Super-Marionation

Did you ever wonder was there anything, any stupid thing, you could mindlessly watch on TV very early on Sunday mornings? Well on CBC, before Coronation Street comes on, there is good old Mr. Dress-up.
Now it’s very sad that apparently he has retired Casey and Finnegan. Even though Casey was a fairly creepy puppet, the puppeteers voice was good and helped belie some of the creepiness. I’d rather a good old fashioned creepy puppet than the endless string of Muppet knockoff kids as puppets.

I do like me some Muppets, but unfortunately, to some degree, they kind of destroyed puppeteering for a long time as every puppet then seemed to have to have been made of that weird, knobbly, squishy looking stuff for years after. I think people thought it seemed more kid friendly or something.

But I think puppets were meant to be kind of creepy and fantastical looking. I think I still have our old witch puppet somewhere. It was made in those early days of plastic and it was super freaky looking. Even my old, meant to be heroic looking, Batman puppet was freakish.

I did fall in love with a couple puppets, one was a kitty puppet because it was fuzzy. If you didn’t grow up in the days of everything being made of strange rubber and funky, odd smelling plastics, you might not realize the revolution that Steiff-like fuzzy things were when they came out in the early seventies.

Some of my favourite freaky puppets were Jerry & Sylvia Anderson's marionettes.
I loved the show Stingray and thanks to Mr. Science I own every episode on VHS. I never saw Supercar till an adult, and maybe that’s a good thing, I might have been twisted beyond repair...