Robert Poulter NEW Website

Thanks to tip from Gigi Sandberg, I learned today of a new website put up by the amazing Robert Poulter. Be sure and check it out!

TT Film Well Received at Festivals

Dante's Inferno is making the rounds on the film festival circuit, and doing quite well. I can hardly wait until it is released on DVD!

When it comes to punishment, though, nothing takes the place of the classics. What served T.S. Eliot well enough also inspires director Sean Meredith in DANTE’S INFERNO (2007; Brattle March 23 at 7:30 pm, with Meredith). Updated in setting if charmingly retro in technique — a crude but effective Victorian cardboard puppet theater — Inferno remains faithful to the original while cleverly revising it for the present day. Here Dante finds himself in the middle of his life hung over and in despair, broke and with a non-functioning cellphone, passed out in an alley. Virgil emerges from the shadows with a mission to redeem him for the sake of the deceased and beloved Beatrice, and off they go into a 2-D hell of a distinctly 21st-century cast.

Dante himself had no qualms about settling political grudges in his epic, and Meredith also indulges in an agenda, though it’s not so easy to peg. Ronald Reagan and even a pre-mortem Dick Cheney figure among the damned, but so too does JFK (lust got him), and the religious right will be glad to know that there’s a special place in Hell for gays, at least in Meredith’s version. Although its slapstick sometimes overshadows its ingenuity, there’s enough of the divinely comic in this Inferno to justify a pair of sequels. - Peter Keough [Boston Phoenix]

Puppet Rampage 2007

An amazing festival and it'll be right down the road from me - I had darn well better find a way to get there!


More performances than a person could take all in.

...and there will be a strong toy theatre presence.

From Harry Oudekerk...

So I guess it is time for an update on the international Toy Theatre Festival in Harderwijk, The Netherlands.

Harderwijk is an old fishing town on the border of the former Suydersea. The town is almost 800 years old and the oldest part is the region called the "Vischmarktbuurt". Quaint old houses, a monumental gate which also "still" functions as a lighthouse, citywalls, an old, former, synagoque, and nice rstaurants in various price brackets.

This is the background for the first of, we hope, a long series of toy theatre festivals.

The festival will be held from Wednesday May 16 in the evening till Friday May 18 late in the afternoon. This is around Ascension Day.

What makes this festival special, are not only the guests, but the enormous enthusiasm with which the neighbourhood adopted the idea of the festival and gave it its support.

The old synagogue will be our "livingroom". Here tickets will be sold, and meals served for the performers. Other guests can drink coffee and such here but are adviced to have their meals at one of the 4 restaurants around the Vischmarkt square that will offer special festival arrangements. Two theatres will be performing on the first and second floor of the synagogue and Dirk Reimers will be selling stuff from his toy theatre shop. In the gate properly called the "Vischpoort" or "Fishgate" there will be an exhibition of theatres from the collection of the famous Ab Vissers a toy theatre collector and performer of long, international, standing. He will be selling too! For children there will be a toy theatre workshop. If you want to come and stay for a few days I can still offer some double bedrooms with breakfast in a nice hotel at the waterside for the duration of the festival at €180.

Advance tickets will be sold from May 1st at €4 per show, 4 tickets at once will cost you €15. Tickets for the whole festival, 12 shows, will be €37.50. During the festival single tickets will be €4 and €4.50 for respectively for children up to 12 and adults.

For more information, take a look at the English website...

Enthusiast: Ab Vissers

Thanks to Harry Oudekerk, I have found out about an amazing toy theatre enthusiast named Ab Vissers.

Anyone that puts a permanent toy theatre for performance in their home is alright with me!

Film Director & His Toy Theatre

A tiny toy theater, measuring not more than 3 feet high, 2 feet wide and 18 inches deep, has been discovered at the D. W. Griffith studios at Mamaroneck, N. Y. The Purpose of the little play house reveals the infinite care observed in the preparations of the Griffith Photoplays such as "Way Down East."

- From D. W.'s Toy Theater, The Washington Post (1877-1954), Dec 4, 1921

Update from Pollock's Toy Museum

From Paul J. Weighell at Pollock's Toy Museum comes this update...

Just a quick message to the main Pollocks addicts!

The new website is now up and running. It will no doubt change and grow! The plan is to add a shop and sell Hugo's and Steve's output if they wish, as well as Pollock's stuff and hopefully all things TT. I have already added a links page to Hugo and Trish and other good sites. If you have a TT links page then perhaps you might update it to point to the new site not the old one?

Steve has finished the Cinderella DVD and it's good and I hope Hugo won't mind me mentioning that he is working on a release of Waterloo to add to his other fine titles.

