Because, Talking Time. You are... A Top 50 Puppets Countdown

[Beta Metroid]

Another couple legendary picks. And again, I'm intrigued that there are nearly two dozen puppets that outranked them!

 

[Violentvixen]

Oh good, I was worried that if I voted for both together I'd hurt their ranking. Glad to see other votes for 'em!

 

[Falselogic]

I missed so many good puppets! Just speaks to how many great ones there are.

 

[Issun]

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ALIEN QUEEN
100 Points; 4 Votes; Violentvixen (#3), Dracula (#8), Kirin (#14), Beta Metroid (#19)

You come at the queen, you'd best not miss
​

When James Cameron was watching the original Alien, one of his thoughts was regarding the eggs and how the xenomorph's lifecycle could be tied together. His answer became the biggest, baddest version of an iconic movie monster. You wouldn't know it from the prototype, though, which was built out of garbage bags and foam.

​

The end product of James Cameron and Stan Winston's efforts, though, was impressive, with 14-16 people required to operate it, with different body parts requiring rods, cables, hydraulics, and even a crane to move the head. She may not have gotten a lot of screentime, but what little she got left an impression on all of us that saw Aliens.

 

[Issun]

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FALKOR
100 Points; 5 Votes; Falselogic (#5), Kirin (#9), Issun (#20), Violentvixen (#22), Bulgakov (#24)

All you need is luck
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Falkor the Luck Dragon rivals the Alien Queen for complexity of assembly and operation, but where the Queen was built to terrify, Falkor was built to be loveable. The body of a majestic Chinese style dragon and the head of a floppy eared pupper, Falkor was instantly the most popular character in The Neverending Story, especially for the target audience. He's a sage, a loyal friend, and just as comfortable saving the world as he is helping to get revenge on your bullies. Don't forget to scratch behind his ear.

The main model for Falkor was built with a frame made of airplane-quality steel and covered with around 10,000 hand-sized scales and 100kg of Angora wool. He required up to 25 people to operate, with the majority of the tackles located in the face, which is why, while you never saw his body move much, his face was incredibly expressive.

Falkor was voiced by Alan Oppenheimer.

 

[Beta Metroid]

This is a nifty pairing! As a big fan of movie monsters and creatures, who was also very squeamish until around my 20s, I had a fascination with things like Alien, Predator, and the Thing, but was terrified of actually watching them (the more family-friendly content was part of the big appeal of kaiju films for me). It was only 6 or 7 years ago that I first delved into the Alien franchise. I may like the first movie slightly more, and I feel like it's a dead horse topic to bring up whether the very concept of the queen is a net negative for the mystique and perception of the original monster, but she is an undeniably amazing creation in action, and pretty much the perfect sci-fi/action final boss. You can see her influence on everything from video games to other major blockbusters like Jurassic Park.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I thought for sure I’d voted for the Xeno Queen, but apparently not.

It’s an amazing display of puppetry, and that makes up for the fact when it starts running around in the climax it’s legs look like they’re pinwheeling around like a windmill

 

[Dracula]

It burst my tiny little brain the day I learned that Falkor and Skeletor shared a voice actor.

 

[Issun]

It burst my tiny little brain the day I learned that Falkor and Skeletor shared a voice actor.

wut

 

[Torzelbaum]

Falkor was voiced by Alan Oppenheimer.

 

[Torzelbaum]

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GREMLINS 2 GREMLINS

55 Points; 2 Votes; Purple (Greta #12, Brain Gremlin #25), Octopus Prime (Brain Gremlin #5)

A New Batch

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When Joe Dante finally made a sequel to beloved horror-comedy Gremlins, his thought process was "What if the original, but balls-to-the-wall silly?", and it was good. The opportunities were broadened, with super-intelligent gremlin, googly-eye gremlin, burlesque gremlin, bat gremlin, spider gremlin, and more. I can only imagine the fun everyone had, coming up with the sheer variety of what we would see on screen. The result was shedding almost all of the "horror" aspect and ramping up the comedy, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.


It's really hard to pick the best one here, but the consensus pick seems to be the "Brain Gremlin" (voiced by Tony Randall!), who turns the "vicious child" aspect of the creatures into a character that still has a cruel streak, but prefers to be civilized about it. Not unlike many leaders in government, the military, and the corporate world.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

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GREMLINS 1 GREMLINS
76 Points; 4 Votes; Johnny Unusual (#13), Torzelbaum (#14), Stripe: Beta Metroid (#18), Kirin (#23)

He'll stop the world and melt with you
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When one looks at the designs for the Gremlins in the first film versus the second, one will notice two things: First, that the gremlins in the first film are a bit more menacing than in 2, and second, that there's much less variety in the first film. The reason is pretty obvious. While both are horror comedies, one landed more on the scary side, and the one gremlin that stands out in movie #1 brings that home. All the gremlins' harm comes mostly from just being mischievous, like a particularly nasty child, but Stripe often seems to harbor actual malice towards others, be it humans, animals, or even fellow gremlins. His actions show this to an extent, but the puppeteers and designers also managed to give him a body language that communicated that he was about more than just doing harmful things to see what would happen.

