Puppetry, The Lost Art Of

[Little Miss Risk]

Early in the morning when I'm half awake and munching on my cereal, I find myself needing to zone out a bit. Since neither myself or my parents, whom I'm visiting, have cable I have the next best thing: YouTube. What I dug up was a great old childhood memory: The Jim Henson Hour.

It was a program split into two bits: the first being a half hour segment involving the Muppets running a television station and the second a twenty-minute episode of The Storyteller which touched on old myths and legends. I think a lot of people in my age group probably remember it fondly, and with no small pleasure about the creatures.

Anyone who knows me well knows that Labyrinth is my favorite movie of all time. Muppets? Check. Young female lead? Check. David Bowie in eyeshadow AND codpiece? Check and check. It's recipe for awesome. But the way the creatures come alive and interact with the actors is something that I think that no matter how great CGI gets, it will never have the same oomph as the skill it takes and life of the puppets.

Don't get me wrong; I love some of what CGI has brought us visually on the big screen but there's a certain lost romance now to the disappearance of those Jim Henson creations. It's the same thing that can be argued in splatter flicks: I love what CGI can do for effects but Dog Soldiers blew me away with being a contemporary werewolf movie with no computer effects. It was all old school, baby.

I recently have taken to making my little stuffed buddy, George Cooney, interact with people in the orbit of my life. He doesn't say much be he seems happy enough to pantomime his communications to them as well as if he could speak English. My roommate swears she talks to that raccoon more than she talks to me.

There is a performance group who specialize in an 'adult' puppet show. I was wondering about how it would work until I saw everyone at this party stuffed into the room and sitting cross-legged, sharing chairs and so on to watch the show. It was brilliant, saucy and, well, a puppet show. I started to think that maybe everyone needs to have an adult puppet show at their next party.

And therein lays the point of my ramblings... I'd love to see a contemporary film that uses puppetry and marries it with modern technology. Except for Coeds At The Slimeball Bowlarama and Ghoulies, it can't possible be bad.

Little Miss Risk