Greetings, this time I join the CineTV community contest to share those memorable series of my childhood writing about two of my favorite series that have puppets as protagonists, although this a production technique considered a bit hilarious, they managed to build quite interesting stories and people became very close to those characters even though they looked like dolls. If you want to know more about the contest rules you can visit the following link:
Dinosaurs
This is a TV series that was broadcasted from 1991 to 1994, but in my country it continued to be broadcasted for a little longer since it was common to repeat the old series. This series has the particularity of using animatronic puppets, It was very interesting to see how the faces of the puppets simulated real human facial expressions when they had the appearance of anthropomorphic dinosaurs, being its protagonists an average family, with customs similar to those of any American family of those years, with the difference that the events of the series occurred thousands of years before Christ, in the territory of Pangea.
This was a rather hilarious series whose problems lay in the simple family coexistence of Earl the father, Francine his wife, Robbie the eldest son and Charline the middle daughter, both teenagers, and the little baby. I remember very well that the family dramas dealt with deep issues for children, as an adult I learned that it was in fact a series intended for an adult or teenage audience, because it was not at all suitable for children even though it starred puppets.
Dad Earl works in a tree-felling company, his wife does housework, the grandmother with a little less participation was a woman with a lot of temperament who spoiled the little baby Sinclair, who always made his father angry because he would call him “not the momma”instead of Dad and also always hit his dad with anything he took in his hands. Since the series was about dinosaurs, there were very few humans, being this troglodytes and not at all civilized like the main dinosaurs who used appliances and clothes.
I saw the series when I was a very young child and the memories I had were quite vague, but when I joined the university a friend gave me a DVD with the episodes of the whole series and I remembered each of these again, one of the most memorable and funny episodes is whenRobbie begins to form a relationship with a friend who is a vegetarian,which drives Robbie’s father crazy because he is very worried that his son is now a vegetarian. When I was a child did not understand what was the problem that Robbie was a vegetarian, but when I watched the same episode again as an adult I understood that everything was a double meaning, father Earl acts desperately because being vegetarian was a disguised way of saying that Robbie had met Hippies teenagers and therefore consuming herbs was an analogy to smoking marijuana, this is very funny, because everything made sense to me, I realized that it was not really a series for children, but it was a great comedy that tried to give a good message at the end of each episode.
Also, the final episode was very sad because it's about when the earth starts causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, when the dinosaur world is about to end, the Sinclair family gets together and Earl tries to make sense of what is happening, he starts a speech saying that maybe the dinosaurs mistreated the planet so much that now nature was trying to get back on track, because he worked cutting down trees for the company responsible for the great environmental damage that had caused the extinction of a small species of beetle and consequently had caused the climate change, then the series ends with an important ecological message, it is very sad because the baby asks his father now what is going to happen and all viewers knew that what was going to happen was that they were going to die. I share with you an amigurumi in the shape of baby Sincalir that I knitted for a friend.
Alf
Alf was another series that used a puppet as a protagonist, however, Alf was the only one, it was an alien who had come to earth from the planet Melmac, unable to return because his ship broke down, but at the same time created an important relationship with the family in whose garage he landed, this family consisted of Willi, and his wife Lynn, his daughter, little son Brian and Lucky the cat whom Alf wanted to eat in almost every episode, but never did because he was a member of the family.
This series started to be broadcasted before I was born, from 1986 to 1990, in fact my older sister watched it when she was just beginning to speak, but when I started going to school they broadcasted again the episodes very early in the morning on television in my country, Since in my house we would wake up early and we had to take turns in the bathroom to take a shower before going to school, I would take advantage of my sister when she was in the bathroom to watch an episode of Alf every morning, this series defined a whole school period where all I remember is getting up sleepy from the bed and still turn on the TV to watch Alf.
One of the funniest things of the series was that Alf never missed an opportunity to call Willie Bureaucrat for wanting to do things with manners and rules, because Alf would see everything in life in a very practical way, without understanding much the human rules that complicated the simplest things, it was also quite funny to see how the next door neighbor woman realized that a strange creature was living in that house, but every time she told her husband that she was seeing a kind of hairy anteater he ignored her, while she could never prove that she was not crazy and that this creature was living next door. I share with you a drawing I made of Alf a few years ago.