We can thank special effects master Chris Walas for these icons. A combination of hand puppets, stop motion and animatronics made them seem truly alive, and he even considered how to make visual connections between mogwai and gremlins so that the transformation seemed natural, the most obvious trait being the ears.

The Gremlins are sort of brilliant in their simplicity. It's a perfect marriage of design and story. Somehow it makes the balance that is hard to in a monster; they are genuinely threatening yet, they are fun to watch and you don't hate them. I think the magic of the sauce is unlike, say, the wacky deadites in Evil Dead, these aren't monsters of pure horror or dread, even in a wacky way, they are just monsters that are like children without empathy, looking for a good time. They don't attack you because of any hatred, it's just fun. And I think I appreciate that though they can and may kill you and find it funny, it seems to be first and foremost about chaos and though they are cruel, it's less focused on their sadism and more on the enjoyment of knocking over a house of cards. You could probably survive an encounter with a gremlin (though not necessarily) unscathed but these little motherfuckers are out of control and there's too damn many.

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MISS PIGGY
82 Points; 3 Votes; Violentvixen (#4), Johnny Unusual (#10), Issun (#12)

The Karate Pig
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Jim Henson was the creative genius behind the Muppets, but Frank Oz was certainly the comedic genius, and no character he performed on either The Muppet Show or Sesame Street played more to those strengths than Miss Piggy. The extravagant flourishes, the shuttling back and forth between demure debutante and coarse, no-nonsense city girl, and of course the physical comedy. Not only was her flouncing hilarious, but sending other Muppets flying with a hearty "Hi-yah" made for some excellent slapstick. She also gave another avenue for Kermit's straight-man act. While he normally just reacted to the wackiness around him, with Piggy there was actual interplay. Yes, much of their banter reinforced tropes that were already stale by the time the show started airing, but Oz and Henson managed to deliver the lines so snappily that it was funny in spite of itself.

If you have an hour I highly recommend diving into Miss Piggy's backstory. It's as convoluted as any Zelda timeline.

Real talk, I had sort of a quasi-crush on Piggy as a kid. Not because she was attractive to me, I just liked the idea of someone being aggressively affectionate towards me. I think I still might but I'm not certain.

 

[Issun]

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YIP YIPS
101 Points; 4 Votes; Violentvixen (#6), Torzelbaum, JBear (#10), Bulgakov (#17)

Uh-huh
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While the bulk of Sesame Street was meant to educate as well as entertain, the Yip Yip Martians were there just to be absolutely ridiculous, which is really fun. Their schtick of beaming down, encountering some strange Earth thing, and completely mistaking it for something else, all the while saying "Nope, nope, nope" when they'd get it wrong, made for wonderfully silly segments, and it made them extremely memorable.

The Yip Yips were very simple puppets. They were furry bags with two rods that Henson et. al. could manipulate in some pretty zany ways.

 

[Issun]

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THE DINOSAURS OF JURASSIC PARK
104 Points; 4 Votes; Violentvixen [Velociraptors] (#2), Falselogic (#4), Beta Metroid [T. Rex] (#15), Kirin [T. Rex] (#19)

We have, of course, spared no expense.
​

Nearly thirty years later, these dinos remain some of the greatest practical effects ever committed to film. Steven Spielberg turned to effects wizard Stan Winston in order to make them as believable as possible. Perhaps the best example is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, which had a major role in the movie and was a massive undertaking, to the point where the fam-rubber skin had to be glued on to the frame from inside the armature, which was potentially lethal as when the rig powered down, the hydraulics would drop the body into a downward-facing position. Alan Scott, one of the people working on the rig from inside, experienced that first hand when the studio lost power, and he only survived by curling up into a ball.

The 17,000 pound behemoth ended up working out perfectly, and, along with the velociraptors, the Brachiosauruses and many others, it stands as one of the great testaments to movie magic.

 

[Violentvixen]

I'll need to track down the picture from when my ex-boyfriend and I went as Yip-Yips for Halloween one year. We bought the fabric and made the costumes and I still have mine. The radio sketch is still my favourite.

For Jurassic Park, I occasionally see complaints about how feathers weren't used in the movie when that was already shown to be true for dinosaurs, but I think a lot of people don't know/forgot that the idea of birds and dinosaurs being so closely related was still not really taught in schools. My textbooks still showed the old squat fat looking T-Rex, and despite the skeletons showing otherwise. Even museum dioramas/diagrams continued to show/draw them that way (I'm sure this varied depending on the budget of your museums and textbooks, but let's be real a lot of those don't get updated for many decades). This movie was the first time many people really saw what "bird-like" movements meant. I remember a lot of us at school talking about how terrifying the raptors were and one of the biggest reasons was because until then we really imagined dinosaurs as these slow, lumbering creatures. Now we had these new mental images of fast, agile and smart killing machines and the idea of escaping them seemed a lot less realistic.

 

[Mogri]

Jurassic Park redefined the way people thought about dinosaurs.

