Tag Archives: Puppetry

Channel 366, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

CHANNEL 366: DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED (2011-2016, 2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling, Baker Terry

PLOT: Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck find their days consistently interrupted by anthropomorphized objects in their home and uninvited guests who insist on teaching them lessons about life via song, dance, and increasingly unsettling interactions.

Still from "Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared"

COMMENTS: There’s a reason that children’s television is, on the whole, weird. After all, there are two competing, even contradictory goals at work: these shows often want to teach young people some valuable life lesson (the alphabet, how the mail is delivered, treating your friends with decency and respect), but hold the audience’s notoriously wandering attention while doing so. All those talking aardvarks and talking Blue Heelers and talking magical unicorns are handwaving determined to steal a child’s focus with any degree of strangeness necessary. Landmarks of the genre going back decades—“Captain Kangaroo,” “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” —have all danced along the line where oddness tips over from charming to off-putting. Even the grand poobah of them all, “Sesame Street,” had to overcome initial concerns that its central conceit—humans and puppets living side-by-side—would be incomprehensible to children. Obviously, the kids figured it out.

Any success inspires parody, satire, and critique. Children’s TV has certainly earned its fair share, as can be seen in the stressful adulthood of the characters in Avenue Q, the aggressive surrealism of “Wonder Showzen,” and the oppressive nightmare of today’s subject, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.” This British web-series-turned-TV-show is perfectly captures the way that just living in the world can feel like unavoidable oppression. The machinations of people who are venal, stupid, or both conspire against “Don’t Hug Me”‘s characters, through the lens of two puppets and a guy with a crimson mop for a head who just want to get through the day. For anyone who remembers childhood as an endless series of grownups trying to kill your fun with their wondrous tales of adulthood and education, this is a show that sees you clear as day.

“Don’t Hug Me” began as a web series, and it establishes its theme—the world is fundamentally cruel—right away. In the very first short, a singing sketchpad shows up to share the wonders of thinking with boundless imagination, and after engaging the trio, she immediately proceeds to shut down their creative efforts with helpful corrections like “Green is not a creative color.” And there’s always room for things to get worse. A collection of creatures trying to describe love pile on more and more parameters and qualifiers, culminating in the revelation that they worship a giant idol and feed it gravel. An interest in food spurs on a storm of questionable nutrition advice, recommending aspic and referring to vegetables as “soil food.” These Continue reading CHANNEL 366: DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED (2011-2016, 2022) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987)

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DIRECTED BY: David Wheatley

FEATURING: Caroline Milmoe, Tom Bell, Kilian McKenna, Patricia Kerrigan, Lorcan Cranitch

PLOT: An orphaned girl is sent to live with her brooding uncle, a toymaker who makes elaborate marionette shows to cow and terrorize the members of his household.

COMMENTS: You have to hand it to the Brits; they just do coming-of-age stories a little bit differently. Here in the States, our budding young women are coping with love and loss at the hands of farm equipment or bee stings. But across the pond, the full flower of the newly mature female is as likely to coincide with psychic revenge upon a distant father or the wholesale collapse of civilization. It’s a whole other ballgame over there. 

Our heroine, Melanie, is coming into adulthood and knows it. Ogling her own youthful, unblemished form in the mirror and comparing it to Boticelli’s Venus, she observes, “Physically, I’ve reached my peak. From now on, I can only deteriorate.” It’s a charmingly lofty and pretentious declaration that highlights her actual immaturity, given her comfortable home and the security of her parents’ oversight. Naturally, it takes their demise in a plane crash (over the Grand Canyon, an appropriately yonic piece of symbolism) to make her realize just how unprepared she is for the adult world. She and her younger siblings are promptly shipped off to a cramped London flat where her foul-tempered Uncle Philip sells handcrafted dolls and wind-up toys in the front and holds oppressive court in the back, demanding total subservience from his mute wife Margaret and her brothers Finn and Francie. Philip is a petty dictator, issuing his cruelties through rigid house rules and cutting remarks. He’s the sort specifically designed to foster rebellion in the young people he despises, and given that Melanie is just starting to come into her own, their collision is inevitable.

The use of the word “magic” in the title implies a fairy tale element that isn’t really the story’s focus. The toys in his shop promise a level of enchantment that Philip is quick to stifle. His peculiar passion is for puppets, which he brings to life as the expression of his cynical view of humanity. That’s where we see the line between childhood and adulthood, between toys as best companions and toys as childish things to be put away. That dichotomy is the story’s pivot point, as Philip repeatedly denigrates Melanie until he finally comes up with a use for her: to play the lead in a re-enactment of the Greek myth in which Zeus rapes Leda under the guise of a swan. When Melanie comes face-to-face with the mechanical bird, it’s the crucial moment when she has to decide if she is interacting with a toy or with the malevolent soul giving it life.

