Unleashed ‘Polar Bear’ Delights London Residents

Daniel Lewis/Rex Features(LONDON) — New York City may have gotten the snow, but London is where the “polar bear” lives.

London residents got a special surprise this week when a “polar bear” was unleashed on the city streets and even in the Underground.

Rather than cause alarm and frantic calls to animal control, the bear — actually a high-tech puppet — was greeted with delight and wonder.

The 8-foot-long bear is part of an ad campaign by U.K. network Sky Atlantic to draw attention for their arctic drama Fortitude.

Instead of sticking to the usual advertisements, Sky Atlantic worked with special effects experts to create the life-like polar bear. It took 19 prop specialists eight weeks to design and build the animal from 60 kinds of material.

To make the bear extremely life-like individual hairs were placed on the bear’s head and then an electro static current was run through them so they would stand on end.

To bring the animal to life, two puppeteers trained for days to get the right polar bear “gait” down.

“To launch our new Arctic-noir thriller we wanted to bring a realistic polar bear to the streets of London to give people an up close experience of what it must be like to come face to face with one of the biggest, but uncredited stars of our new show,'” Zai Bennett, Director of Sky Atlantic, said in a statement.

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