Charlie Chaplin Puppet
Dublin Core
Title
Charlie Chaplin Puppet
Subject
Charlie Chaplin
Description
How can we archive a mystery?
Catalogued by the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum on March 14th, 1997, this artefact raises exactly this question. Entitled ‘Charlie Chaplin Puppet’ (BDCM, 68326), the artefact is composed of various mixed-media elements, including a painted doll’s head and hands, red string, seemingly hand-sewn clothing, a fabric torso, and grey plastic hooks in lieu of doll-like limbs. These elements work in combination to recreate the likeness of American silent film star and comedy actor Charlie Chaplin. Animated using a horizontal control bar, it evokes similar Chaplin memorabilia, such as Dancing Charlie, a cardboard puppet mass-produced in Britain in the 1930s which can also be found within this collection. Beyond its surface similarities to other Chaplin memorabilia, however, the origins of this puppet remain enigmatic.
On his own encounter with a Chaplin puppet during childhood, Alan Bilton writes that ‘I was terrified of Charlie Chaplin […] the puppet: an 8-inch wooden doll mysteriously (where had he come from? whose was he?) sequestered at the back of a cupboard in our living room’ (Bilton, 78). What is particularly striking about his account is that the origin of his fear centres around its mystery: the things that he does not know, which ascribe his puppet (and perhaps, due to its own mysterious origin, this artefact) with an uncanny quality. The composition of the puppet—and particularly its less polished elements, such as the shoes, the hooks, and the clothing—suggest that it was likely handmade, perhaps with the parts of a Chaplin doll. As a result, it cannot be identified with a company or publisher, shrouding its creator in anonymity and offering a searing indictment of the prioritisation of companies over individual creators when acquiring or maintaining the rights to a creation. Indeed, the struggle concerning the archiving of objects lacking identifying information has been a central concern of many archivists; the Regional Peel Archive, for example, write that ‘[r]ecords that have passed through numerous hands are more likely to have become fragmented or incurred changes’ (RPA, 2016).
Despite this fragmentation, however, it is possible to gesture towards potential origins for this artefact. The first celluloid toy was produced in 1869, but plastic did not become the dominant mode of toy production until the plastic boom of the mid-20th Century, particularly after World War II, when producers shifted focus from the war effort and towards consumer goods (Knight, 2014). With this in mind, although there is no definitive date for the puppet’s creation, we can extrapolate from its use of multiple plastics that it would likely have been made at some point between 1945 and the archive’s acquisition in 1997.
Furthermore, although specific information about the creator, publisher, and copyright holder(s) for this artefact have since been lost, information about the creation can also be gleaned from its format: a puppet. Puppetry has a rich history in pedagogy, used often as a means of developing empathy in children. As recently as 2020 and 2023, psychological studies have been launched in order to investigate the use of puppets to evoke positive responses to immigrants (Jones, 2020), and in social development of autistic teenagers (Karaolis, 2023). Most significantly for this object, however, puppetry is central to pedagogy in Czechoslovakia: Bogatryev writes that ‘[m]ore often than not children experience their first contact with native literature and folktales in schools by means of puppet theatre’ (Bogatryev, 1999).
Although it cannot be definitively stated that this puppet originates from Czechoslovakia—puppetry also plays a key role in Russian folk theatre, for example, as Bogatryev goes on to discuss—a nonetheless compelling argument can be made in its favour due to its depiction of Charlie Chaplin. Following the Second World War in Czechoslovakia (and, arguably, Eastern Europe as a whole), Hollywood stars were often framed as agents of United States cultural imperialism, particularly against the emerging backdrop of the Cold War. As the July 1950 edition of Kino (a Czechoslovakian state-controlled film magazine) summarises: ‘Hollywood stars paved the way for American films to flood European cinemas; behind them […] came—oblivious to the general public—powerful Wall Street bankers whose loans fuelled the international operations of the US military. Behind them came the soldiers’ (Kino, 349).
