What is it about puppets that lends itself to Creepypasta, even moreso than film (Though Charles Band still hasn’t given up trying)?
Well, likely because they’re simple to use and make, and common enough in children’s entertainment, that there’s a wide breadth of places to go in terms of inspiration, and some of those places are strange and low-rent enough to fit well with the surreal-meets-direct-reality of what I would call Cryptic Horror, which as I have said before, is the house style of Creepypasta.
It allows the creation of surreal imagery without breaking the feeling of being truly there. From the unsettling Fun In Baloon Land to the
Thusly, we have Pinky, from one of Cosbydaf’s lesser-known Creepypastas Faith Buddies. An unsettling Kermit The Frog-like puppet from a Christian kids TV show, Pinky dispensed dark and mean-spirited lessons about the Christian faith, ramping up to a particularly dark one on predestination and the apocalypse, with a strange post-credits scene implied in this picture.
What’s truly fascinating about this is, despite the bizarre and unsettling details here, none of what happens in the story is impossible in real life.
Similar to Cosby’s much more famous story Normal Porn for Normal People, which also had a theme of re-enforcing normativity with bizarre and unsettling video media by what is implied to be some strange, enigmatic group.
Pinky also showed up as a cameo-enemy in Cosby’s even more obscure story Muppet Chaos, which was about a “rom hack” made by some unknown individual about the Muppets being “condemned” to horrifying deaths by Sam The Eagle in the name of normativity.
Perhaps it’s simply a case of shared themes, but I like to think they were all three the result of the same cryptic, unsettling organization. There’s something fascinating about the idea of unsettling, obscure media being the tools of some secret organization seeking to “purify” the world in some bizarre way, like Videodrome meets Tlon, perhaps even to pacify Cosby’s creation Zharka
And, really, that’s kind of fascinating how puppets relate to this theme. They’re things that speak to you like people; like they’re real, but you can never really see the hand that controls them; not if the puppeteer doesn’t want you to.
One-way media between the broadcaster and the viewer, and you only see what they want you to see. Who knows what bitter hand is behind the felted mouth, the steely rod.
Huh, coulda sworn I remembered another notable puppet for this project...
