Carwardine Parks/Articulated Costumes

History of articulated costumes at Carwardine Parks.

Mario Characters
In 1998, Dept. 2 Productions produced articulated costumes of Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and Bowser. The costumes had blinking eyes and moving mouths that were controlled via Futaba PCM Conquest R/C controllers. The faces were made out of latex, with the eyes & eyelids made of one-way mirrored plastic to allow the performers to see. The designer of the costumes are unknown, but is likely Amaya Carwardine, who performed the articulated Mario for some commercials for the 1999 and 2000 seasons.

Sam Vallejos, Jeremy Vallejos' wife, performed the Bowser articulated costume in the visuals for the 1998 Carwardine Mario live show Mario's Adventure Scrapbook.

In 2000, a Yoshi articulated costume was produced, also a 2-man costume, with the back performer having a Waldo device to control the mouth and eyes. Both performers had monitors hooked up to a camera hidden in Yoshi's left eye to allow them to see where they were going. This costume was changed in 2002 along with the regular Yoshi to be a bipedal 1-man costume.

In 2002, Wario and Toad finally got Articulated costumes. Also in 2002, variants of the Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Bowser costumes came out representing Mario Sunshine or Luigi's Mansion (in Luigi's case), Luigi's costume debuted earlier at Scarwardine 2001 at Carwardine Colony in the promotional live show Luigi's Mansion Stage Experience (wherein he was performed in-suit by Duke Rowell to a vocal track by ), but was not rolled out until 2002.

In 2004, the final batch of characters to get articulated costumes - Daisy, Waluigi and Donkey Kong, got them.

Updated versions (except for Yoshi and Donkey Kong) came in 2008, and second updated versions (for all the characters) came in 2016, to rival Disneyland's new Mickey Mouse costume.

PBS Kids Characters
Carwardine utilized VEE and Fuse Special Effects' articulated costumes for various PBS Kids characters.

Most of those costumes were discontinued in 2007 with the phase out of most of the PBS Kids licensees.

Sonic Characters
In late 1999, Carwardine requested Scollon Mascots to modify some of their Sonic Adventure-era costumes to give them moving eyes and mouths, the result was the first ever articulated Sonic costumes, coming out with the Sonic Stage Spectacular, which debuted in May of 2000, Scollon also made articulated versions of Manic and Sonia from Sonic Underground, Super Sonic, Flicky, Scratch, Grounder and a Big The Cat barring no resemblance to Carwardine's non-articulated version.