Burr Tillstrom (1917–1985) created Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the early television series widely regarded as the first children’s programme to hold an adult audience as firmly as a young one.
He performed everything, alone, unscripted
Tillstrom operated every puppet in the Kuklapolitans and voiced them all, opposite the human performer Fran Allison — and with very few exceptions the shows were improvised outright. No script, live to air, daily. It remains one of the most demanding sustained performances in the history of the form.
The characters
Kukla, a clown, was built in 1936. Oliver J. Dragon followed in 1938. The show began locally in Chicago in 1947 and reached NBC in 1949, running until 1957.
Who watched it
Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Tallulah Bankhead and James Thurber were among its adult fans. That is the useful fact — it demonstrated, very early, that puppetry does not have to be aimed downward to work.
What Jim Henson said about him
Henson credited Tillstrom and the Bairds with having more to do with the beginning of puppets on television than he did — and then drew the distinction precisely: their work brought an existing puppet-theatre craft to a camera, while Henson’s generation worked from the beginning watching a monitorThe monitor is the screen a puppeteer watches while performi..., which he called a very different thing.
That sentence is worth sitting with
It is the cleanest statement anyone has made of what changed, and it explains why the techniques in this glossary are built the way they are.
He also introduced Henson to Don Sahlin
, after the two met at a Puppeteers of AmericaPuppeteers of America is the national puppetry organisation ... festival — a chance introduction that shaped the entire look of the Muppets.