Denizens

Well, due to a 4-day mens' retreat (among other things) I was unable to get the puppets really ready for their debut, as I'd hoped; but we had a script, we had actors, and we had SOMETHING to help visualize the characters as we launched ourselves into the Lion's Den at KidzLife last Tuesday night...

Mr. Smith is not pretty. He's actually quite large and scary looking. He started out based on a caricature of Harrison Ford, but as I sewed him he got more and more wrinkled (of course, seeing the fourth installment of Indiana Jones, I'm not TOO far off the mark). He now has something of a Yoda-esque quality to him. But even as I created him (primarily to be "Pennsylvania Smith"), I had thought of letting him play a large archangel Michael in "The Legend of Slappy Hooper." So when I needed an angel to guard Daniel from the lions, it seemed a logical role for this puppet to play. I've given him the name of Azmaveth for this role, and explained his age and look by saying he's a Warrior angel who has been fighting evil for 3,000 years. He's all about action, and not terribly verbal, which fits in with the Indiana Jones/Pennyslvania Smith type of charater.

No one is quite sure who "Darius the Mede" was, but it seems that his reign in Babylon coincided with Cyrus I's reign over the Medo-Persian empire. That puts Daniel's time in the lion's den AFTER 70 years of him being in exile, which means he HAS to be 80 or older at this time. Thinking of likeable elderly people whose voices I could do, I ended up with a personality and style of speaking similar to Jimmy Stewart (dead now and forever young in many films, but I can recall him in several live appearances in the 60s and 70s, mostly on talk shows, at which point he was quite old). Originally I'd hoped to make both an old Daniel and younger Daniel (another reason for picking Stewart, in that I had a good idea of what he looked like at both ages), but I had to settle for buying a puppet, stripping him of his garb (in this case, a fireman's hat and coat), recostuming him in a simple tunic and putting white hair and beard on over his brown hair and moustache he came with. My wife informed me that his hair fell off shortly after the performance began last week, but I've had time this week to sew it in place, so FROM NOW ON, not a hair from his head shall be harmed...

At first, I thought we could get by with one lion, and I naturally pictured something large and ferocious, roaring with a wide-opened mouth (and from several classic cartoons of yesteryear, I pictured the angel slapping him with an "Ahhhhh, SHADDUP!"; at which point the big fierce cat becomes humorously meek). As I thought more about it, I realized that if I wanted a female character anywhere in this piece, it would have to be one of the lions. So I began to imagine a tough lioness named Leonora, as the primary "take charge" character in the den. Of course, the lion is the "king of beasts" and I didn't want to let go of my initial image, so Lexus Rex emerged as the big scary beast, who makes all the others do the work while he sits back and looks regal. I thought he could stand in for all the puffed-up self-important kings Daniel has to deal with in his flashbacks (as the most famous story about Daniel happened near the end of his life, I thought this would be the ideal setting from which to tell all of the earlier stories). Then Lenny appeared in my imagination as a comic foil, inspired partly by one of Scat Cat's band (in *The Aristocats*) and partly be Cheech Marin's voice work for Disney, as a hep cat beatnik/hippy who likes to take life easy and doesn't really go in for all this "king of the beasts" bit. He kind of likes Daniel, and is not so hip on Lex or other authority figures, and he acts in very undignified and unlionlike ways, partly in protest agains the pomposity and pretense of royalty which the other lions expect him to conform to. As Lenny and Leonora started dialoging, I began to see that their bickering, Lenny's attitude towards Lex and the Lion Code, and the fact that gets away with so much could best be explained if Lenny was Leonora's younger brother. This comes out clearest in the fact that, while everyone else refers to her as Leonora or "Nora", Lenny consistently calls here "Lena."

Though the lions' characters were well developed in the script, I didn't have time to do anything with their bodies before last Tuesday. I found a lion-headed rug which was the proper size for Lex, and picked up at a second-hand store a large stuffed Simba (the best I could do for a lioness) and another stuffed lion for Lenny (which I simply added orange sunglasses to, to help convey his character). I need to work in the coming weeks to turn these into actual puppets, hollowing them out, making them more flexible, and giving them movable mouths. It should be an interesting challeng, working from the outside in, rather than the inside out...