Sesame Street Puppeteers Explain How They Control Their Puppets | WIRED

[Music] my name is Matt Vogel I am one of the Muppet performers on Sesame Street I play Big Bird hello there Big Bird here with my friend the sheep on Sesame Street there are basically three kinds of puppets there are rod puppets like Elmo there are live hand puppets like Cookie Monster and then there are puppets that you wear like big bird or Snuffy I wear ridiculous orange pants with giant feet they put the puppet over my head goes down to about my knees my right hand is up in the air inside the head and that moves the mouth of Big Bird and that makes me talk like big bird like this inside the head there's also a little a little trigger on my pinky that moves Big Bird's eyelids up and down then my left hand is inside Big Bird's left wing and the right wing there is a mana fill that goes up through his neck and down into that left hand when I move my live hand up the right hand goes down and and vice versa we'll need two hands to pick up a proper or hold something a right hand performer will come in put their hand in the wing and that's how we do it and then on the outside like four thousand turkey feathers that have been meticulously graded and steamed and dyed Big Bird is the heaviest puppet in the world no I don't know I don't know how much he weighs my name is Ryan Dylan and I am the muppet performer for Elmo so Elmo is a standard hand and rod Muppet meaning that my hand controls him like this it's very important when your puppeteering in this style to not flap the top of your mouth because we don't do that as humans so you drop the jaw on all the syllables its hands are worked by what we call arm rods there's use two metal rods with dowels in them and I tend to control them on my own but sometimes I'll have an assistant performer coming in help for more difficult scenes there's a number of ways where we have a character pick things up sometimes you can use magnets insert them in the palm of the hand Cookie Monster Ernie telly they can pick things up with no problem because they have live hands Elmo Abby those characters are a little trickier there's wire in the arms but we can't actually move the fingers most puppets that are built in this television style are built with very specific materials the main material being foam rubber after they've been built with the foam they will then be covered in fake fur which is what Elmo is covered in Elmo doesn't have eyelids his eyes are attached in his head with a wooden dowel so that if you move that dowel with your finger he can do this sort of funny look with his eyes and it's sort of a vague sort of emotional expression that he can give and so he doesn't really have a mechanism necessarily but he does have that which eye I use more than I probably should what are we gonna do we both want to do see a prince tonight my name is Martin Robinson I play snuffleupagus it's a cross between a puppet and a costume character you climb inside there's a zipper in his midsection sorry if I'm destroying any illusions I put my feet in the two front feet and the brilliant guy behind me whose name is Brian Young who's my partner in Snuffy to kind of stretch so I have to lean slightly forward he has to lean slightly back so that there's no swag I've actually got it rigged so that most of the weight is on my legs I've never heard my back doing it I work his mouth with my left hand oh bird what are we gonna do now and the eyes are worked with my right hand look left look right thank you how do you work the snuffle it's a curved piece of PVC with a bike handle it's very complicated I'm Leslie Carrara Rudolph my main character is the fairy Abby Cadabby but do all kinds of things she reminds me of my dog you know the way she looks on screen she's always excited and happy that she has her hands and rods but she also has wings so she has like this little tube that has a Mac that you rock back and forth and that makes her wings go when I first got her they thought originally that they were gonna use this motor it was loud it was uncomfortable and they said yeah that doesn't work we perform above her head we look down at a monitor in order to see what direction are puppets going and I remember Dave goals said to me and he was right he says it's gonna be about seven years before you really know what you're doing looky here laughter and tell it joke I'm Frankie Cordero and I play Rudy not Sesame Street I describe him as he's definitely super curious which gets him in the trouble sometimes as well but he definitely always means well this is gonna be his third season coming up that I'm doing so he's still a little new the puppet itself is a pretty basic Muppet style puppet with the moving mouth and the rod hands but it still took some getting used to on Sesame Street a lot of times around the floor on roley's obviously these characters are rather small compared to people so we've got several characters on screen but then we've got six or seven bodies down below because we sometimes have assists as well that come in to do right hands or winds or different things so there's a little bit more choreography going on down below compared to what you actually see on screen at its essence every character is the person performing it you take a piece of your personality and you blow that up and that kind of becomes the essence of the character so Big Bird for me is this kind of wide-eyed every child that just wants to play and have fun a little bit of me when I was younger but then also a mixture of two nieces of mine as well as my one of my cats when I started doing Elmo I had been with Sesame Street for a number of years doing right handing under the guidance of the performer before me who played Elmo so I started to pick up the mannerisms of the character just being in the studio I have under studied under Caroll Spinney for over 20 years it does take a very long time to feel like you are the character we have this thing that some of us say like it's it's being able to take the character out of the glass box and just set it free so for me for Abby I got to create her style there's little moments that we're always discovering that brings her to life you know are excited the way she shakes all that is organic to the heart and the exploration and sometimes it looks awful and sometimes it looks great no matter what we do we're mirroring humanity in some really important incredibly effective way which is strange for a snuffleupagus and a worm but that's exactly what we do there are five of us here right yes so but if we were sitting on the floor and trying to do our puppets we have arms all over it right you have to turn sideways you have to get it right I mean it go and reply

Channel: WIRED

Views: 4,971,638

Rating: 4.9419618 out of 5

Keywords: big bird, elmo, jim henson, muppets, puppets, sesame street, muppet, rudy, puppeteering, puppeteer, abby cadabby, mr. snuffleupagus, jim henson puppet, puppeteers, snuffleupagus, sesame street bts, sesame street behind the scenes, how to puppeteer, how puppets are controlled, how muppets, how to puppet, how muppets work, puppetry, puppets explained, cast of sesame street, cast of sesame st, sesame st, puppet, voices, sesame street puppets, ss, wired, wired.com

Id: 2pVHOaT9CZ4

Length: 7min 25sec (445 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 18 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/TheCheshireCody]

One of Jim Henson's true gifts as a puppeteer was figuring out things that make objects seem "alive" or 'real" to us. There are a hundred little things in the "Muppet School of puppetry" that bridge the gap in our brains between a glorified sock on someone's hand and a real character. My favorite is that he had a very firm rule that the Muppets should never stop moving in some small way. Even background Muppets are always looking around or doing something that people do like scratch their heads or look at something they're holding.