INSIDE EDITION got a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the giant lion Katy Perry rode during her Super Bowl halftime show.
Katy Perry wanted to make jaws drop in the very first seconds of her Super Bowl halftime show.
That lion she rode in on was specially created for her by a master puppeteer.
Michael Curry has designed puppets for Broadway’s The Lion King and the Olympics. But he only had eight weeks to create the lion for the Super Bowl.
He told INSIDE EDITION, "Making a great piece for Katy Perry could enter. It was most important to us. Something grand, a big statement. We had all hands on deck. We had 30 people working and many of them 50 to 70 hours a week."
It started out with a computer model. Then, machines made a foam rendering. Next, the pieces were cast into carbon fiber and covered with gold mirror.
The lion is 14 feet tall and 24 feet long. Curry's studio outside Portland, Oregon, is massive. It has to be in order to accommodate his larger-than-life projects.
At the Super Bowl, Perry wore a harness so she wouldn't fall off. Thirteen puppeteers to operated the lion.
Curry said, "She was such an actress in how she held the reigns. She did her part beautifully. The lion exceeded our expectations."
Now, to those crazy sharks Katy Perry had.
The shark on the right was Perry’s longtime backup dancer Scott Myrick. He has appeared on Dancing with the Stars, and is revealing that he only had 90 seconds to change from his chess costume into the shark getup. He also said his vision was so bad inside the costume that he bumped into a palm tree.
But what about the shark on the left of Perry whose flopping fins and goofy dance moves were an uncoordinated mess? INSIDE EDITION can now reveal his name is Bryan Gaw, and he's also been dancing with Perry for a while. He outed himself on Instagram with this simple bio: “Most Recently ‘Left Shark.’”
