On my holiday trip to Atlanta this year with some od my family, besides visiting the High museum, we also visited the Center for Puppetry Arts. Which is a museum but has puppet shows and workshops for puppet enthusiasts. It probably boasts a few other services, but I’m not really sure. I very much appreciated the exhibits museum portion of the center. In all honesty I probably wouldn’t would not have gone strictly for myself.
I said it was a holiday visit, Christmas specifically, and being the Christmas season the museum had a visiting exhibition including Christmas and Hanukkah related puppets. This was defiantly cool to me. I got to see the original puppets used in making the classic Christmas cartoon. “Santa Claus is coming to town.” I grew up watching that movie on TV not long after it came out in 1970. It was played on television every year for a good long while. I’m quite sure I saw it on TV multiple times during the Christmas season while growing up. This is back when television was the king of entertainment. There were only 3 national channels, and the air time was much more valuable than it is today. Anyway, seeing this was a fond memory of my childhood.
Another treat was getting to see the Emmett Otter jug-band puppets from “Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.” This movie came out in 1977, a couple years after I was born. I don’t recall when I first saw it, but I do recall i first saw it on HBO. At that time HBO was pretty much brand new. I can’t piece together the timeline with any accuracy. I just remember seeing it for the first time and being both entertained and moved emotionally. I don’t recall having as much of an emotional response to the Santa film, but I was younger then and don’t remember much of that time.
“Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas” was probably one of the things that sparked my interest in music and especially rock’n roll. IMDB is being a little stingey with cast info, and I don’t care enough to do more research on this subject. But i remember that there was a group of bad boys that were among the protagonists of Emmett. The leader was a bear in leather biker get-up and there was a snake in mirrored sunglasses if I recall correctly. This is probably when I started to sympathize with the “bad-guy” in films. Probably Darth Vader was first, but that’s altogether different really in my opinion. Even though they were the bad boys trying to foil Emmett’s goals to win the contest, they were pretty cool to me. I remember I did like their rock n Roll music quite a lot. Or at least it made an impression on me. Looking back now it was probably not good, but to me it was new and interesting. It’s too bad they didn’t have the puppets of the bad boys.
Leave a Reply