Believe it or not, 2 new cellars have been found under the building!! They go out right under the road in front of the shop and they are quite large and very very wet. But, they will make a good spot for me to set up a few fish tanks and bubbling apparatus to chemically treat the printing plates and remove the corrosion. Hugo may have offered to photograph / scan the results... Rumours that I will be making a TT Frankenstein down there are sheer nonsense (not enough electricity for one thing...)

The new TT clubroom at the top of the museum is coming on and all the sheets and so on are already up there. Non-TT stuff has been banished! Dolls and Bears have been seen escaping to good homes as more space for TT is found in other rooms as well. The aim is to have all the TT stuff on display in the general museum and then the the club room has space for fixing up theatres, sorting sheets and so on. It may even be used again for holding performances as that was what is was used for in the 60s.

Guilty Pleasures

What can I say...I adore Peter O'Toole, and this made me laugh my *ss off...and, and...it's puppets!!

From Professor Will...

From Professor Will comes this fascinating information on toy theatre special effects, a result of a recent thread about the subject on the Toy Theatre Yahoo Group:

Lycopodium is a club moss spore; if you can identify the moss, you can collect it in the woods at the right time of year. It produces a flash because it's so fine that it "burns" when blown into in the air and ignited by a flame or spark (like a flour explosion). There are no oils involved. Finely powdered resin will do the same but is more dangerous (and smelly) Colored "fires" were frequently coarse resin combined with metal salts. They are technically a firework and appropriate regulations apply.

"Flash" paper, cotton, silk, etc. are forms of nitro cellulose, best acquired for a reputable magic supplier. Must be kept dry. They burn at a very low temperature (unlike magnesium!) Safest igniter is a model airplane glow plug hooked up to 12 volt battery. There's a slight delay which needs to be compensated for in performance. Small igniters that work with a 9 volt battery are available.

I found information about something called a flambol which is "...an apparatus, which is used to make a fire from a flambol with on a stage of a theatre." I have no idea how practial it might be, but thought I'd pass it on here for those that might be interested. This also sounds like a LOT of fun for those scientifically-minded - think of the possibilities!

Toy Theatre Goes to Court

88 F.2d 97
YOUNGv.RALSTON-PURINA CO.
No. 10748.
Circuit Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit.
February 17, 1937.

Appeal from the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of Iowa; Charles A. Dewey, Judge.

Action at law by Guy Young against the Ralston-Purina Company. From a judgment of dismissal, plaintiff appeals.

Affirmed.

Allen A. Herrick and Herschel G. Langdon, both of Des Moines, Iowa (D. Cole McMartin, of Des Moines, Iowa, on the brief), for appellant.

William Hossfeld, of Des Moines, Iowa (F. W. Lehmann, Jr., and W. B. Hurlburt, both of Des Moines, Iowa, on the brief), for appellee.

Before SANBORN, WOODROUGH, and BOOTH, Circuit Judges.
WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge.

The petition in this case presented a cause of action at law in two counts within the federal jurisdiction because of diverse citizenship of the parties. In the first count the plaintiff alleged that he had invented a certain toy movie theater for which he had a patent pending during the summer of 1934 and that during that summer he entered into negotiations with defendant to sell the use of the invention to the defendant; that defendant stated it was interested in utilizing plaintiff's idea on the basis of paying plaintiff a royalty on each toy theater used; that at defendant's request plaintiff disclosed all the details of his invention to defendant, and the defendant thereupon utilized the plaintiff's idea and invention and produced and distributed one million of said toy theaters and became thereby indebted to plaintiff for a reasonable royalty, figured at $12,500.

In the second count the allegations were "that on or about October 22, 1934, the defendant offered to purchase the use of plaintiff's invention to use said toy theatre idea" at a certain royalty price; that the plaintiff accepted the offer; and that the "defendant did produce and utilize * * * one million of said toy theatres and thereby became indebted to plaintiff in the sum of $12,500.00."

There was a prayer for judgment in the sum of $12,500, with interest and costs.

The defendant answered that it did cause toy movie theaters to be made and distributed as a premium during the latter part of 1934 and the early part of 1935, but the toys did not embody the plaintiff's invention and they were not made or distributed pursuant to any contract express or implied between plaintiff and defendant; that the structure of the toy movie picture theater was old and well-known to the public prior to plaintiff's alleged invention; and that the structure of those made and distributed by defendant was fully illustrated and described in six...

From TOYTHEATRE.NET...

From Hugo Brown's wonderful Toytheatre.net website, comes this great old newsreel!




It shows a printmaker from the 1920's making up toy theatre sheets, preparing them for a show, and a bit of a show itself.








An amazing find, Hugo!

Upcoming Performance

Thanks to the toy theatre list, I read about an upcoming toy theatre performance in that readers in the UK might want to take in; see more about it here...

Toys Watching Toy Theatre

8th Int'l Toy Theatre Festival - Summer 2008

The 8th International Toy Theater Festival & Temporary Toy Theater Museum is planned for Summer 2008, according to Great Small Work's newly-designed website.

