[maya 8.0] duplicating character and animation issues

[thynk]

I have a very basic character consisting of a sphere, helmet and a backpack. It's a 10 joint rig starting at the base of the sphere (smooth bound) and traveling up to the top of the head where i have the helmet parented to the highest joint in the chain. The backpack is smooth bound to a series of joints that come out of the back of the sphere and up through the backpack allowing me to deform it. The backpack, sphere and helmet are 3 seperate objects.

I want to animate one of these characters and then duplicate it many times over so that i have an army of them. However when i duplicate the character by selecting the first joint in the hierarchy i only get a duplicate rig with the helmet parented to it.

Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

[thynk]

I decided that I am going to just reference the object into my scene multiple times and apply motion cycles through the trax editor for this project. If anybody knows the solution to the above problem I'd still like to know.


Thanks