PRODUCT REVIEW: The Puppet Company- "Dylan"

I never thought that I would ever own such a product; but ever since I got into puppetry, I had to invest in one. And what better way to find a puppet than to buy one off of Amazon.

On Amazon, there are many companies that sell puppets and accessories, but I wanted a puppet that was unique and original--I wanted a character that got my attention, one that made me curious about it, one that stood out above anything else.

Case in point: The Puppet Company.

The Puppet Company specializes in creating puppets of different creatures--whether worm-like characters, dragons, etc.--and the characters would have their own names. But the one that stood out the most for me was Dylan, a worm-type creature (I call him a bookworm) who wore glasses and a necktie. For some reason, he reminded me of myself (I'm also a bookworm).

So I bought Dylan from Amazon, and got him a couple of days later, thanks to my Prime membership. Now, at first, I was a little nervous in getting the puppet, because on Amazon, he almost looked creepy, the way his mouth was hanging open.

But when I took him out of the Amazon Prime white-and-blue bubble-wrap package (Yeah, rather than put him in a box, Amazon used their bubble-wrap packaging), he wasn't so creepy at all. Plus, the weirdness of this character was what intrigued me to buy him in the first place. I had owned an iZ toy before; so the weirdness is nothing new.

Upon taking him out of the packaging, Dylan had a tiny hanger sticking out from one side of his head--this was in case he wanted to hang somewhere for retail purposes.
He also came with a tag with the company logo.

When you open the tag, it tells you the company's mission statement, and how to wash the puppet (hand-wash its surface).

On the back of the tag, it tells you the suitable age range (explaining it also in 20 other languages inside the tag)

and the well-appreciated line: "Please retain this label for future reference."

When putting my arm through the puppet, the material felt comfortable.

The mouth part was cushioned while the mouth itself were two cardboard-type slabs on the top of my hand and below my thumb. In short, the mouth was easy to move, and I automatically got into the creative aspect of breathing life into the puppet.

Funny thing is: I gave him a German accent (partly because I was studying the Dutch language in school--Dutch and German have some similarities). (You may want to turn up the volume to hear what I was having the puppet say.)

Looking closer at this puppet, I saw that the eyes were a solid material, which popped out to make him more cartoony.
His antennae were easily adjustable.

And when you squeeze his tongue, it's like listening to a squeak toy.

Finally, the majority of this puppet was knitted material, which was done with little to no flaws.

As I researched this product more online, I found out that The Puppet Company had a working website where you can buy their products there. I found this out when I reading the product tag. The takeaway is that this company has more than one distributor.

QUALITY
A lot of work was obviously put into this product. The product was easy to use, and it fit me really well, with its one-size-fits-most physique.
Though, the only somewhat downside is that my hand would get sweaty after wearing the puppet for a long while, due to its stitching, and the material not being ventilated. On a hot sunny day, this could be a slight annoyance, but it can be a warm Godsend for your arm in cold weather. But that's all okay--it's doable.
Rating: 9/10

ASSEMBLY?
There's no assembly required. All you would have to do is remove the hanger and the tag. But keep the tag, in case you need to hand-wash the product.
Rating: 10/10

CREATIVITY
The character Dylan is, of course, a bookworm type. Despite the concept of a literal bookworm being a cliché in it of itself, seeing a worm creature with glasses and a necktie is both funny and cute.
Rating: 9/10

UNIQUE & WEIRD?
At first, the product came to me as weird, because of the picture of it shown on Amazon's website; but when seeing Dylan in person--or in this case, in physical form--the weirdness had faded away. So, ultimately, Dylan won me over with his uniqueness, not weirdness.
Rating: 9/10

DISTRIBUTION/PACKAGING
This product has more than one distributor (the official company website and Amazon, as far as I know).
However, I wasn't a big fan of the packaging courtesy of Amazon Prime. Amazon should think twice before placing the product in a bubble-wrap package, because what if the package got crushed or mangled during the shipping process? Luckily, the package was handled with care; but a cardboard box would've sufficed. I don't know the type of packaging that The Puppet Company uses to ship their products, but as for Amazon, they should rethink the choice of a bubble-wrap type bag to ship something like a puppet like Dylan.
In other words, the packaging wasn't The Puppet Company's fault, but its partner Amazon.
Rating: 8/10

