Live Hot Puppet Chat

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Live Hot Puppet Chat
Barry Bible
Genre	Independent/College show
Starring	Tristan Newcomb (all the puppets), Jesse Chapo (as various Jesses), Brian Ugia (as Blinky the Robot), and Huong Ly (as Carmen)
Country of origin	USA
No. of episodes	6 (plus several unofficial puppet broadcasts) (List of episodes)
Production
Producer(s)	Tristan Newcomb
Broadcast
Original channel	SRTV (local broadcast cable channel) and worldwide via live online streaming
Original run	Sept. 2005 – Nov. 2005
Links
Official website

The television show Live Hot Puppet Chat gained its initial popularity on a student-run college station (SRTV) in the Fall of 2005 at the University of California, San Diego, with a series of shows they titled "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 would have varying reactions based upon the puppet's uncooperative personality, and most of the time the puppets would lead the callers into conversations that can best be described as a mix of politically incorrect rants and surrealistic smut. Some students began to issue complaints with college officials. After episode six, the student-run television station was shut down upon charges of obscenity, stemming from (it is believed) the Barry Bible episode, though there is also evidence that the administration was unhappy with a couple of scattered porn broadcasts on the channel. This debate between what got the station shut down is now roughly equally divided among those who say it was the porn, which is what the press articles focused upon, and those who say it was the Barry Bible episode, which is the claim of several student council members who dealt directly with the school administration on the controversy. The comments posted beneath Live Hot Puppet Chat clips on such sites as Digg.com show that the debate is hardly settled.^[1]^[2]^[3]

A short time after the station was shut down, a group of fans got together with their collected video tapes of the show and tracked down the puppeteer (Tristan Newcomb), obtaining his permission to put together an "official" DVD of all the episodes. Popularity of the show grew and had spread to other colleges, and the homemade DVD sold so well that it soon led to the need to make a factory-replicated retail version.^{[citation needed]}

For a very short time, the DVD was being sold on Amazon, but was quickly removed for unknown reasons (but not before climbing to #1811 on the site-wide sales rankings), and is now offered directly from the website Decovo.^{[citation needed]}

The puppet characters continue to appear in new clips around the web, mostly at Revver.com, but also scattered around YouTube and Google. Nearly all of the videos are hosted at Decovo which is the official production company for the brand.