Remo Saraseni, a sculptor, toy inventor and technological visionary best known for creating the Walking Piano that Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia danced to in a beloved scene from the 1988 hit movie “Big,” died June 3 in Swarthmore, Pa. 89.
The cause was heart failure, said Benjamin Medaugh, his assistant and caregiver. Mr. Saraceni died at Mr. Medaugh’s home, where he had lived in recent years.
Mr. Saraceni’s specialty was “interactive electronics,” he told New York magazine in 1976. His other inventions included a watch that could answer aloud when you asked it the time, a stereo stethoscope system that could pump out your heartbeat pulse and plexiglass clouds that light up at the sound of a whistle in a pastel color suitable for lighting a room. It was all fueled by what Mr. Saraceni (pronounced SAR-ah-SAY-nee) called “people energy”: human voice, touch and body heat.
The power of this kind of technology to mesmerize its users became a key element of the plot of “Big” and in turn the mainstay of one of the most beloved scenes in recent movie history.
After wishing to be “grown up” in a magical Zoltar fortune-telling machine, the film’s main character, Josh Baskin, is transformed from a 12-year-old boy to a young adult (played by Mr. Hanks). He takes an office job at a toy company whose owner, Mac (Robert Loggia), recognizes Josh as his employee one Saturday at FAO Schwarz, the toy retailer whose flagship store at the time was on Fifth Avenue at 58th Street in Manhattan. Mac is a shrewd venture capitalist who investigates his industry in action. Josh is a boy who delights in the world of toys (albeit in a man’s body).
As Josh impresses Mac with his intimate knowledge of FAO Schwarz products, they happen upon Mr. Saraceni’s nearly 16-foot-long Walking Piano. With childlike absorption, Josh begins to dance to the song “Heart and Soul”. Mack, inspired by Josh’s unconscious enjoyment, joins him, making the performance a duet. To an awed crowd, the two perform a cover of “Chopsticks.”
Mac appoints Josh as vice president of product development at the company, setting the rest of the film’s plot in motion.
“It was like jumping rope for three and a half hours every time we did the scene,” Mr. Hanks told Playboy in 1989. “We rehearsed until we dropped.”
The film grossed $150 million and catapulted Hanks to stardom in Hollywood, earning him his first Academy Award (Best Actor) nomination. It also inspired decades of visitors to FAO Schwarz, where it was normal for hundreds of people in a day to line up to play the keys in their sneakers, sandals and loafers.
“Even if you don’t know how to play the piano with your fingers, you can play it with your feet,” Mr. Saraceni told the New York Post in 2013.
He introduced the earliest form of the piano to Philadelphia’s Civic Center Museum in 1970, according to sports and pop culture website The Ringer. Called ‘Musical Daisy’, it was an interactive sculpture with eight cushion petals that played different notes when sat on. He continued to experiment with the idea, turning the daisy into a musical carpet before unveiling the piano idea in his Philadelphia studio in 1982.
FAO Schwarz acquired a Walking Piano shortly thereafter. In 1985, the store’s new management tried to make it a destination for film and television filming. Ann Spielberg, Steven Spielberg’s sister and co-writer of the “Big” screenplay, visited and “came back” for the piano, fellow writer Gary Ross told The Ringer.
At the request of the director, Penny Marshall, Mr. Saraceni made a new version of the piano with three octaves instead of one and keys that light up when played.
Although no other invention of Mr. Saraceni became as well known as his piano, many others inspired similar enjoyment.
Remo Saraceni was born on January 15, 1935, in Fossacesia, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy. His father, Giuseppe, worked with relatives to make shoes and other leather goods, and his mother, Filomena Karuli, ran the household.
Remo started inventing as a boy. His father got into trouble, he told The Chestnut Hill Local, when Remo turned a poster of Mussolini into a kite.
He attended electronics courses in Milan and worked as a radar specialist in the Italian army, but as a civilian he worked as a television repairman. He also launched his own brand of large suitcase-like portable turntables. He went to the United States in 1964 for the World’s Fair and to seek a better life — even though he spoke no English and had no American friends and no savings.
He found work again as a TV repairman and put a note on his bathroom mirror: “America is where anything is possible.”
He married Maria Francione in 1965. They divorced in 1976 but remarried in 1995 when she was ill, and she died shortly after. He is survived by his sons, Ugo and Luca, and two grandchildren.
At the height of his success in the early 1990s, Mr. Saraceni had his own 20,000-square-foot workshop in Philadelphia with about 20 employees. The children especially loved the visit and many of Mr. Saraceni’s clients were children’s museums around the world. He made them devices like a “musical hand”: motion sensors attached to a sheet of music. Children could move their hands like conductors and hear classical music synchronized to their movements.
After “Big”, Mr. Saraceni’s work exploded in popularity. But he’s also had to spend time hunting down copycat manufacturers and suing companies for trademark infringement.
At the end of his life, he was embroiled in a legal battle with a company called the ThreeSixty Group, which bought FAO Schwarz in 2016. Mr. Medaugh, Mr. Saraceni’s heir and executor, said he would pursue the lawsuit, which he accuses the store of selling grains of Mr Sarakeni’s work without properly compensating him and says this has left him destitute.
Mr. Saraceni’s pianos can be purchased for between $6,000 and $16,500, depending on size, by emailing info@bigpiano.com, Mr. Medaugh said. They represent the possibility of a healthy, imaginative relationship between people and technology.
“Technology should live and breathe with you,” Mr. Sarakeni told the Daily News in 1983. “It should respond to you, not you to it.”
