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Top 50 Puppets Nomination Thread: It's Time to Start the Music!

PWS3jRe.gif

Yep, we're talking about puppets! Hand puppets, marionettes, stop-motion, and beyond. You know the drill: Message me with between 1 and 25 of your favorite puppets and I will assign a point ranking with 35 for #1 and 11 for #25. After the deadline passes I'll spreadsheet them, produce a list of Talking Time's Top 50 Puppets and then the thread will begin!

A couple of things: We're talking about all puppets here, be it famous puppets of stage and screen, puppet toylines, or even that special puppet you had as a child. Stop motion is allowed because it does meet a lot of the main criteria. However, as much as we love Big Bird and Sweetums, they are played by people in suits. So while they are Muppets, they do not count as puppets for the purposes of this list.

Soft deadline for submissions is Wednesday, March 16th.

Happy puppeting!
 

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
Do we have to vote for individual puppets or can we vote for duos and entire groups?
 
Do we have to vote for individual puppets or can we vote for duos and entire groups?
I mostly want to keep it to individual puppets, but there are cases to be made for putting, say, Statler and Waldorf as one vote. If you want to just vote for "Muppets" as a single vote I would say please don't, as trying to figure out how to score that in the spreadsheet is very unappealing.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Is an AT-AT a puppet? The originals were stop motion, but I understand if we want to draw the line before vehicles, say keep it to things that are supposed to be sentient characters.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
Is an AT-AT a puppet? The originals were stop motion, but I understand if we want to draw the line before vehicles, say keep it to things that are supposed to be sentient characters.
Oh, this is a good question because technical prowess and complexity of the puppet was going to be a big contributing factor in my list, I didn't assume sentience was required.

Also "I didn't assume sentience was required" is something I hope to get to say again in my life.
 

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
I'll tell you, I knew my list would be muppet heavy and with good reason but I tell you forcing myself to look up other possibilities has been enriching, surprising and introduced me to the fact that there was once a local King Koopa kids show hosted by the voice of Starscream (later replaced by the voice of Uncle Traveling Matt).
 
Is an AT-AT a puppet? The originals were stop motion, but I understand if we want to draw the line before vehicles, say keep it to things that are supposed to be sentient characters.
AT-ATs are definitely pushing the limit of puppetdom. I can't stop you from putting it on your list, but it really does feel weird calling stop-motion vehicles "puppets".
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
I assume electro-mechanical remote controlled characters are puppets, as they’re kind of a natural outgrown of stop motion and such...
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
Oh I have another weird question or I guess an exception request. I know in general we want specific puppets and not whole categories like the aforementioned Muppets. But there's a particular cultural tradition of a very specific style and aesthetic of puppetry that I love, but couldn't name an individual character example of. I mean maybe if I lived in the right country I could, but here we are. Of course it'll only matter if anyone else votes for it, and I expect if I tried to research some individual example there'd be even less chance of that happening.
 
Oh I have another weird question or I guess an exception request. I know in general we want specific puppets and not whole categories like the aforementioned Muppets. But there's a particular cultural tradition of a very specific style and aesthetic of puppetry that I love, but couldn't name an individual character example of. I mean maybe if I lived in the right country I could, but here we are. Of course it'll only matter if anyone else votes for it, and I expect if I tried to research some individual example there'd be even less chance of that happening.
I'd say go for it. These lists usually sort themselves out anyways.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
A couple of things: We're talking about all puppets here, be it famous puppets of stage and screen, puppet toylines, or even that special puppet you had as a child. Stop motion is allowed because it does meet a lot of the main criteria. However, as much as we love Big Bird and Sweetums, they are played by people in suits. So while they are Muppets, they do not count as puppets for the purposes of this list.​
I feel like this rule makes a MUCH fuzzier line than you'd think. Aside from the obvious "well, any hand puppet is some percentage of a guy (a hand, probably some section of arm, possibly a whole second arm!) in a suit. Sometimes even two guys, like the Swedish Chef, but then you get into stuff like the whole style of puppet where you have someone in an all black suit controlling a puppet in front of them with rods hooked to various limbs, a full-bodied performance, but at most you have maybe a hand for the mouth actually inside the puppet. You're explicitly disqualifying Big Bird, but if you have him sitting behind a desk, we've got someone's hand going up a neck to his head, like a traditional hand puppet, and one of his arms being basically a glove is pretty common to other puppet designs. Similarly we have Ludo from Labyrinth, who as this test footage shows, is kinda straddling the whole intersection of suit actor/hand puppet/robot. Legs in wearing fuzzy pants, arms controlling much larger arms via some elaborate stick rigging I assume, remote operators controlling face movements with joysticks offstage.
Gordon "ALF" Shumway is usually a hand puppet, but in some scenes is a guy in a suit. R2-D2 is technically always a guy in a suit (or, was originally? I'm not actually sure in the new movies). I'd pretty confidently call the Faun from Pan's Labyrinth a guy in a suit, but if I had to strictly define how I draw the line I'd probably get into how directly limbs are controlled and turns out that's more of a corner case than I thought.
Pans-Labyrinth-01.jpg

Snuffalupagus is another weird one, because I'm pretty sure there's a whole human being standing in there but generally only his head is doing anything, and full body stuff I'd assume requires another person for his back legs (and then there's also the whole Dragon Dance thing in a similar vein). And I want to say "all kaiju are people in suits" but I'm genuinely unsure about like, Mothra, or some appearances of Ghidorah. I think, tentatively, all my picks are unambiguous but... yeah I'm not actually 100% sure.

Another weird corner case is when you have say, Audrey II, who I think is technically a completely different puppet in every shot of the movie, but I have to assume the answer there is "one character=one puppet" because I mean how do you even count otherwise.
 

JBear

Internet's foremost Bertolli cosplayer
(He/Him)
Why can't talking time ever do one of these without arguing about how to categorize things?

Just make a list. Vote for what you want. No one is going stop you. Send in a list of 25 heads of state installed by foreign powers, if that's what floats your boat. If enough other people agree with you, then congrats, democracy wins, tiny flags for everyone.

And in the meantime, can we not just exhaustively list all of the possibilities before the list starts and remove all joy and mystery? Thanks.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
I never clicked on your link because I already had the thread open, I had no idea it went somewhere else until now! But good job too.
 

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
I put wacky links in each poll, whenI can. I'm sure you can guess the one for top 50 mecha.

Well dang. I thought those used to just be links back to the nomination posts so I hadn’t been clicking ‘em. Now I had to go back and check all the ones here. 😅 Haven’t gone back to the TT2 archives, though, and I’m dying to know what the mecha ones were...
 

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
you should have lampshaded that a long time ago. We've all been missing out on your brilliance Johnny
 
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