They were recently awarded a well-deserved NEA grant towards developing and producing the festival, which is highly-regarded among those in the theatre and puppetry world.

Toy Theatre Influenced Rossetti

The Rossetti Archive has some wonderful examples of toy theatre art.

The site says that "...Nearly all of DGR's artistic juvenilia are drawn in the style of this popular art form that occupied the attention of the entire Rossetti household when DGR [Dante Gabriel Rossetti] was a boy."

Pollocks Trust Exhibition/Benefit

I missed this until stumbling on it today - the day after it closed! Profuse apologies to one and all. Hopefully those of you who may read this and are near enough to have taken it in, already knew about it anyways...

First Steps...

Over my Christmas week holiday, I was finally ready to start my part in putting the theatre together - mounting the proscenium. To say I was intimidated was an understatement. I guess my research and care paid off - I was able to do it, and it turned out great.

Now I'm starting to color (and mount on backing) the scenery sheets and characters. I'm also going to try my hand at fashioning my own character slides - that will be another adventure!

Commission Toy Theatre Update #6 - Arrival

Ann's AMAZING toy theatre arrived a few days ago. The picture at left is what it now looks like, put back together after its journey across the country. I will be taking down the front and applying the Reddington Procenium, etc. to it, which will my first time ever doing one. Ah, the excitement! Ah, the anxiety!! I shall do my homework to ensure that I do it the best that I can, and the rest will be up to the theatre gods...

Commission Toy Theatre Update #5 - Teaser!

From Ann Neff comes the following teasers; by the way, the theatre is on its way to me in the mail (excitement does not begin to describe it...!)

This not the final formal portrait, but I couldn't keep you totally in suspense. This how the Redington will be pasted on. Of course, there is the tip piece, too.

By the way, that Reddington she is using is a high quality photo copy I had sent to Ann to use while designing and building the theatre, and is not the copy I will be using to color and mount on the frame.

If you click on the image (or any of the images in this post), they will open up larger; if you look closely at this one, you will notice the little holes for the footlights!

Here we see the toy theatre in its collapsed form; it was made this way purposely for two reasons - I live in a small apartment, and storage comes at a premium, and also for convenience when travelling with it.

Note that the main part of the stage is reversible so it can be used with or without grooves.

And here is Ann's husband, George Neff - tester (This morning, husband George and the German automechanic neighbor George took my instructions on a trial run. With papers in hand, they put the whole thing together right from the box! I needed to add a few more comments -"Make sure you have removed everything from the base box before you fasten the stage floor down", etc.), but the instructions appear to do the trick...) - packing the theatre up to send on its way to me...

Toy Theatre meets the Future

There has been recent discussions on the toy theatre group about an exciting development. Despite earlier discouragement, a way has been found to capture the small stage digitally in a manner worthy of it. From Paul Weighall of Pollock's Toy Museum comes this wonderful news:

The DVD of Ali Baba is indeed hopefully the first of a deluge.

It was made by Steve Arnott for Pollock's Toy Theatres and it is software powered technology (as opposed to manual stop frame) using characters cut from the Pollock's published play. The computer makes the movement and animates the play as per story line within the frame of a toy theatre proscenium.

The animation has smooth movements, object shadows, character voices played by different actor/actress, character highlighting, a small amount of music between scene changes and other good stuff. It's like watching a TT performance with one's nose stuck right upto the stage front. Marvelous!


It looks just like a normal performance but without the slides. Ali Baba runs for 13 minutes and I am told took 3 days to complete. Now the basics are understood we of course hope to complete many more. Cinderella is already ordered and Blackbeard the Pirate should follow. After doing the popular shortened 1970 version plays we hope
to tackle the more difficult ones.

The DVD has two visual tracks, one for computer which will work anywhere and one for TV. We are therefore doing 2 DVD versions, one for USA TV (NTSC format) and Europe TV (PAL format).

With Hugo churning out beautifully coloured and mono versions of complete plays and play texts from hi-res digital scans, Pollock's selling a new range of hi-res scanned copies of old prosceniums and Steve also doing hi-res digital animations for plays, we are hopefully looking at a modest revival of English TT albeit in a modern format.

If all that sounds a bit salesy then I am sorry but having spent 3 years pushing in this direction I am rather pleased with the results. The cost of mass printing has stopped us making TT stuff for years now but we hope that with the reduced cost of scanning etc. we will be able to make available all the stuff that has been unavailable for ages due simply to demand being low and costs being high. As it costs about the same to do a play that is well known as a play that is not well known we think we can now offer the widest range of material some of which has not been seen for maybe 100 years or even more.

We may even do a couple of brand new plays…

I think it's simply marvelous that there has been found a way to innovate and make a way to popularize toy theatre into the future. Bravo to all involved!!