Do you remember how you discovered your favorite TV show? I do.
Friday nights growing up were special. I would go with Dad into town to get groceries, which in and of itself was not particularly special. But I would always load up on junk food and even rent a video game or a couple of movies if I was lucky. Sometime in the early 2000s, Friday nights became even more special because Space Channel started to show back-to-back horror movies, uncut (though with commercials). I was happy as a pig in shit, yet things were only going to get better.
One night, while me and a friend were waiting for the double-feature to start, we saw a listing for a show called Puppets Who Kill on the comedy channel. With a name like that, there was no way in hell we weren’t going to check it out. The episode in question was “The Island of Skipalong Pete,” which to this day remains perhaps my favorite episode of the series.
Now, if the world was a just place, then I wouldn’t have to explain what Puppets Who Kill is. Everyone would already know. But unfortunately, that isn’t the case. For whatever reason, it seems that this lovely show has mostly gone unnoticed since it finished its four year run in 2006. So in many ways, this interview with series creator John Pattison must first be preceded by an explanation and a review. However, there is an upside.
Most of the time when an article digs into an old cult-classic series there isn’t much out there for people to check out. You can pick up the DVDs if you’re so inclined but if all you’ve heard about a series is contained in that article then dropping your hard-earned cash is a risky gamble. But John Pattison retained the rights to the series, as he’ll explain in a moment, which has let him upload the majority of the series on YouTube. We’ll be sharing quite a few of the episodes in this article but I invite you to check out the Puppets Who Kill YouTube channel and enjoy the series on your own time. Trust me, it is well worth it to get to meet these characters.
But just what is the show?
Puppets Who Kill was a television series about puppets who… well, kill. The show starred five repeating characters. We’re introduced to four of them in the show’s introduction:
Cuddles the Comfort Doll was created to help people with their problems. Now he’s the problem. Buttons the Bear lost a lucrative sponsorship for reasons of moral turpitude. Bill the Ventriloquist Dummy has had 58 partners die in unlikely… accidents? Rocko the Dog was a sidekick in a children’s TV show until, one day, he snapped.
With our puppets introduced we’re then given the premise of the show:
Prison didn’t help and now in one last, desperate stab at rehabilitation they’ve been placed in a halfway house. A home for … Puppets Who Kill.
As I watched this introduction play for the first time, I already knew that I had found something unique and fascinating. And, in what is a repeating pattern in my romantic relationships, I fell in love hard and I fell in love fast. By the time Cuddles the Comfort doll was screaming, “He blew my fucking leg off, Rocko!” as Skipalong Pete set out to hunt the puppets for sport, I was hooked. Every Friday I stayed up late to watch both the 10PM episode and the 2AM repeat.
That introduction perfectly lays out the series. We’re following fucked up characters who, you know, just happen to be puppets. Though a special mention has to be made of Dan Redican, the human social worker who has to try to contain the insanity of the puppets from episode to episode (while balancing his own neurotic, self-centered and, frankly, asshole-ish tendencies).
And what a delight it was to watch these puppets. They swear, fuck, fight. There are episodes about serial killing addiction. Buttons is constantly making sweet, puppety-love to every woman he passes. Rocko’s anger issues knew no limit. And Cuddles remains the sweet, innocent fuck-up who somehow managed to fall into sex addiction, get possessed by a demon, become the head-honcho in a prison gang, a religious icon, an artist of (literal) shit and even brainwashed into being a Manchurian candidate.
What I am trying to say is this: The series is fucked-up, in the best of ways.
If you haven’t seen the show then I personally recommend starting with The Island of Skip-Along Pete, but Pattison shared with me his favorite episodes and each of them makes a wonderful jumping in point: The Payback; Cuddles Goes to Jail; Button the Dresser; Buttons on a Hot Tin Roof; Dan and the Garden Shears; and Dead Ted. The Payback actually won an award in Switzerland; guest actor Colin Fox got a Gemini nomination for his work in Buttons the Dresser; and Dead Ted has the distinction of being one of the episodes written by Dan Redican (as well as the one that I quote the most to this day: D: You are so cynical, how do you sleep at night? P: Same as everybody else: Pills and booze, baby, pills and booze). I say distinction because this show was far more personal than most of the television series but I’ll let Pattison explain that.
