Sean Äaberg
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THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 109
🕑 Added 2024-10-11 18:03:33 +0000 UTCI love puppets. There is something primal about puppets. About humans bringing character to an inanimate object immediately, without stopping to animate the thing. I grew up watching the Muppet Show. It was the most comfortable hour I spent whenever it was on when I was young. The Muppet Show had that “anything goes”, manic, eccentric, weird, post Vaudeville feeling that felt like home to me. My spiritual homeland. Watching the Muppet Show let me know that anything was possible, that imagination was a force that could populate entire worlds. This was a feeling that I found addictive. The Muppet Show wasn’t dull or corny enough to just say things like that outright, they were implied. Sometimes the shoddy construction of the puppets or the production itself lent an extra dimension of weirdness & discomfort to the whole thing. The world of Sid & Marty Krofft was a perfect example of this. By the time I was watching TV on my own in the early 80s, their shows weren’t on very often. But occasionally I’d find Sigmund the Sea Monster, The Banana Splits or the Land of the Lost. I’d have to rent videos of HR Puff N Stuff later to catch up on their true masterwork. The Great Space Coaster & the New Zoo Revue were other bizarre additions that added their own bizarre flavors to the mix. These things always seemed like they might be able to be one segment in the Muppet show, not even beginning to approach the scope of the thing. Later I discovered “The Letter People” on cable, which was laughably bad but charming & mysterious in its own way. When I first watched Jan Svankmajer’s Faust I was struck by the enormous puppets, they added this insane dimension to the film. I found myself obsessed with this enormous headed Picasso costume that would appear seemingly randomly in things. Later I discovered that there were a whole series of parade puppets, Giants, Giant heads & Big Headed characters all with medieval origins that still popped up in Carnival parades in Europe & South America.
