Original Warrior Bug Design

This was the original production design of the Warrior bug I did for SST. I wanted to make our version meaner and less box like than the original design from the movie. So I angled it up and added head spikes and peaks to the body, nastier shapes on the legs.

Having studied insects from childhood, I've always marveled at nature's logical and beautiful design sense, but I found the bug designs from the film clunky and insensitive to the way nature puts a creature together. The film's Warrior bugs had more in common with a pair of scissors tied to a camera tripod than an actual insect. I did my best to reverse engineer the bugs starting from the most iconic, the Warrior bug and build the rest of the species off that blueprint so they would all be one family.

The hub joint, sitting under body, where the legs come out, was a strange unstable design choice, but it was the one detail made the bugs look different to earth insects, so I made it the standard and applied it to the rest of the bug species. I used my knowledge of grasshopper knees and spider joints to make sense of it. Reference is the key, I can't design better than nature so I have studied and learned it's logic as best I can.

Both Executive Producer Richard Raynis and I had trouble with the scissor like beak from the movie, (they would slip past each other in real life, and the thing had no mouth so it would starve), so we devised a lower jaw that could house the top allowing it to shut, then I put mouth parts in to make sense of the whole thing.