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Late-night talk show host Craig Ferguson routinely mocks CBS for being too cheap to pay for decent lighting, a band or a second banana. The lights may still be dim, and there's no band in sight, but starting Monday the Scottish-born cut-up will have a robot skeleton sidekick to guffaw obediently at the push of a button.
Grant Imahara, gearhead co-star of Discovery Channel's MythBusters series, created a bony android companion for Ferguson capable of reciting seven catch-phrases, including, "You're the man!"
Imahara was asked to build the show-biz robot after appearing on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson (11:35 p.m./10:35 p.m. Central, weeknights on CBS).
"Craig is so self-deprecating, he wasn't looking for a shiny metal skeleton," Imahara told Wired.com in a phone interview. "He said, 'I want something a little more do-it-yourself.'"
To that end, Imahara went to work on a plastic skeleton he had lying around in the MythBusters workshop.
"It's the kind of thing you'd see in a biology classroom, and I put it on steroids," he said. "I replaced part of the bones with aluminum, gave him an aluminum torso and blue eyes, and added some servo motors."
As an incongruous finishing touch, the robot, transported late last week by van from Imahara's San Francisco headquarters to the Late Late Show studio in Los Angeles, speaks with a robo-Scottish accent and sports a mohawk.
Named Geoff Peterson for no apparent reason, and inspired by Ferguson's so-called Robot Skeleton Army of Twitter followers, the sidekick may look slapped-together on the outside, but its operating system is actually pretty sophisticated. "Craig pushes a button that sends a signal to a microcontroller, which generates all the pulses and commands to move these servo motors," Imahara said.
"The microcontroller directs a dedicated sound board, which has seven audio clips on it. Push one button and it plays a specific MP3 file that Craig recorded in his own voice, then processed to sound like a robot. The servos will move the mouth, move the head and move the arm, all in perfect synchronization to the audio."
A former punk rock drummer, Ferguson co-starred on The Drew Carey Show before landing his own program and emerging as late night's most original talent.
Last week, Ferguson and his team won a Peabody Award for an in-depth interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but the host also excels in brilliant flights of unscripted free-association observations infused with world history, geography lessons, toilet humor and puppets.
Above all, puppets.
Ferguson once performed an entire show in the guise of an alligator puppet.
So it's not too surprising that robot skeleton sidekick will take to the streets performing as a kind of virtual marionette, Imahara said.
"The idea is that Craig could hide in a van and send the robot out to talk to people," he said. "Craig will have his own joystick he uses to remotely control the robot and interact with people. As Craig talks, he can flap the robot's jaws. It should be mighty entertaining."
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