Ultra Skelly, this year’s updated version of The Home Depot’s iconic giant skeleton, stands 6.5 feet tall and is controlled through a smartphone app, letting you personalize its movements, glowing eyes, voice greetings, and lighting effects.
I watch spooky season movies all year long, so when I got the chance to test The Home Depot’s new 6.5-foot app-controlled skeleton—the $279 Ultra Skelly—I didn’t hesitate. While it may not loom quite as large as the viral 12-foot version, Ultra Skelly still casts an impressive shadow. With glowing eyes, a chilling Vincent Price-style voice (delivering deliciously cheesy dialogue), and four points of ghostly animatronic movement, this bony specter is every bit the haunted showstopper. Equal parts creepy and campy, Ultra Skelly is a wickedly fun way to raise your Halloween game from festive to frightful.How It Looks: It Moves! It Talks! It’s Got LCD Eyeballs!
Beware the living dead! Ultra Skelly may look like a statue, but it’s as animated a fiend as you’d find in a Ray Harryhausen flick. Skelly has five motorized points of articulation, located at the hips, neck, jaw, and each shoulder, plus you can manually adjust its elbows, wrists, and fingers. Its eyes are lively too; each is an LCD with a slew of animations from which to choose. It has two independently controlled color LEDs as well, and five different dialogue clips.
Ultra Skelly has two operating modes: One with motion detection that cycles through the different clips in sequence, and another for Bluetooth control via a smartphone app called Decor Pro SVI. It’s available in the Apple App Store and from Google Play, both of which are easy to find thanks to the QR code that’s printed on the instruction sheet.
I installed the app onto my iPhone, put Ultra Skelly into Bluetooth mode via a button on its left shoulder blade, and had it paired with my phone in a matter of minutes. After that, it took another couple of minutes to update Skelly’s firmware. The app includes a copy of the assembly instructions (more on this below) and pairing instructions in case you get stuck, but its main purpose is customization.
The app lets you change the colors of each of Ultra Skelly’s LED lights, and set each to solid, pulsing (with a slider to adjust the speed), or strobe effects.