John Pattison: I’ll tell you one of the biggest secrets right out front… I fully owned and produced the series and so answered to no one but the network itself. This was a huge advantage worth its weight in gold many times over. No chains of command, no production companies to answer to. I was the final decision maker in everything and if I made a dumb choice I had no one to blame but me.
Zack Long: It was such a crazy idea to me at the time. I had always associated puppets with Sesame Street and The Muppets, so to see them depicted as criminals and murderers was shocking. In retrospect, I can see how something like Meet the Feebles could have been an influence but what I really want to know out of the gate is just where did this idea come from? It feels like a long jump from your earlier work on Fraggle Rock.
JP: When I auditioned for The Muppets in 1982, I was already playing comedy clubs and doing adult puppet comedy. All through my time at Fraggle Rock I was doing many, many other things when we weren’t shooting: comedy clubs; industrial shows; corporate gigs. I was more in the world of comedy than anything else. From the beginning I was experimenting with doing weird comedy with puppets and all the people I saw in clubs were experimenting, too.
I just knew that I wanted to work with The Muppets and learn from them. It just so happened that the project I was learning from was a sweet children’s TV show. Funny enough, Jim Henson actually started his career doing surreal comedy bits and interesting visual skits with puppets and much of his work has an adult feel to it. The people I met through The Muppets were immensely talented and their influences ranged far beyond children’s television.
After Fraggle Rock ended I co-created a children’s TV show called Eric’s World which ran for five years. I wrote and puppeteered on that but I kept doing live stand-up comedy gigs as a puppeteer.
It was during this time that I conceived of a one-man theatre show called Puppets Who Kill. It was about really bad puppets. I had seen so many nice puppets on kids TV shows that I decided it would be fun to do a show about damaged ones. You have to remember that this was the time of shows like Barney the Dinosaur where the puppet characters were ridiculously sappy. I saw Puppets Who Kill as the antidote to that.
The Puppets Who Kill theatre show was a success; it was even a hit at a few Fringe Festivals. I ran it in a Toronto theatre for three weeks and then started thinking about the possibilities of expanding the theatre idea into a TV series.
Despite my early thoughts about puppets having more of a childish leaning, John pointed out something that had entirely slipped my mind. There is a long and subversive history to the artform as evidenced most clearly through the Punch and Judy shows from Britain in which Punch, as John puts it, “is a horrible fellow who kills his wife and kids and makes them into sausages.” It was this deep and rich vein of puppet-ultraviolence that Puppets Who Kill was to build upon.
Unfortunately, I was about as far off the money as possible with my Meet the Feebles guess.
JP: Although I loved Meet the Feebles when I finally saw it, it really had no more influence on me than any number of things – Larry David and Arrested Development had more influence on me than Peter Jackson, just to name two. The TV series was already far along in development when I saw the Feebles in 1998. Peter Jackson is brilliant of course but apart from the fact that they’re both distinctly adult puppet shows, I don’t see a lot of similarity really. I love his art direction on that film… the big production numbers were great and something we couldn’t do. Ours is a totally different take on puppets living in a human world.
Another influence that John had briefly mentioned was Madame, which reminded me of Rodney Ascher’s wonderful Primal Screen. Speaking about his job taking over madame from the talented Waylan Flowers, Rick Skye discussed the way that she seemed to take on a life of her own as he puppeted her. As if she were a conscious entity herself that was able to manifest through his actions. This led me to my next question.
ZL: How “real” were the titular Puppets on set? I watched every blooper at the ends of the episodes and on the DVDs and they certainly felt as if they took on a life of their own.
JP: Yes. There is no doubt about the power of a well-executed character. They take on a life of their own and that holds true with puppets, too. Madame was very well done – Waylan Flowers is a virtuoso, right up there with the best. And that is true when I’ve seen brilliant puppetry live in the studio; the times I’ve seen Kermit or Miss Piggy performed right in front of me by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, for instance. Puppetry, when well executed, is an astonishing and magical illusion.
The same thing happened on Puppets Who Kill. Jim Rankin, who played Buttons the Bear, is a brilliant National Theatre School trained actor and fantastic at creating voices and characters. When he put Buttons on he would disappear for the most part and people in the studio would be talking to Buttons. A lot of our puppeteers had a lot of 2nd City and improv backgrounds so they were very good at playing characters. Guys like Bruce Hunter (who played Rocko the Dog) had years of experience.
