A Puppet Master at Disney’s The Lion King on Broadway was recently arrested for 3D-printing a plastic handgun in the theater’s prop room. A report in the New York Daily News had the scary news.
The Puppet Master, Ilya Vett, was responsible for maintaining and repairing the various puppets used in the show, but was losing his job with Disney on Brodway’s long running show. When security at the Minskoff Theatre was helping him pack up any personal items they found the printer in the middle of manufacturing the gun and called police.
Ilya Vett was profiled in this video on Oh My Disney Youtube channel in November of 2017:
(We expect Disney to take this down soon, so watch it as the puppets on display are pretty cool.)
The Daily News article quotes a police report where Vett told police he brought the printer to work because his home workshop was too dusty and that he was making the gun as a gift for his brother.
The technical ability to make an undetectable plastic hand-gun has been around for years, but the ability to print one on demand is something new. Hopefully Vett had nothing bad planned for the cast and crew of Disney’s long running Broadway musical, but we’re glad anything bad that might have happened was caught by theater security.