This scepticism and suspicion did not extend to Chaplin, who became an enduring and immensely popular figure to Czech cinemagoers. Examining the role of Chaplin’s filmography in Czech Communist propaganda of the late 1940s and 1950s, Jindřiška Bláhová argues that ‘Chaplin was, without exaggeration, the favourite Hollywood star of Czechoslovak Communists after the Second World War’ (Bláhová, 321). After the nationalisation of the Czech film industry in August 1945, the distribution rights for Chaplin’s satire The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1945) was acquired for a staggering $50,000 dollars, at least five times the average individual film price of $3000-$10,000 (NAČR, 1948). In 1947, after the theatrical release of The Great Dictator in Czech cinemas, the film industry went on to purchase six of Chaplin’s comedy shorts, which were screened at the Charlie Chaplin Festival (NAČR, 1947).
Bláhová continues: ‘Chaplin was presented to the Czechoslovak public as an outcast and a progressive artist and that these two main tropes served as a platform upon which general tensions between capitalism and socialism could be articulated and various anti-American narratives could be constructed’ (Bláhová, 323). With this in mind, the association of this object with Chaplin’s film The Tramp (Chaplin, 1915) can be problematised as the puppet also shares similarities to his 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin, 1947); the puppet’s top hat, cane, and pinstriped trousers arguably bear a closer likeness to the latter than the former. Monsieur Verdoux was critically successful upon its general release in Czechoslovakia in 1948, receiving ‘more press attention and initiating more discussion than any other movie that was shown in the country in the second half of the 1940s’ (Bláhová, 322), standing in stark contrast to the film’s critical failure in the United States.
With all of this in mind, the puppet’s lack of association with a publisher or company can be contextualised as part of the dominant anti-capitalist ideologies at play in Czechoslovakia at the time. Equally, the enduring popularity of Chaplin puppets created by contemporary Czech companies (such as Richi) points directly to other Chaplin artefacts that can provide additional context for this one. As a result, I would suggest that this puppet was likely produced in Czechoslovakia in the 1940s or 1950s, perhaps in conjunction with the theatrical release of Monsieur Verdoux.
Regardless of the puppet’s origins, which cannot be definitively stated, this artefact nonetheless speaks to the enduring popularity of Charlie Chaplin iconography in film merchandising, as well as the appeal of puppet toys to children and adults alike. Indeed, puppets are perhaps unique among other toys of their kind due to their complex social element: Stengelin et al argue that, in developmental science, ‘puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions’ (Stengelin et al, 1). As a result, this artefact undermines the perceived binary of toys for children versus collector’s items for adults, problematising this distinction and revealing it to be hierarchical. Overall, whether used in pedagogy, treated as a collector’s item, or perhaps handmade by a Czechoslovakian cinemagoer, this artefact remains a fascinating example of the wide-ranging and complex role of toys in film and television merchandising.
Works Cited
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. ‘Charlie Chaplin Puppet.’ Item No. 68326, https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/explore/item/68326/, Accessed 11th November 2024.
Bilton, Alan. ‘Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins, and Toys in the Films of Charlie Chaplin.’ Silent Film Comedy and American Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 78-110.
Bláhová, Jindřiška. ‘No Place for Peace-Mongers: Charlie Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Czechoslovak Communist Propaganda.’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2009, pp. 321-342.
Bogatyrev, Pyotr. ‘Czech Puppet Theatre and Russian Folk Theatre.’ TDR, Vol. 43, No. 3, fall 1999. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Gale Literature Resource Centre.
Chaplin, Charlie. The Tramp. General Film Company, 1915.
Chaplin, Charlie. Monsieur Verdoux. United Artists, 1947.
Jones, Siân E., et al. ‘No strings attached: Using 2D paper dolls and 3D toy puppets to promote young children’s positive responses towards immigrants.’ The Psychology of Education Review (Online), vol. 44, no. 2, 2020, pp. 12–21, https://doi.org/10.53841/bpsper.2020.44.2.12.
Karaolis, Olivia. ‘Not Just a Toy: Puppets for Autistic Teenagers.’ Youth, vol. 3, no. 4, 2023, pp. 1174–82, https://doi.org/10.3390/youth3040074.
Knight, Laurence. ‘A brief history of plastics, natural and synthetic.’ BBC News, 17th May 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27442625.
