Happy Halloween! Hope that you are all eating lots of candies. That would be sweet. But do you know why we eat candies? Did you know there’s a conspiracy behind Halloween? If you don’t, then you haven’t seen my video from last year that exposed the truth.
It’s been a year. How time flies! But that’s not the point…
This is a music video of a John McCain puppet singing “100 Years To Win”, a parody of Five For Fighting’s song “100 Years”.
I’ve seen a few puppet videos online parodying president candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. Unfortunately many of them are just people putting a light color puppet and a dark color puppet next to each other and calling them McCain and Obama. This one, however, actually looks like John McCain. I think it’s the shape of the head. My favorite part is the eyebrows. They certainly made the puppet a lot more expressive.
The election is in a few days. As for this blog, I’m planning to put up an episode that has to do with the election, and I’m planning to write a post about presidential debate moderators… if I finish in time, that is.
Look. Being a puppet isn’t easy, I tell you. Show them some love.
This is a little song called “Please Don’t Call Me Dummy” by Puppet Scraps. The lyrics are heart-felt and really depict the social issues faced by puppets everywhere. Carry on, puppet. Live a good life.
I wrote a guest post called Why You SHOULD Have A Messy Desk over at Derek Semmler dot com. Check it out! 
I know, I know. Some of you organized people are shaking your heads and tsk tsk tsk’ing at me, but the voice of unorganized people must be heard!
Guess who’s all the rage these days? Yep, Joe the Plumber.
For those of you not familiar with Joe the Plumber, he is this guy that questioned presidential candidate Barack Obama about his tax plain. His name was subsequentially brought up numerous times throughout the presidential debate as Obama and John McCain talk about their visions and plans. Under media scrutiny, there are also other facts revealed about him, such as his real name and the fact that he wasn’t a licensed plumber.
Anyway, I was thinking, somebody (let’s not look at me for now) should make a puppet show where Joe the Plumber, Joe Six-Pack, and Hockey Mom would sit down to discuss politics and economy. I think that would be hilarious.
And then I happened to come across this yesterday… not quite what I was picturing but it was amusing nevertheless.
This is an interview of Kevin Clash, the puppeteer for Elmo, done by… Elmo? Normally, like this interview on Rove, Clash would appear with Elmo in his hand. But in this particular interview, Elmo is the host and Clash is sitting next to him. Either they did some camera tricks or the Elmo part is done by an understudy (I think the latter is more likely). It was pretty cute overall, but I’ve got to ask this:
Is it me or the ending is unbelievably awkward?
Today is National Grouch Day! Let’s celebrate… er, wait, no, I mean, not celebrate. I’m confused.
According to the Muppet Wiki:
According to Sesame Street Magazine, October 15th is National Grouch Day — a day for all Grouches to celebrate their way of life.
A Grouch’s mission in life is to be as miserable and grouchy as possible, and pass that feeling on to everyone else. Only then will a Grouch feel in touch with his or her world and be happy. Yet, even though a Grouch may show happiness at anyone’s misfortune (including his or her own), a Grouch would never admit to being happy. Such is the stability of a Grouch’s life: so balanced, and yet so unbalanced.
So here I’m going to lead by example:
Why? I read several puppetry blogs every day. How come none of them mentioned it? How come I had to have my sister tell me about it and I didn’t even know what it was and had to look it up? You people suck. Start writing about important days like these. And why didn’t I get the day off? It should’ve been a national holiday.
Nobody reads this site. Nobody comments. I had to hurry up and finish this post before the day is over in half an hour. And October 15th was already over in most time zones. I hate this site. Why doesn’t it have huge fonts like Sarah’s? It’s too small and hurt my eyes. And why am I typing in English anyway? This language doesn’t make sense. Why would you spell the word “queue” when you could have just ended the word with just the first letter? I hate this post. Off to feed worms.
UNAUTHORIZED Fist of Oblivion Trailer (via Tubefilter) from Tubefilter on Vimeo.
What do I like? If you’ve been coming here for a while, you know the answer: kung-fu fighting puppets!
Just for the trailer for Fist of Oblivion, which is a web series produced for Scion coming this November. According to Puppeteers Unite, it’s about “the story of Ricky, an ex-cop and kung fu master who’s on the hunt for Bjorn, Ricky’s former friend and partner who framed him for a crime he didn’t commit”. The trailer looks promising. This should be an interesting series to watch. I’m looking forward to it.
And here’s another trailer for it.
(Via Puppeteers Unite)
Over the weekend I watched Jack Rabbit and the Beanstalk that’s a part of the Santa Monica Puppetry Festival that has just wrapped up. The puppet show took place at Miles Memorial Theater and is “a twist on the classic tale by puppet artist Doug Seymour for family audiences” according to the event website.
