The Slow-Grasping Hands of Felt
Feb. 17th, 2021 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I signed a Blu-Ray of the restored Manos: The Hands of Fate out of the city library, one of the disc’s bonus features had been about some people putting on an puppet adaptation. “Puppets,” of course, played their own role in embedding the infamous film in our collective consciousness, and I was amused enough to start looking for information on the adaptation. Before too long I’d found an online video of a performance. Just starting to watch it, though, had seemed enough to get the joke. It took quite a while, when not just one computer but my Internet connection itself was tied up downloading the Big Sur installer, to turn back to my saved copy of “Manos: The Hands of Felt” and finish watching it.
The performance itself had involved people in black clothes carrying the puppets, and it wasn’t hard to focus on the felt creations. (I recalled a moment in the biography of Jim Henson I’ve read where Henson had envisioned a live show that would reveal the people below the Muppets; I’ve never delved that far into the musical-for-adults “Avenue Q,” but understand it does pretty much the same thing.) From the bonus feature I’d known the puppets had a definite “Sesame Street look” to them, and that to try and make the adaptation a little more than just “puppets perform infamous lines” there was the wrinkle of them being at once “the characters ground up in the movie’s story” and “the performers trying to make the movie but getting ground up in it.” When it came to not just “a sudden expletive-filled mutual breakdown” but “an unexpected musical number,” though, that might have been enough for me the first time around. I also have to admit to earlier thoughts the puppet of the movie’s mother Maggie looked kind of unattractive, although admitting that seems to invite “so what kind of hand puppet would look ‘attractive’ to you?” rejoinders. So far as the “Sesame Street look” goes, too, the “make-out couple” of the original movie were represented by puppets playing on one of the more frequent winking nudges at just who’s a “couple” in the educational series.
The second time through I was at least resolved to finish the video, and along the way one strange part of the performance did wind up provoking a bit of empathy for its version of producer-director-writer-star Hal P. Warren. With a rather odd interlude right before the familiar unhappy ending, though, I have to say that so far as “commentary on the original” goes, I still have to stick with Mystery Science Theater 3000’s take on it.
The performance itself had involved people in black clothes carrying the puppets, and it wasn’t hard to focus on the felt creations. (I recalled a moment in the biography of Jim Henson I’ve read where Henson had envisioned a live show that would reveal the people below the Muppets; I’ve never delved that far into the musical-for-adults “Avenue Q,” but understand it does pretty much the same thing.) From the bonus feature I’d known the puppets had a definite “Sesame Street look” to them, and that to try and make the adaptation a little more than just “puppets perform infamous lines” there was the wrinkle of them being at once “the characters ground up in the movie’s story” and “the performers trying to make the movie but getting ground up in it.” When it came to not just “a sudden expletive-filled mutual breakdown” but “an unexpected musical number,” though, that might have been enough for me the first time around. I also have to admit to earlier thoughts the puppet of the movie’s mother Maggie looked kind of unattractive, although admitting that seems to invite “so what kind of hand puppet would look ‘attractive’ to you?” rejoinders. So far as the “Sesame Street look” goes, too, the “make-out couple” of the original movie were represented by puppets playing on one of the more frequent winking nudges at just who’s a “couple” in the educational series.
The second time through I was at least resolved to finish the video, and along the way one strange part of the performance did wind up provoking a bit of empathy for its version of producer-director-writer-star Hal P. Warren. With a rather odd interlude right before the familiar unhappy ending, though, I have to say that so far as “commentary on the original” goes, I still have to stick with Mystery Science Theater 3000’s take on it.