A Brief Puppetry Diversion

March 14, 2023 1:52 PM

How This Guy Makes Hand Puppets That Move Like Real Creatures [WIRED, 9m] is a profile of puppeteer Barnaby Dixon who does really neat, magical things. His YouTube channel is full of delights, including this fairly recent post of puppets sings Sweet Adeline.
posted by hippybear (10 comments total)

My son's been a fan of Barnaby's for a long time. A decade or more ago he 3-d printed one of the hand puppet designs for a middle school art project and wowed his classmates. It's been a while since i've seen anything new, so I'm eager to pass this along.
posted by OHenryPacey at 2:12 PM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

It brings me no joy to milkshake duck this guy (I was a big fan of his puppetry) but he recently platformed some TERF-y bullshit on his channel and when his fans called him on it he did the "Hey, we're just asking questions here..." thing. The videos now appear to be scrubbed from his channel but I presume they're still viewable someplace. Google "Barnaby Dixon TERF" and you'll find plenty about it.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:23 PM on March 14, 2023 [13 favorites]

Yeah unfortunately I was a big fan until the milkshake duck incident myself
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:11 PM on March 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's a real shame when someone you have a lot of respect for in other contexts gets sucked into contrarianism and the weird income-generating feedback loop of being shitty about people on YouTube. Which is not to say that his output doesn't reflect a genuinely-held belief, but the revenue model seems to be a factor in a lot of this kind of stuff. Who can say in this madcap world where down is up? As a parent of a teenager somewhere trans-adjacent it makes me sad that I can't recommend his stuff to my kid.
posted by pipeski at 5:52 PM on March 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

As I said, it would be a brief diversion.
posted by hippybear at 7:14 PM on March 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

His TERF video is still up, as well as a "response to the criticism," which I came across just scrolling through his content before looking at the comments here. Both are oddly well-produced for a channel which otherwise seems to have no aspirations to post political content at all, and I’m not sure spending dozens of hours producing a public political statement really falls into the realm of the "milkshake duck."
posted by brightghost at 8:54 PM on March 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought those videos were more recent than that, so I guess I didn't scroll back far enough to see they're still there. But yep, there they are. Ick.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 10:01 PM on March 14, 2023

These puppets really are magical, thanks for sharing hippybear.

How frustrating that he's a transmisiac. I don't want to watch the video in question as clicking it will give that views but from looking at his Twitter feed it seems he is not someone I could support.
posted by Zumbador at 11:34 PM on March 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I guess at any rate, it's cool to see his techniques. I hadn't seen that upside-down hand over the other hand thing before, and how he uses his fingers for walking is really great.

He can teach us good things about puppets even if that's all he has to offer.
posted by hippybear at 1:18 PM on March 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

From a puppetry view, his genius at natural movement is uncanny. It's a shame about everything else.
posted by ovvl at 4:39 PM on March 15, 2023 [3 favorites]