The Legend of Zog: Stan Winston Studio’s God of Destruction
At Stan Winston Studio, innovation and artistry thrived—but so did a certain brand of chaos. Enter Zog, a seemingly unassuming chunk of metal that became a cathartic tool of destruction, a legend in its own right. More than just an object, Zog was a ritual, a release valve for the brilliant but high-pressure environment of the mechanical effects department. What started as an offhand joke among overworked effects artists quickly escalated into an underground tradition of spectacular electronic obliteration.
In this interview, veteran Stan Winston Studio mechanical effects crew members Jon "JD" Dawe, Richard Landon, and Matt Heimlich share the origins, evolution, and mayhem of Zog with Stan Winston School Co-Founder Matt Winston.
(Clockwise from top left: Matt Heimlich, Richard Landon, Jon Dawe, and Matt Winston.)
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW:
(This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.)
MATT WINSTON: Alright, guys, to kick off this conversation, I want to quickly introduce everyone: Matt Heimlich, Richard Landon, and John Dawe, aka 'JD,' three longtime Stan Winston Studio mechanical wizards who are currently all doing wonderful things. Matt [Heimlich] especially, sitting out on his big spread enjoying the retired life.
MATT HEIMLICH: Best job I've ever had.
MATT WINSTON: We're gonna talk about Zog.
MATT HEIMLICH & RICHARD LANDON: Zog, Zog, Zog...
MATT WINSTON: I'm gonna show you guys a two-minute compilation video to remind you of some of Zog's finer moments, and then we'll get into it.
JON DAWE: I love it.
WATCH THE ORIGINAL SWS ZOG COMPILATION VIDEO:
JON DAWE: Oh my gosh.
MATT HEIMLICH: Who are all those young kids? I don't think we threw anything away for all those years. We saved everything to smash.
JON DAWE: Yes, we did. I have the lineage and the backstory of all this, where I actually brought this to the shop. I was working at another visual effects place. I wanna say it was like 1989. It was a short commercial job, and it had a very short timeline. We were working all-nighters to try to get this thing built. We were building a miniature backhoe thing, and around us, because they were a model shop, they had done a previous television made for TV show about, I think it was a Hawaiian Airlines accident [editor's note: Actually, it was Aloha Airlines], where the top of the airplane ripped off, and then it landed. And luckily, a lot of people survived.
They had made a slew of these miniatures, these airplanes, and all the miniature passengers on this airplane. And in my two o'clock-in-the-morning haze, we were all just burnt. I was looking for some sort of relief from frustration. And I found this giant piece of round aluminum stock. It was probably six inches in diameter and weighed probably about a good 25 pounds. And I found some of these extra little people from that airplane. And I went, ‘Hey guys, these look like they might be able to be smashed. Wouldn't it be fun to do like an Indiana Jones thing where you roll it at the end of the table, like the big ball in the film, and then it smashes the people?’ I said, ‘This thing, it's the god of percussive maintenance. It's the god of Zog." We’re gonna Zog things.
And so later, starting to work at [Stan Winston Studio], building a lot of eye mechanisms and things, knowing that I was doing really intricate tiny stuff, people kept bringing me their Walkman to fix. Most of the time, I could usually unclog the rollers and get the knots out of the tape. But occasionally, it was just so far gone. I'm like, ‘Um yeah, I don't know. I think you might just have to throw this away. Or wait a minute, how frustrated are you with this thing?’ and I said, ‘There’s a big blue X on the ground at the end of my table, and I have this giant 20 or 30-pound round stock. Why don't you place that thing down there? And so we would roll it and watch it slowly roll over, and then, blammo, and everybody would cheer. So, I think Richard was intrigued by that. And then Matt came along, and then we all just started going like, ‘Well, hmm…’
RICHARD LANDON: Hmm, what's the next step?
JON DAWE: We've gotta outdo that.
RICHARD LANDON: I think Matt Heimlich then added the acetone spray. Oh yeah, the fire, the trail, the fire streaks.
JON DAWE: The Flaming ZOGs. Yes. Oh my gosh.
RICHARD LANDON: Because that's how you make them more exciting.
JON DAWE: Typically, during the day, I was so busy, I would tell people, ‘Tell you what, I can't do this right now. We're super busy; we're slammed for a deadline on Jurassic [Park] or The Lost World, or whatever. Hit me up at the end of the day when everybody's leaving, and then we'll Zog this stuff. So sometimes I'd end up with a pile of stuff, like either a couple of Walkmans, a CD player. And then it eventually became like a boombox, and people started bringing in small computer monitors…
MATT HEIMLICH: Giant TVs...
JON DAWE: Big giant TVs. Yeah.
JON DAWE: At one point, I remember Matty, us bringing the forklift in. And it could have been Richard, too. All three of us were colleagues in these crimes. We bring in the forklift. We raised the forks way up and hung a cable with the Zog on it. We did like a swinging Zog.
RICHARD LANDON: Swinging Zog is how we killed the “Casper the Friendly Ghost” clay sculpture.
JON DAWE: Yes. And I remember dropping it off like a 12-foot ladder.
