#bantha

Banthas have a lot of thick, heavy fur that you can hide a lot of stuff under, including wheels. So, the bantha wouldn't have to actually walk under its own power at all. It'd basically be a small van or golf cart. You could maybe even get away with not having legs at all, with enough fur, but if you do have any legs visible, then they would totally just have to kinda LOOK like they're walking. Like the dinos of "Walking with Dinosaurs - The Arena Spectacular" traveling show (2007-2019ish), or the animals at the "Les Mâchines de L'Île" attraction in Nantes, France.

Fur scraping on the ground (if you want to have no moving legs) would get pretty gross pretty quickly, but 1) banthas aren't exactly supposed to be pretty / clean, 2) you could regularly swap out the fur. You could design the rig in such a way that the fur bunches are relatively easy to swap out and wash. You also don't really have to deal with fake skin wear-and-tear this way. Lots of space to put protective tarps and such between the fur layers and moving metal.

If you wanted to get some back movement, like the appearance that shoulder and hip movements are happening underneath all that fur, I don't think it would necessarily even have to be animatronic / electronic? You could maybe set up some sort of simple mechanical system, so that when the wheels of the float are turning, they turn gears that cause the appearance of very basic hip swap and upper leg movements, without a puppeteer.

The only animatronics that a bantha would really need to be pretty good and fun is 1) head shake / turning, 2) blinking, 3) mouth opening and closing, 4) maybe some nose wrinkling and sniffing sound to be fancy. The bantha doesn't have to be visibly interested in guests at all. You could probably get away without even doing any eye tracking or anything.

There's no talking too. Set up a soundboard of 50-100 different bantha sounds for the puppeteers to use and you're all good. Have a set of sounds that sound vaguely like "Happy Birthday" and other phrases, then if a guest tells the accompanying bantha handler that it's their birthday, the bantha handler can go, "Oh, happy birthday! I taught the bantha how to say that too! Wanna hear?" And then they prompt the bantha to make a groan that sounds recognizably like "Happy Birthday." (You do run into that same "needs a minimum of 3-4 staff members to operate and park operators really don't like that cost" problem again, of course.)

If you wanted to really delight guests, you could put some sort of snorting trick / mechanics, using an air pump to huff air out of the nostrils. The walking elephant machine in Nantes can spray water out of its trunk, so kids would run up to get misted and shriek about it, and I think something similar to that would be good, gross fun. "I was spat on by a bantha (misted with water) at Disney World" is a good funny guest story.

Honestly, you wouldn't even have to walk the bantha around / move it (and *gasp* let guests have fun interactions for FREE). Set up a bantha barn for meet and greets, then you don't even have to worry about the bantha running anyone over. You could do droids and aliens this way too, obviously, but my mind wandered over to banthas as a wandering character because they're something very big that seems impressive while functionally being a decorated van / golf cart. Ideally, it would be big enough for a performer to ride (putting guests on it seems like a bad idea) so that it could participate in parades too.

Insane

I fuckin knew it *gaderffii sharpening sounds*