Tony Hale Ranks Buster Bluth’s Hands from ‘Arrested Development’
Ever the good sport, Tony Hale was happy to play along when I recently asked him to rank all of Buster Bluth’s prosthetic hands from Arrested Development. The only problem? “It’s hard to rank them all because I genuinely don’t know the backstory on a couple of them, and some I don’t even remember wearing,” he told me.
Same, actually. That said, after a bit of research, I determined that Buster technically had nine different prosthetics throughout the show’s run. Now armed with this knowledge (sorry), Hale gladly took a hands-on (sorry again) approach in arranging them from worst to best for me…
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The Hook
Sadly, Buster’s most iconic prosthetic hand was also Hale’s lowest-ranking one. “My least favorite was the hook because it got so hot,” recalled Hale. “It also had this pulley system to it that I could never figure out.”
The Fancy Hook
It might have been fancier, but it wasn’t so fancy that it included air conditioning, which kept it from beating the same heat that plagued the regular ol’ hook.
The White Wooden Hand
The Black Wooden Hand
The Science Model Hand
In the Netflix run of Arrested Development, Buster would get a new hand every few episodes. “When we were doing Season Five,” Hale said, “I remember the props guy coming up to me and taking off one of my hands and putting on another hand, and me saying, ‘Why am I wearing this one?’ The props guy literally said, ‘I don’t know man, just go with it. I was told to do it.’”
The Foot
It was no hand at all, but it was what Hale wore during the show’s finale.
The Terminator Hand
The Terminator-looking hand from the last two seasons of the show was a giant bionic hand without any kind of skin-like covering. But it’s mostly high up on this list because of its appearance in a hilarious attic scene with Jason Bateman’s Michael Bluth.
Franklin
“I had Franklin as a hand, too,” Hale recalled. “He was maybe my only friend.”
The Giant Hand
Hale ranked the big, robotic hand as his favorite. “It just made me laugh because Buster was so emasculated most of his life, but, man, he turned bionic with that big hand,” Hale explained. “He didn’t know his power. It was so fun to have that contrast of supernatural strength with a guy who can’t even get to the pharmacy.”
