Word: puppeteered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three-year Maoist spasm of revolutionary zeal against the onset of complacency and bureaucracy. The Cultural Revolution dislocated nearly every institution of Chinese life, many of which still have not recovered. A case can be made that Mao lived too long. The Great Revolutionary died at 82, an enfeebled puppet. His legacy, after the Cultural Revolution, was a ramshackle economy, a badly equipped military and an educational system in which intellect and learning had been superseded by a dank, Orwellian passion for proletarian ideology...
...peelings and no onion. For years Henson, who plays Kermit, insisted that the character was not a frog but "a froglike creature." Peel that, you peelers. Now he backtracks and says that "muppet" was simply a word that sounded good to him. The sound combination of puppet and marionette is merely an explanation that happens to sound logical...
Logic peeling aside, a Muppet is (most of the time but not always) a largish arm puppet, whose body contains the arm and whose head surrounds the hand of its operator. When the operator's thumb and fingers come together, the Muppet's mouth closes; when thumb and fingers separate, the mouth opens. If the Muppet's face is pliable, as Kirmit's is?he is not much more than a green felt sock that fits over a human hand, with a wide pink split for the mouth and what look like glued-on halves of Ping Pong balls...
...super-8 camera to England, where the Muppets' TV show is taped, and did a test with Henson and the others in a meadow. As he was shooting, a cow wandered over to have a look at Fozzie. The results were amazingly good; the brown cow and the puppet covered with burnt-orange fake fur looked as natural together as Newman and Redford...
Puppetry released something in Henson that had not been noticeable before. During his senior year at a Maryland high school, he heard that a local TV station was looking for puppeteers. He knew nothing about puppets, but television fascinated him. He and a friend sewed together a rat puppet that looked French and was called Pierre and a couple of cowboys. They were put to work on The Junior Morning Show, which ran for three weeks and then sank without a Variety trace. Henson's career was moving, however, with an ease and certainty that now seem almost eerie...