Strings attached: why we’re still in love with puppet TV shows
This month, junior gourmands are in luck.
Tykes with sophisticated palates will find their interests catered to with the new series Duff’s Happy Fun Bake Time, in which celebrity chef and Ace of Cakes star Duff Goldman takes a younger audience through the nuts and bolts of cooking with a mad-scientist spin. As he demonstrates the basics of kidfriendly cuisine, he also breaks down the physical and chemical processes behind baking, sautéing, boiling and other little feats of kitchen magic. The show is motivated by the simple, beautiful idea that if the grown-up business of making dinner can be sufficiently demystified, children will want to be more present in the kitchen and adventurous at the grocery store, building a healthy and curious lifelong relationship to food.
This is the same notion at work in Waffles + Mochi, a recent Netflix series in which Michelle Obama leads a world tour of flavors, familiarizing kids with delicacies from Peru to Japan to allay the typical pickiness. In both cases, the famous faces are joined by a coterie of puppet pals; Waffles is a Yeti-looking critter with Eggos for ears and Mochi is a talking rice cake, while Goldman rolls with a sassy sloth, an ill-tempered crab and a know-it-all robot. They fit right in to a TV landscape that also includes the new Spanish-language smash Club Mundo Kids, pairing human host Romi with a googly-eyed coconut and the magenta neighbor Maya. And they’re all growing in the shadow of the colossus that is Sesame Street, still going strong in its 51st season, a fixture on par with The Simpsons or Saturday Night Live without which television would seem empty. Though made of simple felt and faux fur, the humble puppet has endured as a staple of the small screen, its unlikely staying power a sign that some of the emotional mechanisms we develop as children never change.
A fun fact – in Sesame Street’s earliest iteration, the producers separated the segments on their neighborhood block set populated by humans with the interstitial sketches featuring their little hand-operated friends. The reasoning was that youngsters would be weirded out by seeing man and muppet speak to one another as peers, but in practice, quite the opposite was true. Child psychologists brought into the studio found that the pint-size members of the audience lost interest and tuned out for the all-person stretches, precipitating the creation of such icons as Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to hold their attention spans. Their success proved that this was more than a matter of amusing the easily distracted, however, cutting to the core of how still-maturing minds take in art.
Still confounded by many aspects of human behavior, single-digit viewers find it easier to identify with animate toys than with adults or even their fellow whippersnappers. It’s why law enforcement still uses dolls when working with abuse survivors, a preferable alternative that doesn’t force them to articulate feelings they themselves may not yet understand. Rendering the intimidating accessible is the true magic of puppetry, supplying the tentative with an approachable onscreen surrogate who can go through the learning and excitement along with them. Club Mundo Kids host Romina Puga has spoken about her intention to create “a sense of belonging” for first- and second-generation Latin Americans, showing them that they’re not alone in their heritage and experiences. The cuddly look of Maya makes that welcoming spirit easier to tap into for elementary schoolers who won’t have to wonder how much they do or don’t have in common with some child actor.
This principle casts the new Fox series Let’s Be Real in a clarifying light as well, even though it caters to an older demographic. In the continuation of an election 2020 special run last year, the series takes a cockeyed look at current events through caricatured puppet doppelgängers of such celebrity figures as a grinning Joe Biden, a skulking Donald Trump and a bulbous Kim Kardashian. Produced by Robert
Smigel (better known as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, king of all R-rated puppets), the four upcoming episodes derive some of their humor from the simple contrast of something as juvenile as puppets engaging in randy, irreverent, politically incorrect behavior. (See also: foulmouthed Broadway sensation Avenue Q, demented provocation Wonder Showzen, prankcall institution Crank Yankers.) But the foundation of the concept isn’t so far removed from Sesame Street and its many descendants, applying the same softening effect to politics and other news headlines. As if conceived for those TV watchers who find the Daily Show too heady or stuffy, the show turns timely commentary into broad comedy, the moderate brow-level communicated by the presence of the puppets.
Like animation – now a regular tool
for documentary films anxious about alienating an audience with dryness – puppets exude an inviting quality to viewers of all ages, comforting children with the assurance that there’s nothing to fear and adults with memories of childhood. No matter how we may grow up, we never quite outgrow them, because they remain preserved forever in time. Whether the affable Big Bird or bilingual Maya, these pieces of fabric act as our most cherished babysitters in youth, and because they’re ageless, we’re free to return to them with children of our own, as one bridge over the generation gap.