Monday, December 02, 2013

Manos: Hands of Felt and Other Puppetphenalia

I backed a puppet production of Manos: Hands of Felt, and this weekend they sent me access to a copy.  It's a popular motif.  I backed The Gamers: Hands of Fate as well.  No puppets in that production.

We sat down as a family to watch it.  It was much shorter than the MST3K version and lasted just over an hour.  That's plenty of time for a puppet show in my opinion.  However, it immediately remedies one of the issues with the original which is that it seems to go on forever.

Hands of Felt was very amusing, although my family stated many times during the show, "This is really confusing."  What's confusing about dead puppet brides strapped to stakes and movie directories slowly losing their minds?  I think it was less confusing than the original.  Puppets definitely helped rather than hindered.  It was slow in a few spots.  But invariably that was where Hands of Felt were making a joke that required knowing something about the original, so they worked it for a bit.  Supposedly a bots-type track will be added at some point.  So the MST3K guys will have riffed on the original and Hands of Felt will have riffed on MST3K and then Hands of Felt will riff on their own riff.  Who knew Torgo and The Master would ever get that much play.

While I can't give you a link to Hands of Felt, I will provide you with this video for a Magic the Gathering puppet musical (via io9). I like the first number the best.

1 comment:

Vox Fabuli said...

Thank you so much for backing the project! I'm glad you enjoyed the outcome.

Just wanted to clarify: the commentary track will be more like a normal commentary track than a bots-riff.
However, a bots-style-riff strikes me as a wonderful idea.....maybe something for the anniversary edition ;)