This animation is a rare piece of stop-motion footage, featuring a very peculiar and intriguing monster. It is a test animation for a film, The Las Vegas Monster, that never went through to completion. The designer was Pete Peterson, who was a technician on Mighty Joe Young (1949) and special effects assistant to Willis O’Brien on The Black Scorpion (1957) and The Giant Behemoth (1959). He was also an animator on The Thing with Two Heads (1972). [I took this information, somewhat uncritically, from the Internet Movie Database, and I have since been informed that Peterson in fact died in the 1960s.]
This test animation presents us with an interestingly different monster and showcases the effectiveness of Peterson’s work.
More information can be found on the BlueSpill site, which features lots of rare stop-motion footage.
that’s very cool, Rob.
It is, isn’t it? It always amazes me what turns up on YouTube and the internet generally. I never knew this existed. I’d love to know where the owner of the BlueSpill site — or whoever put it up on YouTube — got it from.
Was there an animated sequence by Pete Peterson in THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972)? I heard that in the Steve Archer book WILLIS O’BRIEN SPECIAL EFFECTS GENIUS, it was said that Peterson died of multiple sclerosis in the early 60’s.
Well, he was involved in “The Thing with Two Heads” according to the Internet Movie Database. However, Peterson’s entry in IMDB does not include birth or death details — and on reflection I suspect that the entry is wrong. The BlueSpill site also says he died in the 60s. Perhaps IMDB has confused him with a different Pete Peterson. Mind you, technically speaking Peterson was involved in 1974’s “Flesh Gordon”, because the Las Vegas Monster model was adapted by Jim Danforth into the Great God Porno, along with other “Beetlemen” models for which Peterson had done an earlier test reel. Perhaps something similar happened with “The Thing”. However, that’s stretching the definition of “involved” a little if he in fact was dead by then.
So I’m guessing you’re right, Matt, and I should amend my comment.
Another entry I found on the BlueSpill site says that the Las Vegas reel and the Beetlemen reel were discovered in a trunk in Peterson’s former residence.
It’s been 5 years since the last update on this thread but I wanted to post here that a small group of people are working on trying to get a feature version of Las Vegas Monster made. So far not much luck. We have a completed script, a partial cast (staring Brinke Stevens) and an excellent crew of FX people ready to go on this … all we need is funding. We want to honor the memory of this forgotten man, Pete Peterson (Svend Pedersen) lest we forget the challenges he faced to make the magic he created.
Good luck with this, David. Do keep me informed and I’ll spread the word as best I can. Have you considered putting this project up for crowd-funding, through Kickstarter, Pozible or Indiegogo? This method can be very successful, and this is the sort of project that a lot of people would want to get behind.