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Eye Weekly talks to the Old Trout Puppet Workshop about the show Famous Puppet Death Scenes.

Where did the idea for Famous Puppet Death Scenes come from?
We don’t normally do family shows, but we happened to be doing a big Christmas extravaganza family show of Pinocchio. But we decided to do the original Grimm Brothers version that is way more savage: Jiminy Cricket appears very briefly and harasses Pinocchio about his conscience and Pinocchio kills him right off the bat. He appears briefly later on as a ghost, but that’s it for Jiminy Cricket. He’s not the character people know from Disney at all. So we decided we’ll do the old-school style. We killed the cricket in scene two — brutally, because Pinocchio does it with a hammer — and it was just amazing to actually watch all the different emotions people went through watching this cricket die. First there was shock: “Oh my god they’re doing this. What are they doing to Disney?” and “Oh my god, what are they doing to my children?” Then they started to laugh, and then they started to actually feel sad for the little guy. Then there’s the moment when they think, “But it’s a puppet. Why am I feeling sad for a puppet?” It was an incredible rollercoaster; it was a weird bundle of emotions they had almost all at once. With each hammer blow there was a new one. From watching that we thought, “You know what? A puppet death is an extraordinarily affecting moment. What if we just did a show that was entirely puppet deaths and see how that works — and keep it exciting without all the dull bits of plot?”

Previous Old Trout posts:

• Orgy of destruction
• “I guess people want to see puppets dying”