Puppet Kaos - where Kelvin Kao plays with puppets and tell random stories

One of my greatest inspiration in my life is Taiwanese puppetry. I grew up watching puppet shows in Taiwan. They not only get me interested in puppetry, they also got me interested in voice acting, music, film making, story telling, performing arts in general and the whole enchilada. Besides my family, this is probably one of the things that’s influenced me the most in my life.

There are a few TV puppetry series going on in Taiwan, and the most popular is Pili (note: the site is in Chinese). It’s an on-going story for more than 1000 episodes. Of course, the story now has little to do with story that’s 200 episodes back, but it’s one continuous story of constant battle between good and evil. While a lot of TV puppetry in the United States is for children (like Sesame Street) or comedy (crank yankers), Taiwanese TV puppetry is serious drama for adults. If you really get into it, it’s actually quite epic.

The newest episodes just came out and they are called Pili Shen Zhou (The Turbulent Homeland). I’d like to share two videos to let you guys know what Taiwanese puppetry looks like today. (Of course, they don’t look like this when I was a kid.)

Here’s the opening theme:

And this would be the end credit song:

If you watch the two videos, you’ll see lots of stunts and effects. I am actually very into this. Sometimes I would rewind the video in the middle of it just to figure out how a shot is done. Of course, I could not figure out all of their tricks, but I’ve figured out a few and attempted to duplicate them in the first puppet video I made: Think, Outside the Box. To be honest, the script is just a 10-minute excuse to get some puppets fighting. I hope to make more of this type of video in the future. Puppets yapping, might be fun. Puppets fighting? Yeah, now that’s bad-ass.

Man, I can go on and on about Taiwanese puppets, but I guess I’ll stop here for now.

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