Bringing the Towering Tet’niss to Life

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How Tippett Studio created the terrifying trash crab from the latest episode of the Disney+ series.

By Kristin Baver

On the beaches of Lanupa, Wim and KB encounter a terrifying creature who may just see the lost children of At Attin as more food than friend. To create Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’s lumbering mother crab, a massive version of the seemingly harmless hermit crab-like creatures the pair followed skittering across the sands, series co-creators Jon Watts and Chris Ford called upon Tippett Studio to design, build, and animate the stop-motion puppet in their Berkeley, California studio.

The studio was founded by legendary animator and creature creator Phil Tippett, who led the innovative animation techniques for the tauntauns and AT-AT walkers of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and sculpted several of the aliens, including Max Rebo, populating Jabba’s Palace as the head of the creature department for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. In recent years, the Tippett Studio has been called in to recreate Tippett’s stop-motion dejarik chess set from Star Wars: A New Hope for three recent Star Wars films — The Force Awakens, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and The Rise of Skywalker — and create new stop-motion masterpieces for The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. For Skeleton Crew, the Mama Crab puppet, lovingly nicknamed Tet’niss, would become the studio’s heaviest creation to date….

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