Star Fox's OG marketing materials were dominated by real-life puppet versions of heroes Fox, Slippy, Falco, and Peppy, but the origins – and ultimate fates – of those puppets have always been shrouded in mystery. Finally, we have an answer, but it's something of a dark, tragic twist that I'll go ahead and spoil right now: those puppets were destroyed by Godzilla Minus One studio Shirogumi.
At least, that's what happened to one set of the Star Fox puppets, according to a report from Time Extension. There were at least two different sets, one created for the SNES game's original box art, and one built for a bizarre promo video shown in Japanese stores. The latter was actually made for proper puppeteering – the Fox we see in the video is animated – but apparently it wasn't built to last.
People have long suspected that Shirogumi, a Japanese visual effects studio that's existed since the '70s, was responsible for at least one of the puppet sets, all because of a very old photo. That photo depicts Takashi Yamazaki, who has worked at the studio all these years, manning the Fox puppet. Yamazaki is likely best known these days as the director of Godzilla Minus One, a film that was also made under Shirogumi.
Here's an image of Takashi Yamazaki puppeteering one of the large scale puppets for the JP Star Fox commercial,so there's a possibility that his vfx company created them? pic.twitter.com/pOGe7vhTlbNovember 14, 2021
So Time Extension emailed the studio to ask about the puppets, and its response clears up all the mystery: "The Fox puppets created at our company were made by gluing fur and feathers to natural rubber, so they deteriorate simply by being exposed to air," Shirogumi says. "Because of that, we had to destroy them after production was finished."
A sad end for the animated puppet set, but what of those that appeared on the box art? Well, their fate is a bit more mysterious, but they certainly seem to have lasted longer. "The last time I saw them was about 15 years ago in a storage kind of room within Nintendo," as Star Fox programmer Dylan Cuthbert tells Time Extension. Perhaps they're still out there, somewhere, waiting to make their big comeback. Hopefully they'll look a little less scary than the Banjo-Kazooie puppet that showed up in 2025 if they ever appear again. Eesh.
Janky frame rate and all, Star Fox is still one of the best SNES games of all time.
