Your nightmares begin here. Yesterday, I posted a group of photos of puppets from England's gone-but-not-forgotten satirical TV series, Spitting Image. Guess what, folks? Those were the cute ones. Today, I'm bringing you the rest of the pics, and it's here where we venture into some very dark territory indeed. Sadly, many of these photos are too big to be reproduced at a decent size on this blog, so I've had to shrink them. Consider yourself lucky. These are some very unpleasant puppets. Keep in mind, my original scans of these images are absolutely huge, so I've viewed them in excruciating detail. I will warn you: the image of Whoopi Goldberg's face floating in what appears to be a bowl of milk is not something to approach lightly.
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 inthe "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
Bette Midler: America's Happiest Camper
Bruce Springsteen: For unto Us a Savior is Born in the U.S.A.
Johnny Carson: He Do Re-run-run-run, He Do Re-run-run
Bill Cosby: Call Him a Doctor? Okay. He's a Doctor.
Clint Eastwood: Dirty Harry Says, "Have an Ice Cream. Or Else!"
Jack Nicholson: Not Invited? But I'm Always Invited!
Mick Jagger: Rolling Stone Youth Formula: Removes Lines, Wrinkles, Moss!
Muammar Al-Qaddafi: Radical Sheik
Leonard Nimoy: To Be Spock or Not To Be Spock? That Is the Question.
Pee-wee Herman: Disney Just Drew Mickey Mouse. Pee-wee Is Mickey Mouse!
Prince Charles: The Dunce and Future King
Richard Pryor: A Blazing Talent Gone to the Dogs
Queen Elizabeth: A Scepter is Haunting Europe
Ronald & Nancy Reagan: What Did the President Know and When Did She Know It?
Sylvester Stallone: All He Wants Is for His Country to Love Him As Much As He Does
Barbara Streisand: The Biggest Star So Far (By a Nose)
Margaret Thatcher: A Tory Party Animal - A Minister in Her Prime
Woody Allen & Mia Farrow: Hanna and Her Sisters Meet the Brothers Karamazov
So now we know what Zomby watches on television, which as I argued previously may well be the truest, most accurate way of gauging one's soul.
But what kind of music does Zomby listen to? My best guess: Phil Collins. I think of Phil Collins as the patron saint of the lonely and heartbroken, mainly due to a 2007 radio story from This American Life called "Dr. Phil" by Starlee Kine.
Phil Collins was famous for turning his real-life romantic setbacks into popular songs,"In the Air Tonight" and "Against All Odds" chief among them. Back in the 1980s, a satirical British puppet show called Spitting Image took Mr. Collins to task for this and produced this scathing, dead-on parody:
Eerie, isn't it? "I'm So Lonely" may be the ultimate Phil Collins song, even though Phil didn't write it. It certainly works as a good theme song for both Ziggy and Zomby, both of whom can relate to the themes of loneliness and male pattern baldness.
Incidentally, one of the side effects of British comedy is that it occasionally forces you to look up some of the more obscure references. I'm sure we all know who Bob Hoskins is, but the other British celebs named in the song are not so well-known here in the States. For the record, Mel Smith is a British comedian and actor probably best known to American audiences as The Albino in The Princess Bride.
And Eddy Shah? Well, he's a rather infamous UK newspaper tycoon who very recently was arrested in connection with a sex scandal. At the time of the Spitting Image broadcast, though, he was just a famous businessman.
Now don't you feel better informed about the world? Incidentally, there was no bad blood between Phil Collins and Spitting Image. In fact, not long after this parody aired, the puppeteers were hired to do the deeply weird video for "Land of Confusion," a song by Phil's band Genesis.
