Commentary &Puppet Animation 05 May 2007 08:06 am
More Marionettes
- Jim Henson actually changed puppetry and the perception of puppets with personality, imagination and great craftsmanship. His hand/rod puppets were so believable that almost any other form of puppet was rejected. When he first started appearing regularly on ABC’s Jimmy Dean Show, where Rowlf the Dog became an overnight sensation, puppetry took a giant step. Once his puppets were filmed and were just as successful on the big screen as they’d been on TV, they became something bigger than puppets. Since they were originally planned for television the move to film was relatively easy, and the Muppets took the world. No wonder the show was an immediate success.
This was bad news for marionettes.
Once Bil & Cora Baird had ruled the theatrical environs on TV (Bil & Cora Baird Show and Peter & the Wolf) , in theater (Flahooley, Baker Street) and on film (Sound of Music). Yet when the very successful scene in the film, Lili, where Leslie Caron talks to Bil Baird’s marionette, moved to Broadway as the musical, Carnival, it was Jim Henson who built the puppets for the show.
A sea change had happened. The marionette had become a hand puppet.
Here’s a bit of the Bil & Cora Baird tv show:
It’s interesting that both Henson and the Bairds dabbled with stop motion animation. this is a Sesame Street piece from Henson:
Perhaps it took too long, or maybe the element of live theater was lost, but neither went beyond small attempts in the form. Stop motion wasn’t for them.
Bil & Cora Baird opened their puppet theater on 50 Barrow Street in Greenwich Village and it lived to the end of their lives. But the fame that they knew was eclipsed by the Henson success. Times change and marionettes – puppets on strings – seemed to become little more than a joke. (See Team America. The duo that attacked animation went after puppet films like Thunderbirds Are Go and Stingray.)
Now it appears that puppets on film are getting eclipsed by computer animation. When all cgi filmmakers are using their medium to create little doll-like characters straight out of Viewmaster, can a hand/rod puppet succeed? When Yoda goes from a Henson puppet to a cgi puppet, is the handwriting on the wall?
Perhaps only live theater will keep the brilliance of live puppets (including marionettes) alive. The performance of a marionette Macbeth, that I saw recently, played to a full house. Most of the audience, it seemed to me, were adults.
Time to get back to the marionette theater that has existed in Central Park for so long.
on 05 May 2007 at 10:53 am 1.Galen Fott said …
Michael –
Thanks for this post! I’m very interested in the “intersection” of puppetry and animation.
But it was Nashville puppeteer Tom Tichenor who built the puppets for the original “Carnival,” not the Hensons. The Henson workshop built the puppets for the Encores concert of “Carnival” in 2002.
on 05 May 2007 at 1:06 pm 2.Galen Fott said …
I’ve never seen “Lili,” but it was my impression that hand puppets were used. The Wikipedia “confirms” this (as much as the Wikipedia can confirm anything) and it states the puppets in “Lili” were done by Paul E. Watson and Michael O’Rourke.
Burr Tillstrom was a big hand puppet influence on television as well. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Henson’s puppetry was so revolutionary. (His genius aside, of course.) I don’t think he was the first to conceive of the frame of the television screen serving as the puppet theater, rather than pointing a camera at a puppet theater and filming that. And I doubt he was the first TV puppeteer to watch a monitor as he performed so he could see exactly what the audience was seeing. But I think those two things had a lot to do with his phenomenal effectiveness and success.
on 05 May 2007 at 6:19 pm 3.Ken Priebe said …
Great post Michael…and good to see you here Galen!
I’m sorry to admit I haven’t seen much of Baird’s work outside the Frank Capra Science series and Sound of Music, but what fantastic work it is! Very interesting to muse over the different styles of puppetry in America and why they were effective in varying degrees. I think one element of the Muppets’ appeal was the amount of expression Jim could get into his hand puppets, for example the ‘squash and stretch’ in Kermit’s face. Audiences had likely grown accostomed to the level of expression possible in 2D Animation, so the flexibility of soft hand puppets vs. stiff marionettes could have had an impact on their success. Plus there was the brash slapstick humor in Henson’s early works, often surprisingly violent (puppets shooting each other!?!?!), which could have struck a chord too.
Marionettes could have achieved less popularity due to the fact they were less portable. You would need a large stage with scaffolding above, whereas hand puppets could appear on any talk show easily by just popping up from behind a piece of furniture.
All the same, it would be nice to see more puppetry in any form in today’s culture. I sympathize with Michael’s comments on CG characters eclipsing them. I mentioned a little story in my ‘Art of Stop-Motion’ book about doing a Kermit performance at a church service and finding out the kids were asking which button I pushed to make him move!!! Yeah, more puppets are needed.
on 05 May 2007 at 11:45 pm 4.Henry Lowengard said …
Coincidentally, I saw one of the puppet Yodas today over at the American Museum of the Moving Image!
Beany and Cecil was once a live puppet TV show called Time For Beany, written and performed by Stan Freberg and Daws Butler. Another marionette killing operation!
on 06 May 2007 at 7:34 am 5.Galen Fott said …
Hey Ken!