ZL: Now that we’re nearly fifteen years out from the end of the show and the landscape has changed, how do you feel about modern puppetry? I know there have been revivals of The Muppets and Dark Crystal, stand-up acts like Jeff Dunham and Randy Feltface, plus a handful of exploitation films like Thankskilling but for the most part it seems like the interest in puppetry has slowed down outside of children’s programming.
JP: You make a good point about modern puppetry – I think you’re correct in saying it has slowed down. There are probably many reasons but two come to mind. CGI has come along and at least for now it has replaced a lot of puppetry because it’s easier to do. Puppetry takes a long time to get good at and it is very labor-intensive. It’s hard to find really good people and it’s also expensive.
The other issue I see is that puppetry became very derivative over time. Jim Henson created the gold standard of excellence. He revolutionized TV puppetry in the 50s and 60s and almost everything that came along after him is a copy (sometimes a pale copy) of his work. Jim and Frank were virtuoso puppeteers, incredible comedians… they are not easily copied. I myself have tried to find areas to work in that maybe were not covered by The Muppets.
But there will always be puppetry in one form or another because at its best it is a magical art form.
Puppetry itself is one of those areas which I don’t know as much as I wish I did. It’s certainly magical, however, that much I can definitely agree with John on. But here at Scriptophobic our primary area of focus is on writing and I had to know more about the writing process on Puppets Who Kill. After all, the show greatly influenced me and it came as a surprise to learn just how much control John had over the show as a whole.
ZL: I would love to talk more about the writing process on a show like this. How hard was it to transplant a stage show over into video? Did you run a writer’s room, and if so then was there a typical flow that the writing followed or was crafting each episode its own adventure? (Strap in, writers, it’s about to get detailed!).
JP: Writing the TV show was really quite different from the stage show. There was a whole different set of challenges to be faced. But what it did share was some of the same characters and the same kind of dark topics.
There was no writer’s room. There was no money for one but I also didn’t want to work that way. The scripts for season one were written by me over a period of two years, just sitting in a room and trying to figure out the world of the show. It was a lot of fun to do. The budget was extremely low and so the biggest challenge was to try to write something that people might want to see that was simultaneously doable and shootable. This isn’t easy when you take into account that we were working with puppets and a 3 or 3 ½ day shoot.
The series operated in ways that most series couldn’t. I wrote that entire first season without a contract or pay. When I started writing there wasn’t a series. I just wrote and wrote. Luckily the series was picked up and I did eventually get paid. But that first season was made in difficult circumstances. I financed the making of it myself and produced it with my production company.
What this lacked in immediate pay was made up for by the artistic freedom I had. The budget got better with season 2-4 but I never waited for development funds to get started. I started working long before money came. I never found the timelines in TV to be realistic and I was trying to do the best work I could so it was important to get as much time in as possible.
One of the unique features of the show is that my co-producer, Shawn Thompson, did most of the directing while I did most of the writing. Shawn and I go back many years together in comedy and this gave us a shorthand for discussing comedic things. We came up with the entire idea of how the show would be shot and executed while working very closely together over the course of months. I would come to Shawn and say, “I’m working on a scene where the puppets have a huge fight,” or whatever the idea for a particular scene was, and we could immediately start brainstorming and planning what it would look like.
The result was a nice marriage of visual and dialogue. The writer and director, Shawn and I, literally got to sit around over many dinners talking about episodes that were four months away and brainstorming how they could be done. I never worked on a show that had that kind of unified marriage between the writer and director. Once we had a plan in place we had a group of very talented creative people to take the ideas to – the editor, sound designer, music director and line producer – who all helped us to get a vision for what we were going to do.
Whatever success we achieved with Puppets WHo Kill is directly because of the collaboration of our sensibilities, our sense of how to do things is all over the finished show.
To say I was shocked to discover that so much of this show I adored came from one mind, even considering what I had learned about the level of control he had over it, would be an understatement. But just because the first season was entirely handled by John that didn’t mean that every other episode was. Or even that there weren’t other eyes on his scripts to offer a helpful suggestion or help nail a joke.
JP: When the series got picked up I brought Dan Redican, the one real human cast member, in to look at my scripts and he would make suggestions – mostly on smoothing dialogue and adding jokes. Dan is a very funny gag writer, but not all gags are appropriate for Puppets Who Kill. The show came along around the same time as Strangers With Candy, Sunny in Philadelphia, and the UK version of The Office. I never wanted Puppets Who Kill to be a sitcom. I wanted it to be an odd drama with comedic elements. I didn’t want it to be too ‘gaggy’ and in fact, through the run of the show, I experimented with and wondered where the right mix was. If there was any blueprint for this it was mostly things like Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels, things about stupid people with big dreams.