*************************** FINAL VERDICT: 9/10 *******************************
The only minor issues I had were the non-air-ventilation for the operating arm, and shipping and handling (the way it was shipped, not the S&H fee because there was no fee).
The fact that your arm can get sweaty after a while is, like I said, doable. But, if I was to order another puppet (one of the other sockette characters from The Puppet Company), then I would expect the product to be delivered in a more suitable packaging, rather than hastily push it out the door in a bubble-wrap packaging and hope that nothing bad happens to it.

As for me, I'll probably buy a different character to accompany Dylan because... I think he needs a friend. Plus, he's already made his home in the puppet stage that I had built with a cardboard box. (By the way, curtains for the puppet stage COMING SOON!)

"Dylan, what time is it?"

Sources:
Amazon, 2018. https://www.amazon.com/
The Puppet Company, The Puppet Company Ltd., 2018. https://www.thepuppetcompany.com/

First Day of Blogging!- At Home with Serena

May 29, 2018

Today I had woken up at 6 in the morning. I couldn't sleep, which was weird because Serena was still asleep. So I decided to play my Nintendo 3DS for a while; but then the sunlight was already at the window, so I decided to start my day.

Around Noon:

Lunch time was pretty good. Ramen noodles.
Serena looked at what I was eating and asked, "Why is it stringy?"

I told her, "It's supposed to be stringy."
"Like silly string?"
I thought for a moment and then nodded. "Yeah, like silly string."
She gasped, and then tried to move the bowl away from me, saying, "Don't eat the silly string!"
I stopped her and said, "It's not silly string. It's ramen noodles."

Eventually, Serena tasted the noodles and thought they were good.

That afternoon:
Serena and I were playing the Triangle Peg game--you know, the triangle with pegs that you would find at places like Cracker Barrel--and of course, Serena kept losing. I tried showing her how to play the game right, but she insisted on knocking the triangle with the pegs falling out.

That was when I decided that it was probably too soon for her to understand the rules of the game.
By the way, her way of getting over this game was imagining if she was the triangle.

Ooookay…

Around Dinner time:
Guess who stopped by?
Mombo.
She starts off by complaining about the hot weather. She was like, "I'm telling you, this weather, Veronica..." I was busy watching Fixer Upper on TV, so I didn't really catch what else she was talking about.

Mombo then looked through the pictures on my phone and came across one with me posing with my mom, with us both wearing sunglasses. Mombo saw that Mom had gray hair and said, "What is this? A contest for whoever has the grayest hair?!" She flicked her own yarn hair and said, "Well!" She then grabbed my collar and whispered: "I'm still winning, right?"

I finished my slices of bread with butter, and Serena came by the table with a plate of chocolate chip cookies.

Guess who got the one with the most chocolate chips?
Yep. Serena got that one.
She offered Mombo a cookie. Then she moved the plate clockwise so that her mom wouldn't get the cookie with more chocolate chips in it, leaving Mombo with the one with only one or two chips. Mombo got mad and wrestled Serena for the better cookie (By the way, this wrestling was more of an arm-wrestling match, rather than a fight.)

I broke up the arm-wrestling by telling Mombo about Cookie Monster. "Cookie Monster recently wrote a book," I said. "It's called The Joy of Cookies."

"I believe it," she answered, "because he had that book and ate it too." She said this while she pointed at the book's structure--the on-purpose bite marks on the book itself. But then she did a double-take on the book and she was livid. "SERENA! YOU ATE THE BOOK?!" And I had to reassure her that the book was designed that way, and that it wasn't Serena's fault. "Then go write a book review, and make some money about it!" she told me. "Maybe Big Bird will investigate it!" (She meant Cookie Monster and the Smart Cookies from the Smart Cookies segments of Sesame Street, but anyway...)