Looks like Baird’s hometown of Mason City, Iowa has the largest collection of his puppets on display:
http://www.macniderart.org/baird.html
And in other puppet news, just released on DVD is “The Best of the Jimmy Dean Show” which reportedly has about 20 minutes worth of Rowlf on it.
on 06 May 2007 at 2:30 pm 6.LNG said …
Despite ongoing feeble attempts to keep the company viable, today Henson’s dominance seems to have creatively ended with the death of its founder. In L.A. the Bob Baker Marionette Theater is trying to keep the marionette tradition alive, but it remains an anachronistic struggle in their dated approach. One thing CGI can never do is be truly interactive with a live audience, as long as an electronic screen stands in the middle. There is still a gap to be filled with reviving/reimagining marionettes or restoring relevance to some form of puppetry. Phillip Huber revealed a glimmer of hope in “Being John Malkovich”, by focusing on emotion thru fluidity of motion and the sheer virtuosity of his puppetry. But that was only one approach. There are potentially unlimited solutions. What’s stopping everyone?
on 07 May 2007 at 5:17 am 7.slowtiger said …
There are some attempts to meld puppetry with CGI. TV live shows with CGI characters either use hand puppetry or MoCap. Many a monster from film was animated with input devices very likely to a muppet’s “interface”. So the technique is already there, as well as the hardware.
I believe that this is a promising way to create CGI character movement and hope that it will be used much more often.
on 07 May 2007 at 9:24 am 8.Mark Mayerson said …
There is a Canadian puppeteer named Ronnie Burkett. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen his work, but he is highly regarded in the press and uses puppets to create plays aimed at adults. Here’s a link about him.
http://www.johnlambert.ca/english/ronnie/ronnie_productions.htm
on 06 Sep 2007 at 12:44 am 9.Doug Preis said …
Your information is incorrect regarding the movie “Lili”.
Leslie Caron did not work with the Bi Baird Marionettes. The hand puppets in the film were made by a very famous team of puppeteers that worked in Vaudeville..and settled in Los Angeles..by the name of Walton and O’Rourke. They created the 4 wonderful characters in the film. Bil Baird..based in New York at the time (1953) had nothing to do with the MGM film project.
on 15 Nov 2007 at 11:39 am 10.Suzanne Dargie said …
I’m glad to see someone out there defending puppets. I work in the animation industry, and I’ve dabbled in some CGI animation myself, and there are some definite advantages….but the problem is with the executives. Just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it. I guess Yoda is a classic example. He was just fine in his original form. Then the foolish executives learned that they could make him fly around and all that crap if he was done in CG. Well….I think we all know what a joke he became after that!
I am also a big fan of The Dark Crystal, and I hope it won’t be disappointing when they try to redo THAT in CG. They should continue to treat them AS puppets, but just smooth out a bit of the awkward running movements.
on 25 Apr 2008 at 12:46 am 11.Mike Mason said …
Thanks for this coverage of Bil and Cora’s work. They were close family friends when I was growing up, and Bil, in particular, was a mentor: in music, the anthropology of art, and American (and other) show biz styles from very early in their development, as well as in marionette and hand-puppet construction and vitalization, guitar-picking, calypso singing, and having a good time in the bizarre world of the late ’40s and ’50s (instruction was needed for that …)
I’m sure you know that the You-tube kinescope clip you showed wasn’t stop motion animation, but I thought some visitors to the site might be confused about it.
A lot of Jim Henson’s work came very directly out of the time he spent working with the Bairds — Kermit, for example — but of course Henson brought a special additional magic to it; I’ve I always thought that the key to the additional magic was Jim Henson’s very fine script sense and writing.
The kinescopes that really should be seen are the ones of the Bairds two marionette TV series, “Snarky Parker” (a Western, a la Baird), and “The Whistling Wizard” (set in Druidic Ireland, as I remember). A whole floor of the former warehouse the Baird’s lived in in Greenwich Village was devoted to a TV shooting stage Bil constructed, with very high operators’ bridges (above camera range) running around at least three walls, with catwalks connecting them allowing continuous motion of the marionettes through scenery that extended far beyond a normal marionette stage footprint.
Other Baird projects included the Broadway musical “Flahooley” (with lyrics by their friend E.Y. Harburg), and, earlier, helping to introduce the world to their friend Buckminster Fuller by making marionettes that were visual embodiments of Fuller’s Tensegrity principle.
Cora, who (contrary to the kind of straight impression in the U-tube video) had been a burlesque dancer when she and Bil met, and she inspired many of his female figures, both in terms of facial features and motion. Bil’s translation of the movement of the human female into marionette motion was respectful, appreciative, adoring, both lustful and courtly, and inspired.
Slugger Ryan — the unshaven honky-tonk piano-playing marionette Bil brought to parties (who actually cut a record album, with Bil’s help (maybe)) — had a way with human women that hadn’t been seen since the days of the Greek demi-gods.
Bil also ran tatoo parlors for kids under twelve wherever he happened to be — mostly Polynesian decorative motifs. No needles, but the inks were good for a month if you didn’t bathe, two or three weeks if you did.
Mike Mason
(father of Willy & Sam, also inheritors of the tradition, along with Peter and Laura Baird)
on 10 Sep 2008 at 1:16 pm 12.Scott Land said …
After working with marionettes for over twenty years now, and working in almost every shot of Team America, I can tell you… Marionettes are more difficult to stage then all the other forms of puppetry. Plain and simple. Even with all the advances to the marionette design – amazingly complex animation on the puppet heads… each shot was a special effect. The producers made this disadvantage very obvious in their press releases to the public. The result… an amazing film that the director / producers bad mouthed the puppets. Was this fair? No. But it placed another nail in the coffin for marionettes and other productions considering marionette use. Still, marionettes are unique to most audiences if performed with skill and experience, sadly, the environment does not promote new puppeteers to create and practice this dying art form. There are only a handful of full time “marionettists” today and few younger skilled puppeteers to continue this craft.
Scott Land
on 20 Dec 2015 at 7:51 pm 13.Frank Lawrence said …
Thanks for this on the Bairds; my heroes! I saw Flahooley in Philadelspia on its way to Broadway. Enchanting! I was smitten with puppetry, particularly –the Bairds.