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

I was pretty excited when I found this video on the internet. This was from The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, an 1990 made-for-TV stop-motion film based on a Russian folk tale. The movie was originally released in the UK. I watched it as a kid when they showed it in Taiwan (I don’t even remember if it was dubbed or close captioned). In the story, the Tsar decides that he would marry the princess to whoever brings him a flying ship. A young man set out on the quest for a flying ship, and meets a bunch of friend with different strange skills. They eventually have a flying ship for the Tsar, but the Tsar regrets the decision and put the group through more tests. And let’s just say there’s a happy ending. For a more detailed story, read this article on the answer to everything website.

Strangely enough, I still remembered the song that they sang (not the lyrics, but the melody). I also remembered what the old man and the flying ship looked like. We’ve never been short of stories about not-so-smart but have-a-pure-good-heart young man trying to marry a princess, and stories about people with strange skills, but this story tied them together quite nicely.

I think this was also the first time I was made aware what a stop-motion picture was, and it certainly made me appreciate all the work gone into the film even more. I also started liking the style and started watching Grandpa’s Stories (阿公講古), a Taiwanese claymation series about where each episode was a different story (often folk tale) told by Grandpa (kids sitting under a tree listening to local grandpas tell stories was a way of life before TV). If you want to see what it looked like, click here to see the two screen shots. The site is in Chinese though. Ah, I sure miss old TV shows. Some of them are good; some of them are mediocre. But either way, they are a part of childhood.

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