We calmed her down by talking to her more about the weather. Yeah, Mombo likes to argue with people... but it's funny.
I asked her for her opinion on the weather here in Texas--believe me, we're heading to the 100s (if not already). She was like: "Oh, we're gonna melt eventually." Wow. Thanks, Mombo, for giving us a reason why we should stay at home all summer! LOL

Mombo then asked me if she could have her own segment on the Living with a Hand Puppet blog. I was like: "Okay. What do you want to do?"
"You know how Angry Grandpa has his own set of proverbs... or truth-isms?"
I nodded. Somehow Mombo knew that I watched the Angry Grandpa series on YouTube. "What about it?" I asked.
She smiled and answered, "I wanna do something like that."
"Well, we'll see," I told her. "I already have a listen of ideas for this blog. But I'll see if I can squeeze you into my schedule somewhere."
"We'll speak tomorrow," she said. "I wanna talk over some Subway sandwiches."
The thought of Subway made me light up with joy. "That sounds good, Mombo!"
"And YOU'RE buying," she said.
Darn...
Meanwhile, Serena was staring at the both of us, and then asked, "We're gonna eating a subway train tomorrow?"
"No you ding-dong! Sandwiches from Subway!" Mombo corrected her.
Serena paused for a few seconds and finally said... "But San Antonio doesn't have subway stations."
All I could do was laugh.

How Serena Was Born...

Once upon a time...
(No, that sounds WAY TOO CLICHE)

…

In 2018, I was living out my last semester at Our Lady of the Lake University, about to graduate with a Master's degree in the Arts (English). And seeing that I didn't have much going for me--trying to find a job and not having any prospects--I had struggled to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

One day, while I was working on a homework assignment for Literary Translation (a class I was taking at the time, where you had to translate text from a foreign language into English), I took a trip down Memory-Lane by watching episodes of NickJr.'s Oobi on YouTube. The show follows a hand puppet named Oobi, who has a sister named Uma, a grandfather who they call "Grampu," and a best friend named Kako (played by Noel MacNeal, one of my puppeteer idols). I remember being amazed by the creativity and puppetry that went into that show--how it easy it was to create a puppet just by using your hand.

Then later that week, when class had ended for the night, I took a picture of my right hand in a "talking position."

And then the next day, I decided to add some features to the photo. So I opened up the "Paint" app on my computer, and I gave my hand eyes and some pigtails using a stylus. This turned out to be my concept art for Serena.

Now, for the name "Serena," I decided to give her that name, because that name is derived from the word serenity, which meant something along the lines of "being at peace"... which was something that I truly needed in my life. Serena was the care-free, childlike spirit that I wanted to be, not the young woman who made mistakes and wasn't a perfect adult... or daughter. In fact, as I began conceiving this idea, Serena had become like a daughter to me, because she was a part of me (mentally AND physically).

That was when I began wondering if the Oobi-inspired could be recreated so that I could bring Serena to life. So out of curiosity, I looked up if there were "Oobi eyes" for sale so that I could make my own Oobi-inspired hand puppet. I came across a brand from a company in Rhode Island (and I'll probably write a product review on it), because the original creator of the Oobi-eyes was reported to have discontinued back in 2013. Now this brand was surprisingly good, and I was able to fit my middle finger through the hole between the eyes.

After I tested out my Oobi-eyes, even posting pictures on social media--

--I decided to give my hand puppet some hair, just like in my concept art photo.

So I went to Walmart to buy some yarn- the Red Heart brand. Her brown hair was a "Coffee" brown, while her hair bows were a "Perfect Pink" pink. I made two pigtails into braids using three long pieces of the brown yarn, and I tied them together with pieces of the pink yarn. I then tied the pigtails onto the Oobi-eyes, and I was able to slip the eyes on with ease and make it seem like my hand puppet had hair, as shown here...

(and don't worry: I'll probably do a tutorial on adding "yarn-hair" to Oobi-eyes sometime in the future).

