When I started writing PuppetVision there was I think exactly one puppet web series – Mario’s Word of The Week – and the term “podcast” didn’t yet apply to videos so it’s pretty incredible that less than three short years later there are now so many people producing shows via video sharing sites like YouTube and Revver that it’s almost impossible to keep up. I started losing track sometime late last year.

Naturally, as YouTube has the biggest share of the online video market it’s where a lot of the neat stuff with puppetry is so rather than do my usual weekly round-up of puppet podcasts this week I thought that I would instead take a look at all the fantastic, fun puppetry on YouTube.

I collect most of the YouTube videos that I write about in the PuppetVision YouTube Group, but there’s much, much more good puppet stuff on YouTube beyond that. Putting together a comprehensive guide to all of it is nearly impossible, but here’s a small sampling of some of the puppetry goodness that people are cooking up on YouTube daily:

Don’t Hold Me Up
A lot of the puppet videos on YouTube are music videos with people lip syncing to music, which is a great way to learn and practice puppetry. Don’t Hold Me Up is a relatively new one by J.J. Graves and friends from Nebraska Christian College. They didn’t use monitors to film this so there are some heads and arms in the shots, but a lot of the puppetry is great, the editing is slick and I think the idea of using puppets to make a song for a video called “Don’t Hold Me Up” is clever. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more great stuff from J.J. and his pals.

Potter Puppet Pals
I’ve mentioned Potter Puppet Pals before (see previous post), a puppet show that grew out of a series of cartoons about a Harry Potter puppet show. While new episodes aren’t frequent, PPP enjoys an audience of millions and is probably the most popular puppet series on the web.

Troy Murphy
Lots of great puppetry stuff is happening in Australia these days, including Troy Murphy’s work. For the past few months he’s been quickly amassing a lot of videos on YouTube including episodes of his show Drag News. The production value might be a little low, but the puppetry is good and the puppets look even better.

Buttons The Radical Boy Scout
The Boy Scouts are for the most part a great organization, but they’re desperately in need of 21st century makeover so this kind of show is an interesting idea. Each episode is built around a different scouting-related theme like learning the Cub Scout promise and stars (naturally) a puppet named Buttons The Radical Boy Scout. It’s produced by a real Scout group too, Boy Scout Troop #68 in Melrose, Minnesota.

Yakking With Faze
Just as the title implies, every installment of this Canadian show features a puppet named Faze (a caricature of his puppeteer Faisal Lodhi) yakking with wrestlers, zombies, film fans and the occasional Canadian celebrity. So far Faisal has logged 35 of these, which is pretty impressive.

Years from now, I think that when this era of puppetry’s history is written the emergence of video sharing sites like YouTube is going to be viewed as a watershed moment. Most of the puppetry you see on YouTube isn’t polished and might not be ready for Hollywood just yet, but if you put this many people experimenting with puppetry in one place and give them access to a potential audience of millions interesting things are bound to happen.

I won’t be surprised if someday soon I’m writing about a puppeteer who’s scored a big deal for a TV show or movie and how they got their start on YouTube.