 

[Torzelbaum]

The Yip Yips are not only one of my favorite Muppets/puppets but also one of my aunt's favorites.

 

[Adrenaline]

One of the reasons the new Jurassic Park movies are bad is that they are more interested in inventing new fake dinosaurs than updating the series' depiction of real dinosaurs. Real dinosaurs are cool! You don't have to do weird hybrid shit!

 

[Bulgakov]

For me, the Yip Yips are a perfect example of embodied motion defining a puppet. Their mouth movements (generated by a rod, rather than the opening and closing of a beak-like hand) are so foreign as compared to other muppets that they create a phenomenological alienation that matches their clueless attitudes to our world. Add to that their curiosity and tendency to categorize in a yup/nope one-syllable binary, and you had a perfect recipe for a predictable but enjoyable comic gag.

 

[Kirin]

I didn’t think of the YipYips but they’re awesome. I think I saw one in Metal Slug once.

JP is also notable from being one of the first times we got a combination of really impressive practical effects and CG that didn’t clash horribly. It’s kind of amazing that, while obviously dated in a few spots, the vast majority of it still holds up really well today.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

While the bulk of Sesame Street was meant to educate as well as entertain, the Yip Yip Martians were there just to be absolutely ridiculous, which is really fun.

I'm going to disagree because I think there's subtler teaching going on. When I was helping my niece with her development, one milestone is "pretend thing is another thing." So I think it's a soft education on pretending and interaction.

 

[Bulgakov]

When I was helping my niece with her development, one milestone is "pretend thing is another thing." So I think it's a soft education on pretending and interaction.

Oh yeah but was your niece able to gape her mouth in astonishment fluidly when she discovered a conceptual misunderstanding? What level milestone is that?

 

[Dracula]

One of my earliest and most primal emotional memories is sheer terror when the Yip Yips would appear on screen. Watching Sesame Street always came with a slight air of dread because I knew the next segment could feature the horrifying Yip Yips.

What was horrifying about them? Great question. All I knew is they sent me fleeing into the laundry room until my mom told me the segment was over.

 

[Johnny Unusual]

Dude, I was scared of the Tums commercial with the Dragnet them. Slackjawed monstrosities are a much more sensible fear.

The Martians were on my big list but didn't make it to my final one.

BTW, the vote for the next list is up. Good topics, all.

 

[Issun]

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SKEKSIL
104 Points; 4 Votes; Dracula (#1), Octopus Prime, Falselogic (#8), Johnny Unusual (#23)

MMMMmmmm!
​

Not all the votes for Skeksis were specifically for the Chamberlain, but come on. When you think Skeksis, it's impossible not to think of the wormy, whiny Chamberlain who exists only to backstab and usurp. When the leader of the Skeksis dies, SkekSil challenges another to Trial By Stone for the rite of succession, and when he loses the other Skeksis are all too ready to banish him. However, he is incredibly cunning, and yearns to find another way to take the throne.

The Skeksis were operated by cables. The puppeteer would kneel and have their hand above their head to operate the head and mouth. It was probably very uncomfortable but it sure was effective.

SkekSil was voiced by Barry Dennen.

 

[Issun]

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COUNT VON COUNT
110 Points; 5 Votes; Torzelbaum (#4), Purple (#5), Johnny Unusual (#19), Bulgakov (#20), JBear (#22) (somehow no vote from Dracula)

Vun Billie Eilish Ah Ah Ah!
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For a puppet whose personality is counting things, the Count sure has made an impression on generations of children. That's because his appeal is in how he looks and how he comports himself. He was our introduction to counting, yes, but he was also our introduction to vampires, and many an Xer/Millennial/Zoomer who saw Bela Lugosi's Dracula as an older child or adult likely found themselves comparing him to this lively, purple puppet. His obsession with counting has resulted in some wacky hijinks, from preventing answered phone calls to even hypnotizing other Muppets early on. If you think of it this November 13th, count a few things in honor of the 50th anniversary of his debut.

Count Von Count was originally operated and performed by Jerry Nelson.

 

[Violentvixen]

Both of these were late and painful cuts for me. I banked on them still making the list due to others and am glad that worked out!

 

[Kirin]

I’m not sure why I didn’t have the Skeksis; probably was just cutting myself off before half my list was entirely from two Hensen movies, but they’re pretty great. It occurs to me that Johnny’s description of how they were operated probably accounts to their hunch-backed postures and voluminous robes, which is neat.

I likewise love The Count but kept myself to just one.. two.. three! Three Muppets on my list, ah hah hah!

 

[Octopus Prime]

I absolutely love everything about the Skeksis visually; everything about their appearance tells you everything you need to know about their personality and everything about their culture;

That They’re awful bird mummies

 

[Johnny Unusual]

I will say I voted general Skeksis and said Chamberlain if specificity was required. Age of Resistance wasn't the greatest show but it looked really good and had an all star Skeksis cast. Of course you'd cast Andy Samberg as a goofy skeksis. Why wouldn't you?