Local Blood Sucker Enjoyer

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Yoshimasa Ishibashi was inspired to create The Fuccons after seeing an advertisement where guests at a party had frozen facial expressions, recalling that they were “so fake they made [him] laugh.” Ishibashi opted to use mannequins because he did not want audiences to dismiss the series as a “TV parody” and because the series’ content would feel “too grotesque” if real actors were used. In addition, he did not want the actors’ personalities to influence how the characters were portrayed and wanted the characters to be “completely depersonalized.” Recreating a retro family setting similar to Bewitched, Ishibashi sourced the mannequins from a friend’s warehouse, which originated from Yoshichu Mannequin. He picked fair-skinned, blue-eyed mannequins because the Japanese-looking mannequins had facial expressions that seemed too serious. Before filming, the mannequins would be styled by Ishibashi’s make-up and hairstylist teams while he chose the outfits himself. He claimed that working with mannequins was “weird at first” but later decided that they were “not all that different from live actors.”

Illustration from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner for Andrew Lang’s The Blue Poetry Book by Lancelot Speed (1891)

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