MATT HEIMLICH: It was the best way to get rid of any annoying animatronic toy that somebody brought in and drove everybody crazy with. Suddenly, it would appear in flames on the middle of the floor and get smashed by Zog. So, we'd never have to hear that stupid duck, that western duck again.
JON DAWE: I think I remember a Furby or two floating around the shop, too.
MATT HEIMLICH: That Gorilla Alive head that I got at Sharper Image or something.
JON DAWE: It helped to let us, you know, as a team, let off some steam and just bring a little bit of joy and fun into the shop during those stressful weeks.
RICHARD LANDON: By the time we had done half a dozen of them, we didn't have to plan ahead or do anything. We would just, after someone said cleanup, pick up the [intercom] phone and just quietly go…
MATT HEIMLICH & RICHARD LANDON: "Zog."
RICHARD LANDON: And everybody knew what that meant. Everybody had to either be wearing safety glasses or be outside the glass wall [outside the mechanical department], and everybody would cluster outside that glass wall, and we would drop something on a molten pile of electronics.
MATT WINSTON: Guys, watching the footage, I'm going, 'Man, was dad ever nervous?'
MATT HEIMLICH: He was never there for it. But we knew it had gone too far when we looked over one day, and everybody was there. And then Laurie was there [from the accounting office.] She was like, what's going on?
JON DAWE: Well, I seem to recall there may have been a time there [when Stan was suspicious]. It was certainly before AI [Artificial Intelligence]. I thought I remembered Stan walking around, going like, ‘What are we doing, girls?’
MATT HEIMLICH: And he saw, and then he walked off, shook his head…
JON DAWE: ‘I don’t wanna know what this is.’
RICHARD LANDON: Plausible deniability. Yep.
JON DAWE: ‘I saw nothing.’
MATT HEIMLICH: We had a lot of hijinks back then, and this was a way better way of doing it than lighting off a garbage bag full of acetylene in the parking lot and setting off all the car alarms.
RICHARD LANDON: The acetylene oxygen bombs. Yes!
JON DAWE: You grouped together a bunch of people who are incredibly imaginative and creative, mechanical engineers like Matt, magicians like Richard, and brilliant designers. And you get us all together, added to the fact that we were like 25, 27, 30 years old, our crazy imaginations were out there, and we were like, ‘Man, what can we do?’
MATT HEIMLICH: 3000 super balls!
JON DAWE: I have so many stories, whether it was bouncing a million rubber balls off of Richard's head by accident...
MATT HEIMLICH: He did it to himself! He picked up the radio, set it up, picked the frequency that we had picked, turned it on, and triggered it on himself.
JON DAWE: Yes. Many hijinks. We were cruel. The best thing is there was usually a video camera floating around, as you see with the Zog video, so as to capture all the hijinks, the craziness, or the embarrassment of the victim. So it was definitely fun times. It was great times.
RICHARD LANDON: There's one Zogging in that video that was a little bit different than the rest, too. On The Lost World, I had been asked to recreate the big giant foot stepping in the mud, the iconic shot from the first movie. So I built that huge tower with like, three-inch steel pins for the hinges. It was probably rated to lift 10,000 pounds. But then, before it was done, they canceled the effect. So it just sat out in the parking lot, and somebody brought in a television that was like a full-sized 1970s console television. And we said, let's try this.
MATT HEIMLICH: That came from off the street one morning. It was out in front of the apartment complex. [SWS Mechanic] Dave Covarrubias, I think, me, and somebody else, we carried it, and it nearly broke our backs.
RICHARD LANDON: Yeah. And it was huge and ungainly and we set it under the very tip of what would be the slapping point of that giant truss that I had built. And when we finally dropped it and shouted ‘Zog!’ and we all went, ‘Where'd the TV go?’ It vaporized all the glass, all the electronics, the fake melamine wood, everything was disintegrated. Then we took apart the giant steel structure and threw it all away.
MATT WINSTON: Well guys, I'm so glad we're finally able to share the exploits of Zog with the community. You guys were not only great creators but clearly great destroyers, too, so there's a balance there.
JON DAWE: Absolutely. I have one last thing to add to the legacy of Zog. A couple years later, I think it was after JP 2, maybe during Congo or something, Mike Smithson, who's a dear friend of all of ours, and a long-time super makeup artist, he came up to me and he said, ‘Hey JD I had this little side gig during the summer and I was doing some artwork for Topps bubblegum cards. They asked me to do some Star Wars illustrations. I just wanted you to know that I immortalized Zog on one of those baseball cards.' I'm like, ‘What?! What are you talking about?!’ He had done an illustration, and I have the card at home, of an interaction between some of the [Star Wars] cantina thugs and then written in graffiti on the back wall. It says “Zog Lives.” [editor's note: actually, it says "Zog Was Here."] And I went, ‘Mike, I'm so honored, man. Thank you, buddy. That's incredible. I'll cherish this forever.’
(1995 Topps Star Wars Galaxy Series 3 Card illustrated by Mike Smithson #352 with the words "Zog Was Here" in graffiti on the cantina wall.)