We pretty much adhered to that kind of routine for the series, with Dan helping to punch up scripts but never leaning too far on the gags. Dan also wrote some episodes in later seasons. There was no one set way of working together, really. Some of my episodes have no extra dialogue from Dan and some have some wonderful Dan gags in them. A few of Dan’s scripts he wrote completely on his own and there are some hybrid collaborations where I worked out the story and some of the dialogue. Our most collaborative script is “Rocko and the Twins.”
As for improv, there really wasn’t much on the floor. The scripts were pretty much set. Sometimes the puppeteers came up with a nice tag or a good line in a scene and we used it. All the outtake footage of fooling around and stuff is really from when we were killing time while setting up for takes. It would have been good to do more ad-libbing in scenes but we just didn’t have the time. Our schedule was relentless.
And that’s essentially how we did the series. Our biggest problem was time and we simply ran out of time. A few scripts I worked on weren’t ready or had some problems that didn’t get fixed. But some scripts worked very well… so maybe that’s how it goes.
You don’t win them all.
But it would have been an interesting experiment to have some kind of writer’s room. I wonder if we could have achieved the same results. I don’t know.
There was a lot to digest in John’s response. Especially when considering the end result of the episodes. Not every episode worked, after all. John would be the first to admit that. Having retained control over the series it is entirely in his hands which episodes he uploads to YouTube channel. He made the channel as a response to how much the show was pirated and bootlegged. If there is a demand to watch then why not be the one to cater to that demand? But not every episode is online. There are no legal issues at play preventing them from being shared. John simply feels that the missing episodes aren’t their best work.
Was the issue that these episodes faced due to budget and scheduling? I didn’t think to ask. Rather than focus on the negative side of the question, I was more interested in its reverse.
ZL: You’ve mentioned time and budget as limitations, which I’m sure anyone who’s worked in the industry can relate to. But assuming that these resources were in abundance, was there a particular idea that you would have tried? One that you had wanted to but just simply couldn’t?
JP: The show was never invented to be an assembly line series with many directors and writers. It was really my own personal project that gave me a chance to write and develop my ideas. I saw myself in a role like Ricky Gervais, doing a small amount of episodes and writing and shaping them with a small creative group. I had no idea that it would continue to be picked up season after season. In fact, the network wanted to keep going but I ended the series after four seasons for a number of reasons but budget was one of them. We were still quite a low budget show.
Budget was always an issue. I had a script that I wrote early on that would have been fun to do but it had so many outside actors and extra things that it would have been impossible – six different versions of one puppet. It was an episode that would have featured the character Dash Dagger, adventure hero. Dash Dagger did end up in an episode in season one, though, where he gets a job as a greeter at a store.
ZL: One last question. The show clearly worked on a status quo continuity but, as the creator of the puppets, do you have any thoughts on where they would have ended up these days?
JP: Where would the puppets be? I guess I would answer that by saying that they would be as they always were. I see no change or growth for them – it just doesn’t seem right. They are not particularly introspective, except for Cuddles who is totally introspective but he can’t control his life or events and is always at the mercy of greater forces.
And, I guess, who would really want to see these characters grow? The show worked because they remained the same lovable fuck-ups that they were when we first met them. It was inevitable that they would climb as far as they could only to slide back down. If they ever did get ahead and stack up a win, Dan was always there to shit the bed for them.
But the same can’t be said about the show. John is incredibly modest when speaking about it. He is explicitly clear that he doesn’t have an inflated ego but rather that he is grateful to have been able to create the show that they did and to have been noticed the way they were. I could talk at length about how the show was groundbreaking to me when I discovered it but looking back at it it is easy to see the limitations and the challenges that the show faced. Yet it continued to be hilarious and to bring laughter into houses every week. Inflated or not, that is something to be respected and I am grateful that I got to share as much time as I did with Rocko the Dog, Cuddles the Comfort Doll, Bill the Ventriloquist Dummy and Buttons the Bear.
And none of that would have been possible without the wickedly twisted mind of John Pattison and the talented creatives that made up the Puppets Who Kill family.
