His hands are worked by what we call arm rods. They're just two metal rods with dowels in them and I tend to control them on my own, but sometimes I'll have an assistant performer come in and help for more difficult scenes.
There's a number of ways where we have a character pick things up. Sometimes you can use magnets, insert them in the palm of the hand.
Cookie Monster, Ernie, Telly, they can pick things up with no problem because they have live hands. Elmo, Abby, those characters are a little trickier. There's wire in the arms, but we can't actually move the fingers. Most puppets that are built in this television style are built with very specific materials, the main material being foam rubber. After they've been built with the foam, they will then be covered in fake fur, which is what Elmo is covered in.
Elmo doesn't have eyelids. His eyes are attached in his head with a wooden dowel so that if you move that dowel with your finger, he can do this sort of funny look with his eyes and it's sort of a vague, sort of emotional expression that he can give. I don't know, I've never been in a car before.
And so he doesn't really have a mechanism necessarily, but he does have that, which I use more than I probably should. What are we gonna do? We both wanna do different things.
My name is Martin Robinson. I play Snuffleupagus. It's a cross between a puppet and a costume character. You climb inside, there's a zipper in his midsection. Sorry if I'm destroying any illusions. I put my feet in the two front feet and the brilliant guy behind me whose name is Bryant Young, who's my partner in Snuffy, we have to kind of stretch, so I have to lean slightly forward, he has to lean slightly back so that there's no swag.
I've actually got it rigged so that most of the weight is on my legs and I've never hurt my back doing it. I work his mouth with my left hand. Oh, Bird, what are we gonna do now? And the eyes are worked with my right hand, look left, look right, blink, blink, blink. How do you work the snuffle? It's a curved piece of PVC with a bike handle. It's very complicated. I can do magic! I'm Leslie Carrara-Rudolph. My main character is the fairy, Abby Cadabby, but I've done all kinds of things.
She reminds me of my dog, you know, the way she looks on screen. She's always excited and happy. What was that? She has her hands in rods, but she also has wings, so she has this little tube that has a mech that you rock back and forth and that makes her wings go. When I first got her, they thought originally that they were gonna use this motor. It was loud, it was uncomfortable, and they said yeah, that doesn't work.
We perform above our head. We look down at a monitor in order to see what direction our puppet's going and I remember Dave Goelz said to me and he was right, he says, it's gonna be about seven years before you really know what you're doing.
Rudy here to share the laughter and tell a joke. I describe him as, he's definitely super curious, which gets him into trouble sometimes as well, but he definitely always means well. This is gonna be his third season coming up that I'm doing, so he's still a little new. The puppet itself is a pretty basic Muppet style puppet with the moving mouth and the rod hands, but it still took some getting use to.
On Sesame Street, a lot of times you're on the floor on rollies. Obviously, these characters are rather small compared to people. Three, two, rehearsal. So we've got several characters on screen, but then we've got six or seven bodies down below 'cause we sometimes have assists as well that come in to do right hands or wings or different things.
Something's there on the ground. Under the tree. The newcomer will manipulate the right, a duty informally known as right handing. You become one character together.
Peter Linz, who portrays Ernie among other characters on the series, tells Mental Floss that getting a puppet to exhibit a personality takes some finessing. Linz, who also teaches classes on puppeteering, says that there are some techniques to get puppets to show off their mood, however. You can get them to smile by opening their mouth. There are degrees of subtlety in all of that. Linz says the audience does part of that work themselves, projecting their own feelings onto a puppet.
The ultimate proof might be in the example of Miss Piggy. Sesame Street utilizes three major varieties of character. Cookie Monster can pick things up. Elmo can, but it takes longer. You need to stop [filming] and attach something to his hands with tape or a pin. But Linz says that the Sesame Street crew and the rest of the Muppets were designed by Henson with that in mind.
Turning the puppet even slightly, he says, and they will wind up looking at something else. Being a Sesame Street puppeteer requires more than just having performing chops. On set, characters that may be at waist level with their human co-stars are operated by performers crouched below frame, often on wheeled boards called rollies.
Your arm is up in the air performing. Fortunately, not every scene requires contortions. Some sets are built raised so performers can stand up straight. Scenes set on a stoop usually mean the performer is lying down behind the steps.
Lurking in the offices of Sesame Workshop is a puppet factory that, according to Dillon, houses a number of "Anything Muppets"—blank designs that may one day be used as the template for a brand-new character.
In , performer Carmen Osbahr got an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of conceptualizing a character when she helped originate Rosita top right , the first regular bilingual Muppet on the series. I wanted her to be active and colorful. Puppet manipulation takes concentration and effort.
Occasionally, the cast of Sesame Street can find themselves flubbing a take. When it comes to Sesame Street characters, there is one sacrosanct rule—aside from right handing, no puppet will have more than one puppeteer. The cast can also cover for one another if a scene requires two characters who are normally operated by the same actor. Both Bert and Grover, for example, are played by actor Eric Jacobson. If the two share screen time, Dillon might step in to perform one of them, with Jacobson recording his lines later.
Day after day of manipulating puppets can lead to issues with cleanliness. Performer sweat can dampen the foam insides, while body oils and other contaminants can affect their fur coats.
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