A dim-witted moose named Marshall and his sidekick Buck were the stars of the web’s first puppet web series, The Marshall and Buck Show.

Wok With Marshall was the first episode of The Marshall and Buck Show, which was – to my knowledge anyway – the internet’s first puppet web series. The series was built around two characters I originally created for my Bear Town project, Marshall and Buck. Each episode featured Marshall and Buck engaging in some kind of activity like cooking, acting, or putting on a magic show that would go horribly awry. Four episodes of the show were sporadically produced between 1997 and 2000, starting with Wok With Marshall which was shot in 1997, but didn’t premiere online until March 10, 2000.

Unfortunately, because I don’t own any of the master tapes from the series it hasn’t been available online for a long time, but I did recently find a high quality dub of Wok With Marshall so I thought I would post it to YouTube for posterity. It’s a little rough, but keep in mind that we did make it over ten years ago.

The puppeteers in the video are the brilliant Shawn Hazelton (Marshall), myself (Buck) and Kim Mahony and Pauline Antonopoulos, who performed the Happy Meal puppets and Betsy, Marshall and Buck’s cow. The video was directed by Brenda Tan, who’s also credited as the writer although I seem to remember that roughly half of this was ad-libbed on set.

Cross-posted from The Bear Town Production Journal.

*Note: I’m pretty sure The Marshall and Buck Show was “first” but that’s also very self-serving to say, so if someone out there has an example of an earlier show please drop me an email with details, I’d love to know about and share it on PuppetVision.