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Turtles in Movies   Bye Bye Birdie (1963)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This musical comedy is all about the young and beautiful Ann-Margret. It made her a huge star, with the help of her opening and closing performance of the title song while walking on a treadmill. Unfortunately, I have to feature a less charasmatic, less musical actor here - Swifty the Tortoise. The main character of the film, played by Dick Van Dyke, is a failed songwriter who was trained as a biochemist and is staying at the house of Ann-Margret's family in Ohio which includes a ten year old boy who keeps a pet tortoise and plays with a chemistry set. Van Dyke has developed a secret formula that increases the work output of domestic animals, including increasing the egg production of chickens, that he calls "Speed Up." Van Duke needs to impress Ann-Margret's father so he grabs some of the boy's chemicals and quickly makes a pill of his formula that he shoves into Swifty the tortoise's mouth as an experiment to see what will happen. We hear a gulp when the tortoise swallows. After a few minutes and a song about Ed Sullivan, Swifty's eyes roll wildly and he jumps off the table and races across the house and out the front door, about a hundred times faster than a normal tortoise walks, finally living up to his name. Later we see Swifty race across the backyard grass, fly into an artificial pond, quickly swim to the other side and explode out of the water. I'm not sure how they did it but the fast-moving tortoise effects are very well done. They might have been done with fast-motion photography and some kind of artificial tortoise. Swifty the tortoise is a live Desert Tortoise whose shell was painted with a yellow star-like pattern similar to a Star Tortoise. They also painted yellow on its face and legs. The entire movie was a blast of bright colors so a plain brown Desert Tortoise would have looked too dull in context. However, I can't imagine that painting it's shell was healthy for it. There are some publicity photos of Ann-Margret "walking" the tortoise, which they say is named Swifty. There's an umbrella glued to its shell, supposedly because it was so hot at the studio. If that was true, the tortoise would have suffered a lot from the heat and hot pavement. They burrow deep underground in the heat of summer to keep from overheating. One online commenter says that the tortoise needed the shade because Ann-Margret was too hot. That interpretation makes more sense.