Film
Retired Puppets Have Feelings (and Sex) Too!
Clearly puppet owners have feelings too.
Rusty the rooster and Jerome the giraffe have left the building (The CBC Museum in Toronto) , and the Friendly Giant is rolling over in his grave after the legendary puppet duo were mocked in a short comedy sketch prepared for and aired at the 2007 Gemini Awards.
Richard Homme, the son of the late Bob Homme (aka The Friendly Giant) feels that trust and contract were violated because approval to use the puppets was never sought. He also insists that had permission been sought, they would have never given the CBC the green light to portray Rusty and Jerome as forgotten, retirement home-dwelling, drinking, smoking, and over-sexed has-beens.
I'm not sure where the real problem is. Clearly the sketch aimed to be funny, nostalgic, hip, and risqué. Was it the part where one puppet was shown "going down" on another that went too far? Or was it their referring to (legendary) retired puppets as a "flop"?
Rusty and Jerome, you will be missed.
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Second, the owners are likely upset that the sketch ridiculed these puppets, and by extension their owners.
Compared to these, the fact that the puppets were portrayed as smoking, drinking and having sex really ranks a distant third reason to be upset IMHO.
Note also that all other puppets portrayed in the sketch were caricatures of actual puppets, while for Rusty and Jerome the producers used the actual names and actual puppets themselves.
Not everyone appreciates dumb, ironic, hipster humour.
But it would have been just as funny if the producers had merely caricatured the Hommes' puppets as they had done with Casey and Finnegan, the Sesame Street puppets et al.
This country is really beginning to turn ugly. everyone takes everything so harshly. People really need to chill the *uck out.
A similar example is how, in the recent movie about Diane Arbus, "Fur", the producers were not allowed to use any of Arbus' work because her daughter didn't like the script and didn't feel that her mother would have approved. At least they were respectful enough to ask first.
I wonder if the producers are now likely to get a knock on the door from Big Bird's lawyers. A certain purple dinosaur has demonstrated a very litigious nature of late...
But swiping the Homme family's property from a museum display in order to make fun of it isn't funny.