Word: puppet
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Burr Tillstrom's first solid job was with a WPA-supported puppet show. "It was terrific," he recalls. "We played everywhere-hospitals, old people's homes, orphanages." But the stirring days faded in 1937. Two years later, Tillstrom was working as a salesclerk when RCA put on a television demonstration in his store. "That did it. The moment I saw TV, I knew it was the one medium made expressly for puppets...
...Tillstrom's Kukla, Fran & Ollie brilliantly proves the rightness of his conviction. But in finding success, 32-year-old Tillstrom has lost his own identity. Like Singer Fran Allison, the only other human regularly on his show, he has been swallowed up by the puppet world he made. The world revolves around Kukla, a pinch-faced, sadly wise, sentimental puppet, and Ollie, a one-toothed dragon whose preenings and posturings might have been conceived by Moliére. It is also peopled by such types as Fletcher Rabbit, whose "mother was a suffragette, and who consequently takes a serious...