In Which Kim W. Has An Epiphany

I was contemplating the response viewers had to Cookie Monster's puppeteers being visible at show's end; most viewers said that they honestly hadn't noticed the puppeteers, because they were too busy looking at Cookie Monster. Could it be, I wondered, that we've somehow internalized the idea that you're "not supposed to see them" that even when you do see puppeteers, you don't "see" them? This is how it's done with Japanese bunraku, after all -- the puppeteers manipulate the puppets in full view of the audience, but they dress in black so they sort of "fade into the background." Originally, bunraku used this technique because the low lighting in most performance spaces really did let a dark-dressed puppeteer fade into the background; and audiences just were used to the convention even as lighting improved.

But then I realized that it is very likely that a blue furry monster is simply just more attention-getting than a human. Any puppet is probably going to be more attention-getting than an actual human, even the very realistic ones -- because with a realistic puppet, audiences would be watching to see just how "lifelike" it is. So audiences may have simply tuned out the puppeteers because of "ooh, it's Cookie Monster, that's different!"

Anyway. Speaking of bunraku, here's another clip -- this made the rounds of youtube a few years back, where a team uses puppetry techniques not just on puppets, but on people, to do a sort of Matrix "bullet-time" sketch about a ping pong game.