Parking: The parking was across the street from the actual theater beneath the AT&T building. When I got there and told the parking booth attendant that I was there for Miles Theater, she directed me to to level P3. I didn’t see many cars there, so I’m guessing that many people didn’t know about the free event parking there. I guess they didn’t check the playhouse website like I did. When I crossed the street to get to the theater, I realized that most of the street parking in the surrounding streets were taken, so I guess it was the right thing to park in the structure.
The Audience: I got there close to show time so most people were already seated. The show was for ages 3 and up, so the audience members were mostly parents with little kids. (I don’t know if they are actually 3 and up, because I didn’t see bouncers carding those who look like 2-year-olds.) I was probably one of the few adults in the audience that didn’t come with a kid or two. It was attended by about 80 to 100 people, but I’m not sure how accurate this count is, because one, I suck at estimating, and two, some kids were sitting on their parents’ laps or blocked by backrests, making it harder for me to see and count. The stage was pretty much empty. A guy went up, started welcoming the audience and talked about what other events are going on for the rest of the puppet festival, and after that, show started.
The Puppets: The curtains opened and revealed an owl in the tree. That’s our narrator. And then the princess came in and started talking to the king. And… why do I bother telling you the story? It’s based on the English (probably) fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk, so you know what it involves, like the cow (yep, named Betsy, of course), the giant (Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!), and the magical beanstalk (though in this case, it talks and flies). The puppets are cute and there are a variety of them in terms of controls. Most of these puppets are marionettes, except for the narrator and the giant. The giant is a human-sized puppet that shares his legs with the puppeteer. And then the puppeteer used one hand to manipulate the head and the other for the right hand. Most of the time the giant was either eating or sleeping so one moving hand was pretty sufficient. I was wondering how they were going to do the giant falling down from the sky part. It was a pleasant surprise when they brought out a screen and started doing that part with shadow puppets. I liked the way it was handled.
My Favorite: My favorite puppet of the whole show, though, was the magical harp that played itself. It was a marionette. The puppeteer used wires to control it a few feet above it and it actually looked like it was playing. It looked very natural too. Instead of just having a bunch of strings moving around, it looked like invisible fingers were plucking the strings, and then the strings would snap back into place and oscillate back and forth. I couldn’t figure out how they did that but it looked awesome.
The Sound: This show used a pre-recorded soundtrack, which cut out the possibility for improvisation but also made the tech part easier and smoother. The voice acting and the sound effects were good too. The puppeteers could focus more on the puppeteering without worrying about who was saying the next line and where. So that’s good too.
The Kids: The reactions from the kids were typical. There were kids really captivated by what’s going on on stage and stayed focused on the story the whole time. There were kids that were too young to really pay attention or understand the story but they were just happily watching all the colors and movements on stage, while the parents whispered into their ears. And of course every now and then a kid would start crying and the parent would need to take him/her outside.
For Parents: Just like taking young kids out on a trip, sometimes it’s more for the parents than for the kids. Young kids might not even remember going to these shows or places, but it’s quality time the parents spending with the kids. Besides jokes that would be understood by kids, there were stuff that probably took someone older to understand. Nah, there were no sexual language or jokes, but there were references to elevators, the game show Family Feud, and an explanation of photosynthesis when the magical beanstalk was asked why he grew so tall so fast.
The Puppeteers: When the show was over, the six or seven puppeteers came out and took a bow. The event website only mentioned Doug Seymour. I recognized Bob Baker from an interview that I previously watched previously but I don’t know who the rest of them are.
It was a good show and I enjoyed it. I am not going to urge you to go see it though, simply because I don’t know when they will be doing it again. But yeah, I am gald that I went to check out the show. And of course, I also encourage everyone to check out some local puppet shows!
PS. Also, the theater was located inside Christine Emerson Reed Park. It looked pretty nice and I totally would’ve walked around some more if lunch wasn’t waiting for me. Hm, overall I just like Santa Monica a lot and that’s why I’ve also lived there before even though rent was generally higher there.
PSS. I had some problems charging my camera so I wasn’t able to take pictures. These pictures are of the original production from the event website. The puppets looked like the same ones used in the show I watched, except the giant. The giant looked bigger (giant-er?) in the one I watched.
That’s how many spam comments this blog has received so far that’s been filtered out by Akismet. Yep, 1000. We’ve finally gotten there.
Imagine what I would be doing if I didn’t have the spam filter installed on this blog. It wasn’t as bad back then, but recently I’ve started to receive about 50 spam comments every day. That’s probably not a huge number compare to larger websites, but that’s already a lot if I had to delete them by hand every day.
In the earliest stage of this blog, I didn’t even have a spam filter installed. Now I can’t imagine running a blog without one!
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