Puppet Kaos -

Today, April 30, 2008, is the 20th year anniversary of Su Huan-Jen’s (素還真) very first appearance on April 30, 1988. Wow, 20 years. I’ve been watching the same character for 20 years. That’s more than 1300 episodes and it’s still going. Today, let’s recount how the puppet has changed in the last 20 years.

To give a little bit of background information: The most popular puppet series in Taiwan is Pili (霹靂). It’s one never-ending, good vs. evil, epic saga that has gone on for more than 20 years. Su Huan-Jen is the lead character of Pili. He is handsome, intelligent, eloquent, and calm. He is also a kung-fu master and full of wisdom. He is the leader of the good people and is constantly trying to resolve conflicts in the Wulin (martial arts world) and is always fighting against the evil ones.

Enough of that. Let’s see some pictures! (Note: These are all screen shots from videos that span 20 years. There are Chinese characters at the bottom because the show is close captioned.)

1988: Su Huan-Jen’s first appearance. He was actually introducing himself in this one.

1989:

1990: In this shot, he was reading a letter from his wife, who had to go into hiding without saying goodbye. She did that because she did not want to become a burden while he faced the enemies. It didn’t help. He spent a lot of time looking for her and had gotten into more danger because of it. Too bad.

1992:

1993: In this shot, he was telling his best friend Ye Hsiao-Chai to retire from Wulin to be away from danger. Ye later came back to help Su anyway. He was still an active character in 2008.

1994: This particular puppet is a little odd. Normally these puppets have a neutral expression but this one seems to be smiling. Maybe that’s the reason that they didn’t use it for very long. But it was interesting to see.

1995: Not wearing his hat.

1995: This is around the time that Pili was experimenting with bigger puppet sizes. Around this time, all characters have really broad shoulder paddings because they were in the middle of figuring out how to hide the mechanism inside the puppets.

1996:

1997: Experimenting with wearing white.

1998: In this shot you can see that he’s wearing white clothes and has black fabric on his head. This is because he was mourning his son’s death. (Don’t worry. His son later came back to life. Su Huan-Jen himself died many times and came back to life many times, one way or the other. You’ve got to take breaks every now and then if you are going to be around for 20 years.)

1999: Still wearing white, but different style from the last two years.

2000: This puppet is using a head that’s similar to the one from the movie Legend of the Sacred Stone that they were shooting at the time. I cannot put in words what exactly is different, but it’s more similar to the movie head instead of the regular TV heads.

2001:

2002: Back to wearing white.

2002: He was severely injured, hence in a wheel chair in this one. Behind the wheel chair was his son. See? I told you that he came back to life.

2002: He sure changed quite a few times in 2002. There was a reason but the plot was too complicated to explain.

2003:

2004: Breaking character and saying that he’s celebrating his 1000th-episode anniversary.

2004: Trying out purple. I like this one a lot. Maybe it’s because the color scheme matches the house (see the background).

2007-present: I actually didn’t like this face as much when I first saw it. It was meaner than the previous one, but the more I looked at it, the more I liked it. I guess it’s because it made him look more decisive and determined when he was faced with challenges.

So, that’s 20 years of Su Huan-Jen. The puppets certainly changed many times. There were a few things that were his trademarks and pretty much didn’t change though. The puppet maker that carved out the first head and face decided to give him swirls in the eyebrows. And that became something that’s very recognizable him. The first stylist that worked on him decided to give him a hat shaped like a lotus flower. And he’s been wearing variations of that throughout the 20 years. Also, he normally carries a duster (拂塵). In traditional Chinese and Taiwanese drama, you often see characters carrying these things. Unless they are actually servants, these are usually elegent-looking dusters that serve as decorations. People carry these as symbols to remind themselves to rid their minds of dust to achieve clarity.

Ah, 20 years. That’s pretty crazy. I’m certainly happy to have been born in Taiwan to have a chance to know about and witness this phenomenon.

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Following up the last post Smoke, Flames, Taiwanese Puppets Live!, here’s a video footage where the puppeteers came out from hiding behind set pieces and showed the crowd how they were operating the puppets.

In the video, you get to see how big the TV puppets are in comparison to the puppeteers. You can see that each puppet is puppeteered by one puppeteer (what an awkward sentence). The legs are often covered up by clothing so the puppeteers usually only focus on the head, arms, and the body movement overall, except when the focus is on walking or kicking. A puppeteer would use his right hand to control the puppet’s head and right arm, and his left hand to control the puppet’s left arm. Due to this mechanism, the puppet’s left arm is a lot more flexible than the right arm in terms of movement. So you often see the weapons in the left hand, as demonstrated in this video.

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Smoke, sparks, flames, fighting. This is no summer blockbuster action movie; this is Taiwanese puppetry.

Pili, the biggest TV puppetry company in Taiwan, had just put on an outdoor live performance this past week (March 30). A story of good vs. evil was told, and when there’s good and evil in the same story, you know they’ve got to fight. And when they fight, they will fight in style. Without all the cutting, editing, and computer graphics that they normally have, they went back to what they used to do to provide special effects before TV. And if you are familiar with the genre, you know there shall be lots of smoke, lots of lighting effects, lots of sparks, and lots of flames. Here’s a taste.

Now that’s entertainment!

It’s hard to tell what the puppets look like from the footage but here’s close-ups of the two main guys in the fight.

To look at them in action and in different angles, check out their music videos here and here.

In live Taiwanese puppetry (the modern ones anyway), dry ice is often used to create a different atmosphere. Also, while “chi” is invisible in kung-fu, the dry ice smoke is often used as a way to represent the exchange of chi or energy. When there’s a heated battle, sparks are added for effect. Flames can be used to represent powerful moves and heated battles as well. The usage of these things are not strictly defined, nor are they a requirement for these shows, but they certainly add spice and entertainment value to the overall experience.

Of course, there’s the fighting itself. One of the character can be seen using a spear, while the other just fight with his hands. Puppeteers often like to give their characters long weapons like spears and swords to make the fights more stylish. And you know the crowd will always enjoy some good action!

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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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