Squirt is just one of many great-looking puppet characters that inhabits The Big Magic Book.

The full pilot for The Big Magic Book (see previous post) is now available to watch online. There are a lot of very talented people behind this project, including a few names that should be familiar to PuppetVision readers; the fantastic looking puppets in the show were mostly built by Pasha Romanowski and the great-looking animated opening sequence was put together by Nate Pacheco, who also built a couple of the minor puppet characters. The sets looks great, the music is good and there’s a lot of high-energy fun and silliness throughout the entire episode.

Still, to me The Big Magic Book feels like a cake that’s been baked with a lot of great ingredients, but a recipe that isn’t quite there yet. The one thing the show really seems to need is a good story editor. There’s lots of great-looking characters, but there’s so many that it’s hard to get really invested in most of them. The show is really high energy, but almost to the point of being spastic. Also, the puppet voices are dubbed and it really shows (one of the quickest ways to create a disconnect between an audience and a puppet character is to use a canned or dubbed voice).

Still, it’s important to remember that this is a pilot and a work-in-progress and a really good one at that. Overall, I think that The Big Magic Book has tons of potential. You’ll need to go through the hassle of downloading and installing the Div/X web player to watch the pilot, but go take a look at The Big Magic Book and see what you think.

Update: Apparently the video has been pulled off the net. All that’s seen at the link now is a collection of Muppet videos. Too bad.