There have been a host of puppets gone wrong flicks from Attack of the Puppet People in the '50s to the dummy in the film "Magic" that drove Anthony Hopkins to the brink of insanity! Where did this fear stem from, how did the Howdy Doody days go spinning out of control. Journey now, back in time. Toga time to be exact when fashionable men in Greek wore loose clothing. The first case of ventriloquism as evil instrument was utilized by the Priestess of Delphi who could through her voice so it appeared as the Delphi Oracles were speaking and therefore, the Gospel According to Delphi! To the Greeks ventriloquism were the voices of the unliving, so any good con artist prophet could pull off a scam and blame it on the ungrateful dead.
Then there was Punch and Judy! Traveling shows with messages in the Renaissance that usually had Punch and Judy beating each other over the head with sticks to the delight of young and old in the rural Italian countryside. Violence and children’s morality tales have often been sautéed with a touch of evil and violence. Hansel and Gretel with blatant cannibalism in the foreground with a mixture of pedophilia. Grimm’s Fairy Tales were indeed Grim and Grimmer so, it's not unforeseeable that these violence prone puppets and fables would cross over into the civilized world of the 20th Century.
Ventriloquism and vaudeville were a perfect fornication of entertainment at the turn of the 20th Century. The truly bizarre thing about all of this is not the fear that a stalking Chucky doll will carve you up with a meat cleaver but that from 1937 - 1956, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen became a huge star with his dummy Charlie McCarthy...on radio! Like we could see his lips move on AM, eh? Only in America can a ventriloquist become famous on radio!
The first ventriloquist film was shot in 1925 with a guy named Echo and his dummy. The story line has three circus performers launch a crime wave in clown costumes, led by Echo the Ventriloquist. The amazing part is that the film, called The Unholy Three starred Lon Chaney, Sr., the man of a thousand faces. It was remade in 1930 as a talkie, starring again, Lon Chaney who died within a month of it's completion. Coincidence? I Think Not!
Now forget everything you know about munchkins and yellow brick roads. In 1945 in the Dummy Talks, a midget detective poses as a talking dummy to solve the murder of a ventriloquist...I kid you not! Even I can't make up this stuff! Films on the cold war fifties brought us to the edge of nuclear puppetry gone bad with Attack of the Puppet People and more recently the series, The Puppet Master, macabre fucking stuff to be sure.
In between all this celluloid thrilluloid were the teaming up of a dummy and Anthony Hopkins, who was scary enough as Hannibal Lecter, but in Magic, Hopkins talking dummy takes charge and control, similar to the dummy in the Twilight Zone episode with Cliff Robertson. In the Twilight Zone series there were numerous "zoned" puppets and mannequins, not the least of who was Talking Tina, also a toy telephone that only the dead could call you on from the great beyond and a robot grandmother in Trip the Light Fantastic who is not evil at all, and showing that even automatons can be decent folks.
It probably all started when the Baby Boomer Puppets of the 1950's, Howdy Doody, Charlie McCarthy, Farfel the dog and others reached puberty by the changing times of the 1960's There is one story circulating that Howdy Doody had to leave Doodyville after raping another puppet, Princess Summer Spring Winter Fall. At one point she did have a restraining order taken out on him but as you can see when a puppet has rape on it's little wooden head, his woody will win every time. Howdy holed up in the Haight and started using acid and hanging out with a perverse gang, we know today as the Manson Marionettes. Howdy was involved in the brutal slaying of famed dummy Charley McCarthy and others who were at the Bergen mansion that night. Edgar was out of town in Europe at the time fighting extradition on charges of unlawful sex acts with an underage hand puppet.
There was only, to my knowledge, one auto erotic automaton and that would be the Bride of Chucky. For an animated inanimate object, she was hot in a bad girl sort of way and probably would have made a great topless puppet dancer in her day! But only Chucky got to do her! So who were these human voice boxes that gave life to these killers? A criminal hall of fame if ever there was one. Edgar Bergen for one, Paul Winchell, Jimmy Nelson, and Willie Tyler. Then there were the hand puppeteers such as Shari Lewis and Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Fran being a human. But...last but not least, a puppet that was literally a hand (and no, I'm not going there!) created by Senor Wences who would appear on the old Ed Sullivan Show! That brings us to the royal realm of puppetry..the Marionettes..the greats include Pinocchio and of course, Topogigio who was another Sullivan regular.
So you see. We do have ample reason to fear puppets and is the reason we should never give a loaded gun to a puppet, or a gun to a cocaine loaded puppet. They may be made of wood, but goddamn it, they have brass balls!!!