Friday, April 13, 2012

Puppets you say...


Well, Jeremy's Dark Crystal post, one of my absolute favorite childhood moves, reminded me of a little friend I have hanging on the wall of my work room.

Do you all remember Spitting Image? It was a British tv show from the 80's. I loved the look of these extreme caricatures when I was a kid, still do. I found out that the tv show ran into the mid 90's! wow, so I guess it wasn't just an 80's thing.
Here's a picture of an album produced back in the day.

Well, one my parents took me shopping at Toy City (in my part of Canada we didn't have Toys R Us yet, we had Toy City which was pretty much the same thing, it dissapeared and Toys R Us came into town). While walking down one of the many isles I spotted this:
Wow, I was blown away. A Spitting Image foam head puppet of Ronald Regan. I think they also had the queen, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, maybe... I can't really remember, and I can't find any info about them on the interwebs. I do remember it came in a cool box, but that's it, nor do I remember how much it was, maybe $10 or something which at the time was kinda expensive. The picture above shows Ronnie hanging on my taxidermy wall along with my miniature bull head, but that's another post.

These are totally cool, made of soft squishy foam rubber, you stick your fingers in the back and start the show, see look:




Much to my delight after have though I lost this in a garage sale purge many years ago, it appeared in a box full of wwf wrestlers (again, we'll save that for another post). To my surprise it was still soft and squishy as the day I bought it.


As far as puppets go, that's about all I have except for the rubber Yoda on my shelf.
If anybody else has one of these or knows more about them I would love to hear about it.

3 comments:

  1. it's surprising to me that this is still foamy . one would think it would be all decrepit and dusty by now. don't squeeze it too much! you'll go blind!

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  2. I was pleasantly surprised.
    Now that I think of it, we had a California Raisin puppet like this too. Maybe its still at my parents house somewhere, hopefully I can find it.

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  3. I had one of these and it totally deteriorated over the years. I kept it for the longest time even though it was crumbling, but finally tossed it.

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