Dead 2 Rights: A gallery of grotesque celebrity puppets from "Spitting Image" (1987)

Friday, September 28, 2012

A gallery of grotesque celebrity puppets from "Spitting Image" (1987)

A group shot of royal puppets from Spitting Image

England's bizarre satirical puppet show Spitting Image ran for an astonishing 132 episodes on ITV from 1984-1996. With its extremely topical parodies of politics and show business, the program was something like our Saturday Night Live... only with a much nastier edge and with all the celebrity parts being played by foam and latex doppelgangers of the rich and famous. These three-dimensional, often unflattering caricatures became the show's trademark. Although the original British series never quite caught on in the States, the puppets did have a brief window of notoriety in America thanks to their appearance in the "Land of Confusion" video by Genesis in 1986 and a few prime time network specials. Although America's interest in the show was short-lived, the fad did manage to produce at least one souvenir book.

In 1987, Harcourt Brace Jonavich published Spitting Images, a collection of photographic portraits of some of the puppets, with accompanying text by National Lampoon's Sean Kelly. In the interest of preserving pop culture history, I have decided to scan some of the better ones. The captions are directly from the book. The photos are by John Lawrence Jones