From there, everything was going well; but then reality had come back to sucker-punch me in the face. I remember sitting in my bed one night in the second week of May crying, because I didn't know where my life was going. I had no clue! I wasn't happy with my substitute teaching job; I wasn't thrilled to graduate from OLLU sooner than anticipated; and, as I've said, I was feeling the opposite of what serenity was supposed to be. I write about my mental and emotional struggles in my book Starving Artist: A Writer's Journey through Work, School, and... Adulting (2018).

I also wrote about how I had somehow found my way out of this hole that I was in. In my book, I mention Serena moving the covers to get my attention, and then showing me the books that I had bought from Amazon:
10-Minute Puppets (2010),

and Box! Castles, Kitchens, and Other Cardboard Creations for Kids (2013)

--both written by puppeteer Noel MacNeal.

Thank God for Serena that night, because that gave me back the spark to actually live again, even though I was soon going to live outside of school for the rest of my life. School was my life; and I wanted to stay in that environment in any way possible--as a student, as an employee--that was home.
(By the way, it was Serena who helped me move my tassel at the OLLU commencement ceremony on May 10, 2018, and she bowed her head to me as a sign of respect and congrats. This served as a reminder that I now had something to look forward to post-school.)

So nowadays, Serena has been living with me. And sometimes, her mom who we call "Mombo" (rhymes with "combo," when you think about it) would stop by and visit.

(From Left to Right: Serena, me, and Mombo)

Okay, how can one describe Mombo? Well, it's pretty straightforward: Mombo embodies everything about my own mother--from the long gray hair right down to her speech. Funny story: I had a Cherry Coke in a koozie, and Mombo strolls by and says "Oh, is that alcohol?"--like my own mom who knows that I would occasionally drink, Mombo knows it too-- and I was like "Get real! It's a Cherry Coke!" She gives me a "Mmm hmmmmmmm" ("Yeah right") and strolls off. Yeah, like Mom, Mombo will speak her mind.

So me, Serena, and Mombo are like this: Serena is the child; Mombo is the mother figure/critical one; and I'm... well, just me. I'd say we're one happy family. And I'm happy.

And I have you to thank, Serena.

Introductory Post (NEW WEBSITE!)

This may sound funny but... I TRULY AM living with a hand puppet. And her name is Serena.

Serena is adventurous, always busy doing something, silly, and of course... talkative. (BTW, this may give my twin sister a run for her money, because SHE's also talkative... and silly.)

I recently took up the art of puppetry--studying the techniques of many of the most popular puppeteers like Shari Lewis, Noel MacNeal, Jerry Nelson, etc.; and growing up watching shows like Sesame Street, Bear in the Big Blue House, Oobi, and Veggietales. However, Oobi was part of how Serena was created, because I liked the idea of the simple hand puppet (and I'll share more of Serena's origins on this blog), as well as the art itself.

Now this blog is going to mainly revolve around good ol' little Serena, especially with the upcoming series SerenaTalksALot. I'll also test out and/or try to reengineer some techniques that I've learned from my long-time puppeteer idols. Every once in a while, I'll do product reviews on toys/products that revolve around the content that I would focus on this blog (For example, I got to know a puppet named Dylan... Well, you'll see later on in this blog). And I'll even write about the different adventures that Serena will get into. (Like I said, she's adventurous.)

So Serena... Do you want to write something on here before we start blogging?
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…
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…
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Um, Serena? You're putting dots on here. How about typing some words now?
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…
What wORDS?
OOOH... WORDS ARE BIG NOW!
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Serena, you hit the "Caps Lock" button by mistake. I fixed it.
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NO NO PUT IT BACK ON!!!! THESE PEOPLE NEED TO HEAR ME TALK!!!!
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How can anyone hear you if you're just typing---?
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BIG WORDS MEAN BIG VOICE!!!
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Anyway, see guys? Serena is very, very talkative, as you saw here. So come check out our blog!

…
--Uh, Veronica? How do you spell a word?
What word?
--You know, that sound you make with your mouth when you're blowing a raspberry?
How am I supposed to know that?
--Oh. … Wait. Caps are not on... tHERE WE GO!!! YAY!!!!