Hi guys
To Funboys question, from my recollections there was never a problem with the first robot, from Lucas Film, as it was a totally original design.
The reasons they dropped it at the eleventh hour was robot one was based on a spider and there was a back lash to spiders in the film "The Wild Wild West" with Will Smith. At test screenings of Wild West the comment cards came back with such a high negative response to the sub theme of spiders that the studio re cut the entire film for its release, the result was very detrimental to the release print of Wild Wild West .
The reception from the paying public to the final film meant the studio looked at the film as a failure.
Next came The Red Planet with a spider type robot, the studio panicked and ordered us to trash the fully working robot spider.
(No guys, I didn’t get any photos of that driod, sorry)
Syd Meed was hired to quickly come up with a new design for AMEE , which he did over a weekend.
But the changers kept coming during the week we had to build her.
So there was one after another compromise to the final appearance, like the wings I made for her, you can still see two struts that come out of her back which was the mounting point for the wings.
I hope they stored the spider AMEE so it can be used in another show,
althoughthe teck’ used to drive spider AMEE is 15 years old now, so she would need a total refit to bring her up to a usable level of today’s film needs
Cheers
Gary