Home Depot stepped up their werewolf game this year with a much larger 9.6 foot model…sort of a cross between their prior 7 foot guy and the famous 12 foot giant skeleton. Of course it still has the red flannel as required.

Image credit: Home Depot

Eye modules (conveniently labeled left and right) come out easily with two screws each.

And with the eye cutouts in the werewolf’s head, we can see the “stencil effect” is in full force. As we’ll see later, when the eyes are open they don’t even have to draw eyelids.

From the front, we can see the bitty 160x128 screens of the smaller props are upgraded here to common 320x240 displays…forgot to measure while they were out, but probably 2.4 or 2.8 inches.

Since these big props go out in the yard and not under a porch covering, the electronics are fully enclosed and sealed with what looks like polyurethane glue. Decided not to compromise the seal for further teardown…we can tell well enough from the animation and from this edge glimpse of the electronics that all the same principles are in use, just more pixels.

The animation leans on techniques from the earlier props…the motion is all “on rails,” with blinks and movements following a set path and returning to a home position.

When fully open, eyelids aren’t drawn, relying instead on the plastic outer shell to provide a stencil. So there’s probably not even run length encoding being used to save flash space, just full raw frames as with the earlier props.