Screenwriter , adapting her own book, has been seen ‘round these parts before—specifically, her reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood in The Company of Wolves. Magic Toyshop similarly explores notions of burgeoning sexuality, both in Melanie’s unsteady flirtation with the roguish Finn and in the strange abuse heaped upon her by Uncle Philip. It’s a powerful simile (far too overt to be a metaphor), although one that is undercut by its sudden and unsatisfactory resolution. Yes, we get the revolution we expect, but with no follow-through. Melanie, who once declared that she had peaked and could only deteriorate, now looks at the flames consuming her world and says, “Everything is lost now.” It’s as though Carter refused to countenance an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after, but can hardly see a world in which anyone lives at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A gorgeous, strange and mesmerizing fairy tale for adults… ‘Toyshop’ is less a film of sexually charged transformations, man into wolf, than one with magical, spellbinding effects…” – Sheila Benson, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE HANDS OF GOD (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Alyson Levy

PLOT: Participants at the 9th Annual International Festival of Christian Puppetry and Ventriloquism in Kankakee, Illinois explain the role of puppets in their evangelism and their faith.

Still from The Hands of God (2005)

COMMENTS: I will never forget the jaw-dropping moment some years back when a late evening spin ‘round the dial landed me on public access television just in time for one of the most bizarre sights that had ever flickered across my retinas. It was a green space alien puppet singing in a warbling baritone about the power of Jesus, while random intro-level chroma-key wipes revealed an assortment of inanimate puppets waiting for their turn in the spotlight alongside the barely animate human hosts staring blankly into the distance. I had stumbled upon Mr. Grey Spaceman, one of the stars of the legendary “Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Hour,” a kind of kids’ show for kids who had been raised in a cave and then fed quaaludes before being plopped in front of the TV set. The inexplicable mind behind this entertainment (that ran for over two decades) was David Liebe Hart, who built and operated all the puppets in the show, using the same voice for all of them and singing in unthinkable lugubrious tones. Hart’s was a talent so singular that Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim invited him onto their “Awesome Show” to just be himself.

There is nothing quite as weird as Hart’s material in The Hands of God. (There is probably nothing as weird as Hart’s material in the world.) But there’s a spirit that runs through the “Junior Christian Science Bible Lesson Hour” that is present here, an earnestness to spread the word of the Gospel and an innate certainty that the best way to do so is through sub-Henson puppetry. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and this is certainly among the most impenetrable of His mysteries.

Director Levy is part of the PFFR collective, the folks responsible for the outrageous children’s-TV parody “Wonder Showzen” as well as the scripts for the twisted anthology Final Flesh. So it’s natural to assume that her goal is to exploit these guileless rubes for all they’re worth. And that may be, but having arrived at this week-long gathering of devout felt, she clearly realized that nothing she did could be more remarkable than what these performers were willing to do themselves. Aside from pointing the camera at the stage, Levy is careful to let the action speak for itself.

One of the things the action says very loudly is that the message is vastly more important than the medium. The puppeteers are uniformly terrible performers, so dedicated to reminding us that Jesus died for our sins that they never come within a country mile of the rhythm or wit we expect from a comedic sketch. One puppet duo consists of an old man in overalls and a primly dressed little girl, but the characters are irrelevant because they’re only here to trade Christian aphorisms that they already know, echoing the way they themselves are performing for an audience that has already been converted to the Good Word. When there is a message, it’s usually a reminder of the flawed world we all share. One puppet troupe dances in front of signs reading “Oprah No” and “Jesus Yes.” Four puppets wrapped in keffiyehs slam into each other in an orgy of Muppety violence until they are thrust apart by the arrival of a puppet Jesus. Most cringe-inducing is the sweet-looking woman whose hippie-girl puppet Yolanda is just back from Mexico, where she “never knew it would be so poor.” Certainly they mean well, but absolutely no one is concerned how they will come across. The Lord is on their side.

An interesting storyline in The Hands of God is the connection between the puppeteers and their puppets. In interview segments, when the subjects are explaining their understanding of the functionality of faith, the humans frequently turn to seek approval from the very figures they are controlling. The puppets authentically become independent personalities, separate in character but fully aligned in mindset. Perhaps the most insightful moment comes during the closing credits, when the interviewees attempt to answer the question of whether there are puppets in heaven. For the first time in the picture, there is a schism in the dogma, as the absolutists who reject any physical manifestation in the Great Beyond run up against those who are clearly heartbroken at the mere thought of being without their companions for eternity.

The Hands of God is proof that weirdness is in the eye of the beholder, as the behavior of these righteous performers can be interpreted as either wildly psychotic or charmingly quirky. But like their spiritual ancestor David Liebe Hart, no one here is doing a bit. Levy’s short documentary is a fascinating look at a group of people for whom touching the face of God is as easy as talking to the hand.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Creepy looking Christians in all weird shapes and sizes. None of these people really look normal.,,, This was pretty damn funny — but insanely scary as well.”–Claire CJS, Clint’s Blog

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Depraved Puppetry: Is There Any Good News in Dark Humor? – A perspective from a Christian who’s also a fan of PFFR

(This movie was nominated for review by Brad. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)