Or I would read to my son with the puppet and make his personality come to life and show a surprise reaction when my son said something that surprised me or him laughing or sad or whatever, and I’d really rehearse those emotions with him because it makes it fun. Every chance I got, whether it’s other songs I wasn’t performing, I would mouth those songs with the puppet. That rings true in football and life and if you’re trying to work a puppet for The Masked Singer. The physical side, the creative side and the time on task. I can picture it, rolling his little neck… TVLINE | I love that even though you’re no longer a pro athlete, you’re still on the sidelines, stretching out Baby Alien before the big game. So he was instrumental in Baby Alien coming to life.
After that, we continued to work with certain notes, rehearsing with the song, rehearsing it at home, rehearsing with him on Zoom of where to put the puppet’s head placement, his hand, how to work all that. There’s essentially four judges and a crowd that you’re puppeteering for. You need to do that with your wrist immediately when you put it in the puppet: how far right, how far left, how far up, how far down? And then make circles and figure out your range.” And once you know all those extremes, you know your boundaries and you work within those boundaries.Īnd then you take into account what setting you’re in. He’s like, “Just like a car or any kind of machine, you calibrate it to what it can and can’t do, where it can and can’t go. I’m really thankful to the people at The Masked Singer and to Ron, the puppeteer expert and coach, who taught me some basics early on and then kept really expanding upon those basic skills to try to get the most out of the puppet’s personality, out of Baby Alien.
TVLINE | I can’t find anything in your background about a puppetry career, so tell me what it was like to have that skill thrust upon you.