Blog 3

There were many interesting puppet characters highlighted in Chapter 4: Casting Characters.  The chapter really showed how many different types of  characters puppets can be used to represent; and why they can be better than human performers.  For example, animal puppets can be more effective than real animals because they can "talk" and puppets can be created in the likeness of the character.  I particularly found the thirty foot tall puppet from A Giant Dropped From the Sky really interesting because it showed how puppets can better tell a story than humans.  In a play, there would be no way to present a human-sized actor as being thirty feet tall, but puppets make that possible. 

However, my favorite puppet featured in Chapter 4 was Richard Bradshaw's kangaroo puppet from Superkangaroo, a show about a kangaroo superhero who fights for what he believes in.  I could not find what the puppets were made of, but I think it's possible that the shadow puppets were made from Plexiglass or craved leather, similar to Julie Taymor's The Way of the Snow.  Bradshaw is an Australian puppeteer and created Superkangaroo in 1972.  The reason this puppet stuck out to me was because I thought it was very interesting for a puppet show to be involved with political tones.  In the photo of Superkangaroo in the book,  the superhero is shown blocking a bulldozer sent by the government to knock down an aborigine's hut.  With everything that has been going on politically in our community lately, it was interesting to see how puppets could be used in a form of social protest.  Another political theme in Superkangaroo is that, initially, his cap is the Australian flag, but Bradshaw eventually removed the Union Jack portion from the kangaroo's cape because he didn't want it to appear as though the superhero support the government's politics.