Last week's (LOOOOooooog) post about my audition that started my short, wonderful career as a television puppeteer really got me thinking about those days and what it was like to puppeteer on a kids television show, and I remembered more things about that "lifetime".

To begin, let's recap about what you have to do to operate a puppet:

Duckwalk, one arm straight in the air, other arm in the air captured through the character's sleeve, head cocked to the side, watch the monitor, "saying" dialog lines, keeping the head looking in the correct "plane".

A few things came to mind when I was thinking back that really altered the "technique" that really didn't come out during that short audition that showed up during the production of the shows.

First thing was overall height. I have the sneaky suspicion that there was something that skewed the results in my favor at the audition: my height. Nancy was around 5 feet ( I think she was 4' 11", bit I don't recall right now). I'm 5' 3". Bill Jackson, on the other hand, is closer to 6'. Now, when I work with Nancy, height was never an issue. Sometimes with Bill, it is. If he was puppeteering a character, his character may be pretty tall in the scene, so sometimes you really had to stretch or figure a way to come-up on your legs to get more of an extension. But you still had to get your head out of the shot. so you had to crane your neck even further. Let's just say that hurts a LOT.

Second: When I auditioned, Bill recorded all of the character lines for all the scenes that we were running. That way he didn't have to be mic'ed, he didn't have to worry about lines, he could just focus on the performances.

During the shows, Bill would usually only pre-record lines only when he had to appear in a scene with any other character. If he wasn't visible in a shot, he would deliver the lines live. This adds a degree of difficulty to getting the mouth sync correct from take to take, because you know Bill's never going to give the performance exactly the same way as was rehearsed. Or as the last 5 takes.

Third: there's a variation or two when it comes to using a real hand a a character hand. These fake sleeves almost always had a knit glove that matched the opposite stuffed hand of the character. The one exception was Dirty Dragon who had rubber gloves with long fingers that would always flop around and were hard to keep under control and try to act natural. Not only that, they had to have some powder applied to them because, lets face it, under hot studio lights your hands sweat a bit.

Normally you use your dominant hand to operate the mouth. That's because there's a lot of things going on with your hand and wrist and you just have more control with your dominant hand. that means that if you were using the other hand with a dummy sleeve, then you'd use your non-dominant hand for the gesturing. Sometimes this doesn't work, usually because you need to do some complex of fine work with the gesturing hand. That meant that you had to "flip" the way you operated the puppet - you dominant hand was now in the opposite sleeve of the puppet and the "week" hand operated the head and mouth. Talk about screwing you up! It's just like stepping-up to the plate and hitting from the left side when you're a right-hander. The mouth sync suffers a bit as you try and concentrate using your "bad" hand and trying to keep straight and cocking your head in the opposite direction. It's really really really difficult. We really tried not to do that too often. In fact, Bill may break up a scene just so that we can break somewhere in the middle and change hands so the performance wouldn't suffer.

Another variation is when your character needs two hands. we actually changed the technique as we went through the shows. In either case, the solution was using a second puppeteer for the character. We started out having the second puppeteer use their hand opposite the one you use for gesturing. Sometimes, depending on the action, this didn't work out as well. When you carry a prop you may move your hands in different directions than what would be natural for action. We changed that so that the second puppeteer would use both of their hands for gesturing, leaving the primary puppeteer to concentrate on the head an body. This worked really well since only one person was using both hands in perfect synchronization. Looking back, this arrangement made the most sense.

Next is the oddest variation of the two puppeteer technique. We experimented with the concept toward the end of Gigglesnort Hotel, and really put it to use during Firehouse Follies and the Le Hotspot pilot. The difference? It's one puppeteer and one musician. In Firehouse Follies, the musician is a piano player. Bill worked exclusively with him. Bill obviously handled Dirty Dragon and voiced him live at the same time while the piano player worked from underneath and in front of Bill using just his two hands - through Dragon's costume - to play a small upright piano (that was actually built into the back of a prop firetruck that was used in many scenes of the show. By then end, it actually looked pretty good! I think that's what Bill was remembering when he wrote the pilot to Le Hotspot, which was about a dragon that owned a speakeasy and had his own band that performed at the club. That's leads to another variation that I actually did during the pilot - I operated a different dragon character that was the band's drummer. This required me to sort of wrapped around the stool of the drum kit, so the drummer that would sit behind me could play the drum set. His arms went through my character's arms and I had to really move around with the drummer, so that I wouldn't restrict his movement and make him miss the sweat spot of the drums. It also meant that I wasn't far from the big kick drum. It was a really difficult contortionist position to get into. Fortunately, it was only one arm and really no mouth movement, but the character was the drummer, so there was still a lot of action to portray.

You know... this has been really a hell of a lot of fun to reminisce like this. There is still more to say about puppeteering, so I might have to do another entry...