Do you ever hear the slightest clip of a song on the radio, and it triggers the memory of something else that you'd forgotten? Well, that's what happened to me the other day. I heard some unknown band called Pinwheel when I was searching for AM talk, and it reminded me of a show that I hadn't thought of in years. For those of you who weren't fans of Nickelodeon back in the 80's, you aren't going to understand this article or gain any satisfaction from reading about my fear of puppets, so you might as go back to watching Dragonball F.A.G. (or whatever the fucking letters are) and leave me alone. If you're anywhere near my age, though, you're probably going to remember the show I'm talking about. Pinwheel! It was your basic children's show from the early 80's, complete with scary looking puppets who interact with humans, cartoon shorts (Curious George and Paddington Bear were my favorites from Pinwheel), and songs designed to teach you the alphabet.
The hosts of the show were a Japanese chick named Kim and a black guy named Jake. Why do so many children's shows have an Asian woman and a black man as the hosts? Ever fucking noticed that? Maybe it's because the racist families in Arkansas won't be offended by an Asian woman with a black dude, but a white girl would be off limits. I have no clue, and it doesn't really matter, since the humans of Pinwheel aren't the focus of my phobia. No, ladies and gentlemen, it was those damn puppets that I was scared of.
Orelia was the puppet that I found most disturbing. She was supposed to be the landlady of the house (who made sandwiches for all the tenants, like most landlords do), but it wasn't her high rent prices that scared me. No, it was the fact that she stood about six foot SIX that scared me. This thing looked almost human, with a booming voice too horrifying to describe. What made the character even scarier was the fact that she was a fortune teller. I find psychics scary enough, without having some human-sized puppet (who looks like she could easily beat my ass) telling me the future of Betamax stock. Simply terrifying. I was always waiting for her to look straight at the camera and say, "Your future is... DEATH!!!" as her head starts spinning around and blood pours from her plush eyelids.
There's only one other puppet who scared me on the same level, and it's Madame from Solid Gold, that music show from the early 80's. She was absolutely, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the scariest bitch of a puppet ever to give me nightmares as a toddler. Her homosexual puppeteer has long since died, and Madame's puppet carcass was buried with him. It's actually a pretty interesting story, but Madame did enough psychological damage to me to warrant an article of her own, which I'll try to write sometime in the near future.
Look, here's a note to all you puppeteers out there: nobody likes "old lady" puppets. If you feel the need to stick your hand up some stuffed animal's asshole to make it talk, that's perfectly fine; I have no beef with that. What I do have a problem with, however, are the puppeteers who feel it's their God-given right to scare the shit out of a generation of impressionable youngsters with a puppet that looks like a decrepit old lady. Puppets alone aren't scary, and neither are old ladies, but when you combine the two - let's just say it's not as scary as the Holocaust, but it's pretty fucking close.
Sadly, Orelia wasn't the only lifesized puppet on the show. Luigi O'Brien ran a vegetable stand outside the Pinwheel house, complete with talking vegetables. In retrospect, I'm really not sure why he didn't scare me, because he's an Italian stereotype with a big nose and a cart full of disobedient, talking produce, which seems pretty fucking scary to me now. At the time, though, it all seemed perfectly normal. I'm just glad he was rarely in the same scene as Orelia; since they both stood well over six feet tall, they might have started dry humping or something. Actually, I think that might turn me on.
Ebenezer T. Squint was the green-colored botanist of the neighborhood, a cranky old man who preferred talking to his weeds than to actual human contact. He was obviously a ripoff of Sesame Street's Oscar The Grouch, albeit a meaner version. With Oscar, you at least had the assurance that he was actually warm-hearted deep down inside, but there was no such luck with Ebenezer. Imagine Oscar on steroids and PCP, more than willing to do some serious damage if you got within arm's reach of him. That was Ebenezer T. Squint. I don't think I'm alone with I say that nobody wants to hear a puppet yell, but Ebenezer did plenty of shouting. He would get so pissed off at the noisy woman who lived in the apartment under him, I used to fully expect him to get homicidal. If Ebenezer had been married to Tina Turner, he wouldn't have let her escape to a solo career like Ike did - he would have carved her up and made a jacket out of her skin and eaten the leftover guts. I personally believe that's why Ebenezer didn't have a wife on the show... he was the puppet equivalent of OJ Simpson.
There were plenty of other puppets on this horror show called Pinwheel, but none of them were quite as menacing-looking as the three mentioned above. In all honesty, I didn't dislike Pinwheel at all as a child; it was actually one of my favorite shows and I watched it whenever it aired. I find a sick kind of satisfaction in dissecting (and ripping apart) the TV characters who helped raise me, though, so I'm not going to stop here. I've developed quite a fear of Lady Elaine Fairchilde from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood in recent years, so I'll probably write an article about her next. Or maybe The Count from Sesame Street. Or how bad I wanted to fuck the shit out of Daphne from Scooby Doo.
Damn, I have issues. I also have a lot of writing to do.
