Yes, school starts for me on September 8. In the midst of this horrible economy, I've heard via Facebook that my school has been rapidly taking out clubs and activities that are too costly to keep going and are just not bringing anything to the school. Moreover, new clubs are not allowed anymore. Now, I can't really say this is official yet but I have had a very large feeling that the Puppetry Club (see my 5-part "The Rise and Fall of Puppetry Club" series) has indeed been cut.
And I couldn't be happier.
I won't go into the details of why I'm so happy because you can just read part 5 to see what a cumbersome task it was for me to continually write up budgets, try to group people together, and come up with promotional material. Had the beginning gone off to a much better start, I'm sure I could have over time taken the club into the sunlight but I was not ready. I overestimated the club's worth which promptly led to its downfall. I've taken the failure well since then and I don’t feel as bitter as others would in my position. I have since ported all my characters and ideas I created for the Puppetry Club into other projects. With this also, I'm going back to my original goal... to make a television show with puppets that people notice.
Ever since I started doing puppetry, I've always had that goal. In 2000 when I started doing puppetry and became fascinated by Arms-Length Productions puppets (www.armslength.com), I started planning out a sitcom in my head based around the puppets on that site who are the black family. Named after the puppets, the show was called The Afro Family (at age 8 I didn't really realize a sitcom about a black family with that title wouldn't be all-PC). The show revolved around the afro boy on the site, who I named Kyle (after my cousin's then 7-year old son), who was a klutzy but lovable pre-teen who was best friends with the Anglo boy Billy (named after the protagonist of Gremlins, my favorite movie at the time) and his sister Ally (named after a girl in my third grade class who I ironically was pretty annoyed by). Kyle also had a talking pet dinosaur who somehow survived the extinction (I actually planned out a whole episode that explained the dinosaur's origin story!). Other then that, there was not very much to The Afro Family besides surreal storylines that only an eight-year old kid could come up with.
But the thing that sticks out the most from my pipe dream was not so much the weirdness and political incorrectness of the whole thing but rather the format itself was unique. I wanted the show to be an hour long, the first and last 15 minutes would be the Afros' story while that half-hour in-between would be devoted to random puppet skits. I was really into Rocky & Bullwinkle at the time thanks to that R&B movie that came out that everyone seems to hate but me (OK, it's not that great movie but it's not as terrible as everyone makes it out to be), and I'm sure the format of that show had more than some influence. But there were two recurring sketches I came up with based on Arms-Length puppets: Ant Scouts, which was a bunch of Boy Scout-wannabe ants who can't really get much of anything done successfully, and Moonbeamies, which was about two alien cops.
Over time as I got older, I grew out of The Afro Family idea and began to focus more on just growing as a puppeteer which lead to the club and you know the rest... but over this summer, I have begun to have a new idea and restarted myself with the characters I created for the Puppetry Club and putting them into an idea for a new children's series.
It wouldn't be a show for very young children; the show would really be aimed at kids entering kindergarten about to outgrow Sesame Street. Whereas Sesame Street teaches children the alphabet and how to count, my show would have a huge emphasis on love, forgiveness and friendship (not that Sesame Street doesn't do that but we would emphasize it more). Using VeggieTales as model for the format, my two main characters Conrad the Otter and Milo A. Monster would serves as hosts for stories emphasizing these points. Unlike VeggieTales however, my show would seldom have direct references to God. I'd use Bible stories occasionally to make points but that's it. Everything else is parody or whatever works best for the message with enough pop culture references (mostly 80's and 90's jokes of course) and double entendres to keep their parents and older siblings entertained.
Yes, I'm going into life now with a new outlook anticipating to actually get somewhere with this show that could really be kind of entertaining and rewarding but still a lot of fun for everybody. So goodbye Puppetry Club; I'm back for good, television industry.
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