“PERSONETTES”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20924, 31 December 1937, Page 18

“PERSONETTES”

RIVALLING POPEYE AND MICKEY MOUSE

“Are Popeye and Mickey Mouse finished?” asks a “Sunday Morning Herald” article.

“Not yet, perhaps, but some producers will tell you that the film industry is facing a minor revolution that may upset the careers of these famous cartoon characters just as the talkies did in the case of many a flesh-and-blood star of the silent pictures. To-day the animated cartoon has a rival—the marionette show.

“This marionette show is something new in pictures. For some time both Paramount and Walt Disney, owners of Popeye and Mickey Mouse, respectively, as well as several other large studios, have been working on the development of this form of entertainment, and are now ready to try it out on the public. Russell Patterson, the noted illustrator, has constructed a marionette show which is being used in a short sequence of ‘Artists and Models.’ ”

“Mr Patterson worked in clay, using ‘personettes.’ They stand about three feet high, and are operated by complicated sets of strings, which control not only their limbs and necks but even finger joints, lips and eyelids. “Mr Patterson worked in clap, using a set of imported French tools as delicate and assorted as a dentist’s. The few visitors permitted in his sanctum saw, from day to day, the rows of clay lumps stuck on little stands turn gradually into likenesses of their favourite comedian, romantic hero or glamour girl. “In this marionette show Mr Patterson has given himself opportunities for amusing tilts at Hollywood, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, W. C. Fields, Radio City Music Hall and a good many other subjects. “For one thing, when the camera first moves into the marionette sequence you do not even know that it is a miniature affair. You think you are in a huge theatre, larger than Radio City—larger, in fact, than even that ‘Pretty Girl is Like a Melody,’ set in ‘The Great Ziegfeld,’ and this impression of vastness is heightened by the spectacle of an aeroplane actually swooping down from the proscenium arch and taxi-ing across the stage. Mr Patterson designed the whole show himself.

“By the way, Mr Patterson does not like people to refer to his little figures as marionettes. ‘Too old fashioned,’ he says. He wants them to be called ‘personettes’ and nothing else. ”