and says, Well this cost less than one TENTH what you charged us and it does TEN times as much, and it's smaller!!
I smile and point to the IC chips on the Ziggy board, You see these integrated circuit chips, the little colored boxes, well they look pretty small, but the actual circuit, is much tinier, perhaps the size of a pencil eraser, the rest of the size you see, is just an insulator to keep the chip from over heating and to make it possible to hook connections to the chip.
I continue, Think of them a refrigerators in your kitchen, the fridge is much bigger than the food you have inside. Now that Casio translator is mass produced, so they can take all the ingredients they need custom design a miniature circuit and pack it into one chip, like storing everything for one meal in one refrigerator. Because we cant spend the kind of money they do, I have to buy off-the-shelf, available chips and make up the circuit I need. It's like having to buy a separate refrigerator for milk, one for you eggs, one for your lettuce and so on. Before you know it, your whole kitchen is packed with refrigerators! I would bet, Casio has 2 or 3 million dollars in development money in that translator, in order to make it that small and cheap.
She get right up in my face and says "BULL****!!"
I must say, I was a bit stunned. I was speechless in fact. After a moment, I turned to the producer that hired us and said, "Well, I guess I don't know as much about electronics as I thought I did, so I'll send you a bill for where we are and you can find someone more skilled." I packed up and walked out. He caught up with me in the parking lot and apologized and I said, "Hey, no big deal, but, I just showed you the most amazing electronics in a prop, and that level of ignorance is unbeatable, so I'm done."
So the next guy made an acrylic box with blinking LED's..
