Named after a work: Muppet

"Puppet" is far too broad and "animatronic" is too narrow. There's nothing animatronic by any stretch of the imagination about Big Birs or Kermit, and "Puppet" also covers completely un-muppet-like types like sock puppets and marionettes and Balinese shadow puppets.

I'd be fine with Muppet-Style Puppet. Kermit was a hand puppet. Big Bird was a suit. How the puppets are moved doesn't matter for this. It's the style that they're made in that does.

edited 13th Oct '11 7:24:52 AM by shimaspawn

Muppet Style Puppet is what works for me, as that's the most frequently used description online that I've seen for them.

Kermit isn't just a hand puppet, though. He's a combination of a handpuppet and a rod puppet. "Muppet" isn't simply construction materials, anymore than it's strictly appearance or strictly "made by Jim Henson".

That's what I was trying to get at. It's about the design style. Not about how you make them move.

But it is about how you make them move as well. Kermit used elements of both hand puppetry (his head and mouth) and rod puppetry (his arm) at the same time. No one had combined them before. That's what set Jim Henson's Muppets apart from regular hand puppets.

He wasn't a Muppet because he was made of felt. He was a Muppet because he was two kinds of previously different puppet combined

edited 13th Oct '11 8:30:42 AM by Madrugada

I think we can agree that Jim Hensen's muppet-puppets have a distinct design that combines several working elements into one puppet, and that's what makes them defined as Muppet - Even Big Bird was both a suit and a string-manipulated head, and Oscar the Grouch had a hand-puppet mouth with two "gloves" for hand. Sometimes they have animatronic elements in there too. The idea is that they're complex, have subtlety and take more than one person or hand to manipulate.

I can get behind Muppet Style Puppet. But looks like people need to agree on what is a muppet style puppet first. Note that in my wick check (where I was just checking of the article being used for the show), I saw it often used for just any type of puppets. Often sinkholed for any puppet or animatronic creature..

edited 13th Oct '11 3:48:52 PM by Ghilz

I believe that the guiding philosophy behind Jim Henson's puppet-making philosophy is that the puppets should be flexible and expressive. Foam and felt were his favorite medium, and that could allow a structure that wasn't too rigid, and would allow limbs and the face to move in a wide direction. Eyes were a bit projected as well, in part because eyes are considered very important for expression purposes and in part because it's easier to do wild takes when they're already projected, and it's much easier to recess them as needed.

If there are examples that aren't really Hensen-style muppets and are just some other kind of puppets, then they're not examples of this trope. I think we're brainstorming quite a few qualifications now for what a Muppet is, we'd just have to look over the examples again and take out whatever doesn't fit.

So far we have:

• Expressive, allowing for subtlety
• Complex in design and manipulation
• Could be animatronic, manipulated by hand or both at the same time
• Made of softer materials, flexible and more life-like in its movements
• Often found alongside live-action actors/settings

edited 14th Oct '11 10:18:46 AM by Gillespie

Take out "expressive allowing for sublety". That's not unique to Muppets.

Try to tell me that LambChop wasn't expressive:

edited 14th Oct '11 10:39:28 AM by Madrugada

True... Henson was not the first to use softer materials for expressive purposes (that goes way back to puppets from the Punch and Judy days, and likely well before that); he's just the most notable recent user of the sort.

The projected "googly" eyes should be mentioned, though - that is one of the expressed design philosophies behind Muppet production, and the "split ping pong ball" design is practically a Henson trademark. There are exceptions for characters designed to be more beady-eyed (either being a bit less scrupulous or just old - and even the latter had Big Ol' Eyebrows to compensate), but I think the only major player to be an exception was the title character of Bear In The Big Blue House.

I don't agree with the Googly eye part. Simply said, many of the muppets do not have googly eyes, like The Sweedish Chef or Statler (and depending on your definition of googly, Waldorf)◊. Heck, even Miss Piggy has normal puppet eyes.

edited 14th Oct '11 11:29:34 AM by Ghilz

The reason I mention the googly eye part is because, if you search for interviews and the like on Muppet creation, that is actively cited by Jim Henson's Workshop as one of the guiding principles of Muppet creation. A majority of them do have such eyes, and even those that don't (which include Statler, the Swedish Chef, and Floyd) generally have very defined and expressive eyebrows that just out as much (or possibly more than) the eyes for expressive purposes.

The number who lack both are rather small. Miss Piggy does, but even she manages to have prominent eyes thanks to a puppet version of Anime Eyes (can't think of a better trope to describe them). Professor Honeydew lacks them as well, but that might be to suggest his inherent Comedic Sociopathy. Other than that, we've got Sprocket from Fraggle Rock and the aforementioned Bear. Out of the hundreds of characters produced by Henson and Co., that's a pretty small list.

Yes, but how many non Jim Henson examples of Muppet-Style have the googly eyes? Lets go through the example list.

Dark Crystal doesn't. Nor do most of the creatures of Labyrinth, going for more realistic style. Yoda doesn't. Nor the creatures from Hellboy. Again, going for a realistic style of eyes. Not the Ninja turtles, nor the vogons from HHGTTG.

So that's the entire movie section, except for the muppets and those designed to parody them, we've not one example with googly eyes, since designers can also opt for more realistic eyes if they don't want cartoony characters like the muppets. Live Action Television yields a similar result.

edited 14th Oct '11 12:14:22 PM by Ghilz

Fair enough, which may mean that we should note the googly eyes as a way to distinguish the actual Muppets.

I suppose it's worth noting how many of those examples are from Jim Henson's Workshop, although they aren't officially Muppets. EDIT: Specifically, of the ones you named specifically, only Hellboy and the Hollywood Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy were not made by Jim Henson's Workshop.

edited 14th Oct '11 12:20:04 PM by 32_Footsteps

Indeed and many of those don't follow the googly eyes rule, hence a big part of my hesitation on the subject.

The only thing that was absolutely unique to the Muppets, when Henson first started making and using them, was that they were were not any single other type of puppet. They combined types (Kermit, hands plus rods), or they required multiple puppeteers to operate a single puppet (Rowlf, who needed three hands, and therefore two puppeteers).

Giving this a bump

"Muppet" is a portmanteau of the words "Marionette" and "puppet". And that's exactly what it is: a marionette whose mouth is able to move like a puppet. Or a puppet whose limbs can be moved like a marionette. Those should be the only criteria for a muppet.

And I have no problem with renaming it Marionette Puppet or something up-front like that.

edited 1st Nov '11 11:52:26 AM by SalFishFin

Could we get away with "Puppionette"?

I don't think it's a good idea to make up a word for something that already has a known, existing word or words to describe it.

What's wrong with Muppet Type Puppets?

I don't have anything against it - just "marionette puppet".

Dunno, just seems people are having a debate over what exactly is a Muppet Type Puppet.