In tonight’s new episode of Community, the Greendale 7 get in touch with their felt side. Okay, that sounded weird. I mean they are going to be turned into puppets.
This puppet humor is in keeping with recent (Neil’s Puppet Dreams) and upcoming projects (The Muppets…Again!, Happytime Murders) and the continued presence of the Sesame Street-spoofing musical Avenue Q Off-Broadway in New York. However, Community is going to turn human characters into puppets as opposed to strictly having human characters interacting with puppets. That’s kind of new. 30 Rock did something similar, in a far more limited fashion, when Kenneth saw the world in puppet form. However, the gold standard is and probably will continue to be the masterful season 5 episode of Joss Whedon’s Angel: “Smile Time,” in which David Boreanaz’ lead character is turned into “a wee-little puppet man.”
“Smile Time” was the 14th episode of the final season of Angel, with the title referring to an evil children’s television show headed by 4 demons pretending to be the puppet stars of the show. The puppets are using the show to suck the life force out of its youthful audience. When one too many catatonic kid shows up in the hospital wearing a far-too wide smile, ala a victim of the Joker in Batman, the case comes to the attention of Angel and his team. When Angel goes to the television studio to investigate he discovers a mysterious orb which magically transforms him into a puppet, thus beginning one of the funniest and best hours of television from a Joss Whedon show.
Here is how his friends find out about his puppet-ification:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91zNLwwl6qU
The show had previously punctured Angel’s rather affected mannerisms in the season 2 episode “Guise Will Be Guise,” which is equally brilliant. Here, how can Angel maintain his persona of broody, troubled guy when he is made of felt, cannot even operate a remote control with his fingers, and has a removable nose? Moreover, Angel was (and continues to be in the comic books) a character at a complete loss when it came to expressing his emotions. However, as a puppet he is completely manic with expressing emotion, all righteous anger one second and immense love and gratitude the next.
He is, of course, loathe to admit to anyone outside of his inner circle that he has become a puppet. He even takes to hiding under his own desk so as not to allow his would-be girlfriend, Nina the werewolf, to see him. When his frenemy, Spike, walks in, well, the entire office finds out about Angel’s puppet-status in a hilarious fight scene:
Angel and his team eventually descend upon the “Smile Time” television studio, and engage in hand-to-hand combat with puppets. The show even manages a Community-level meta commentary with a direct spoof of its own conventional method of hero depiction. Both Buffy and Angel were incredibly fond of the heroic group shout, in which the characters forcefully walked toward the camera being led by the star of the show and thus leader of the team (Buffy for her show, Angel for his).
But what if the hero in charge is a puppet?
During the fight, Angel even morphs into a vampire meaning we get to see a vampire puppet:
Here’s what Community will have hopefully learned from “Smile Time”: Joss Whedon and episode writer/director Bed Edlund were able to make a puppet episode gimmick work through a combination of character development and story arc advancement. The episode is hilarious, and the puppet is adorable. However, the episode speaks to the mental state of Angel at that point in the season. At a time when Angel is concerned over his ineffectual hero status and having become nothing more than a glorified puppet for evil law firm Wolfram & Hart he is turned into a puppet whose nose comes off. He cannot successfully defend himself when his would-be werewolf girlfriend attacks while he was in the middle of his big epiphany speech and hadn’t noticed her transformation.
The puppet story line is merely a use of a form – here it is children’s television, on Buffy it was a musical (“Once More With Feeling“) or a silent movie (“Hush”) – which functions to communicate something about the characters which could not be otherwise accomplished. It is only through being turned into a puppet that Angel is able to express his feelings for would-be girlfriend Nina, with whom he ends the episode hand-in-hand and on the way to their first date even though his puppet spell has yet to wear off. Moreover, the children’s television show convention, i.e., the innocuous lesson song, which is featured in the episode actually speaks to qualities lacking in both Angel and Wesley at that time in their respective romantic non-conquests. The demon puppets for “Smile Time” sing a song about the necessity of self-esteem (they’re evil, but they still want to put on a good show), which is a lesson learned indirectly by both Angel and Wesley at the end of the episode. Here is the song:
So, by the end of our goofy puppet episode Angel has had an epiphany and his story arc with Nina has been advanced, the will they/won’t they between Wesley and Fred which has been building for 2 and a half seasons is concluded with a passionate kiss, and in the background Gunn has made a seemingly minor deal with the devil which ultimately sets into action the hell that awaits all of the characters in the season’s second half. The episode proves to be one of the most important, story line-wise, of the entire 5th season of the show.
It is not surprising that Community would follow Angel and 30 Rock’s lead. Community has built its reputation on genre pastiche, with classic episodes nodding toward Die Hard, Goodfellas, Apollo 13, Star Wars, and generic spaghetti westerns. So why not add The Muppets to the list. However, because Community is a show based in reality, albeit a cartoon-y, sitcom reality, it cannot fall back on science-fiction or fantasy excuses for the fantastical the way Angel could. As such, they always attempt to structure their far-out episodes around a central story which grounds everything in reality and advances the overall story of the season. The classic example of this is season 1’s “Modern Warfare” in which the campus descends into a paintball war and spoofs the film Die Hard, but Jeff and Britta finally hook up thus completing a season-long story arc which then looms large in the season finale. It does not seem likely that tonight’s puppet episode will manage such a balance, as other than the arc involving Jeff’s reunion with his estranged father and a horribly conceived amnesia story line with Chang the show does not have many story arcs this season. It’s most likely the puppet episode will just be quirky for quirks sake. Hopefully, it’s really funny, though.
As for “Smile Time,” you can actually purchase replicas of the Angel puppet. The problem? The replica puppets are limited editions, and will cost you a pretty penny. There are, at least, a variety of options. Toy company Diamond Select produced three different versions of Angel (normal, battle-tested, and in full-on vamp mode) as well as a version of Spike as he appears in Shadow Puppet, a comic book follow-up in which a Japanese version of the show Smile Time turns Spike into a puppet.
If you want to learn more about the puppeteering aspect of “Smile Time” check out “Hey, Kids! It’s Smile Time!”, a featurette from the season 5 DVD of Angel. You can stream it via YouTube. The puppeteers are interviewed, with the ones who operate and voice the main characters (other than Angel since that was still Boreanaz’ voice) in the episode being Victor Yerrid as Polo, Drew Massey as Angel, Julianne Buescher as Flora, and Tim Blaney Groofus. Fun Fact: Blaney also voiced Johnny 5 in the Short Circuit movies (“No disassemble!”) and Frank the Pug in the first two Men in Black films.
The full episode of “Smile Time” is available to stream through Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu. In fact, when I first saw it my best friend who had seen the entire series before I came to it insisted I wait until she was around to watch “Smile Time,” as it is best enjoyed with company because you will laugh together….a lot.
Love “Smile Time” as well? More optimistic than me about the Community puppet episode? Let me know in the comments.
We Minored in Film 