Live Hot Puppet Chat
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The television show Live Hot Puppet Chat gained its initial popularity on a student-run college station in the Fall of 2005 at the University of California, San Diego, with a series of shows they insisted on calling "Season 2" (never having really had a first season). Each episode was hosted by a different puppet: they were, in order, Skiddles, Prickle, Al the Slug, Reducey-Risk Reindeer, Barry Bible. and Dobo Disty. The theme of the show was that, in between the scripted moments of puppet monologue, the students would telephone from their dorms and try to shock the puppets with as filthy a question as they could manage. The puppets had varying reactions to these horrors based upon their personalities, but often the puppets would drag the students down to levels of surrealist, politically-incorrect smut that caused complaints to be lodged with college officials -- in fact, after episode six, the student-run station was shut down upon charges of "pornography."
The story goes that, a short time later, a group of fans got together with their collected video tapes of the show and, after tracking down the puppeteer (Tristan Newcomb) and obtaining his permission, they put together an "official" DVD of all the episodes. Word had spread to other colleges, and the homemade DVD sold so well that they soon found themselves in the odd position of having to make a factory-replicated retail version. For a very short time it was being sold on Amazon, but was quickly de-listed due to the same "obscenity" issues (but not before climbing to #1811 on the site-wide sales rankings), and is now offered elsewhere.
The latest news is that there will be a new, cinematic-style puppet series titled "Carpe Diem in Fur", releasing online in October of 2006, being produced for the web-based media label Decovo.