National Archives of the Czech Republic (NAČR). ‘Distrubuce v roce 1948.’ NAČR, Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Archive, 19/7, Archival Unit 660, 1, 43-4.
National Archives of the Czech Republic (NAČR). ‘Stary Chaplin stale živy.’ Filmové noviny, 31st May 1947. Department of State Files, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD, Decimal File 1955-59. 811.452/2-2555.
Region of Peel Archives, ‘How Do Archivists Describe Collections?’ Peeling the Past, 29th February 2016.
Stengelin, et al. 'Children over-imitate adults and peers more than puppets.' Developmental Science, Vol. 26, No. 2, March 2023.
Catalogued by the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum on March 14th, 1997, this artefact raises exactly this question. Entitled ‘Charlie Chaplin Puppet’ (BDCM, 68326), the artefact is composed of various mixed-media elements, including a painted doll’s head and hands, red string, seemingly hand-sewn clothing, a fabric torso, and grey plastic hooks in lieu of doll-like limbs. These elements work in combination to recreate the likeness of American silent film star and comedy actor Charlie Chaplin. Animated using a horizontal control bar, it evokes similar Chaplin memorabilia, such as Dancing Charlie, a cardboard puppet mass-produced in Britain in the 1930s which can also be found within this collection. Beyond its surface similarities to other Chaplin memorabilia, however, the origins of this puppet remain enigmatic.
On his own encounter with a Chaplin puppet during childhood, Alan Bilton writes that ‘I was terrified of Charlie Chaplin […] the puppet: an 8-inch wooden doll mysteriously (where had he come from? whose was he?) sequestered at the back of a cupboard in our living room’ (Bilton, 78). What is particularly striking about his account is that the origin of his fear centres around its mystery: the things that he does not know, which ascribe his puppet (and perhaps, due to its own mysterious origin, this artefact) with an uncanny quality. The composition of the puppet—and particularly its less polished elements, such as the shoes, the hooks, and the clothing—suggest that it was likely handmade, perhaps with the parts of a Chaplin doll. As a result, it cannot be identified with a company or publisher, shrouding its creator in anonymity and offering a searing indictment of the prioritisation of companies over individual creators when acquiring or maintaining the rights to a creation. Indeed, the struggle concerning the archiving of objects lacking identifying information has been a central concern of many archivists; the Regional Peel Archive, for example, write that ‘[r]ecords that have passed through numerous hands are more likely to have become fragmented or incurred changes’ (RPA, 2016).
Despite this fragmentation, however, it is possible to gesture towards potential origins for this artefact. The first celluloid toy was produced in 1869, but plastic did not become the dominant mode of toy production until the plastic boom of the mid-20th Century, particularly after World War II, when producers shifted focus from the war effort and towards consumer goods (Knight, 2014). With this in mind, although there is no definitive date for the puppet’s creation, we can extrapolate from its use of multiple plastics that it would likely have been made at some point between 1945 and the archive’s acquisition in 1997.
Furthermore, although specific information about the creator, publisher, and copyright holder(s) for this artefact have since been lost, information about the creation can also be gleaned from its format: a puppet. Puppetry has a rich history in pedagogy, used often as a means of developing empathy in children. As recently as 2020 and 2023, psychological studies have been launched in order to investigate the use of puppets to evoke positive responses to immigrants (Jones, 2020), and in social development of autistic teenagers (Karaolis, 2023). Most significantly for this object, however, puppetry is central to pedagogy in Czechoslovakia: Bogatryev writes that ‘[m]ore often than not children experience their first contact with native literature and folktales in schools by means of puppet theatre’ (Bogatryev, 1999).
Although it cannot be definitively stated that this puppet originates from Czechoslovakia—puppetry also plays a key role in Russian folk theatre, for example, as Bogatryev goes on to discuss—a nonetheless compelling argument can be made in its favour due to its depiction of Charlie Chaplin. Following the Second World War in Czechoslovakia (and, arguably, Eastern Europe as a whole), Hollywood stars were often framed as agents of United States cultural imperialism, particularly against the emerging backdrop of the Cold War. As the July 1950 edition of Kino (a Czechoslovakian state-controlled film magazine) summarises: ‘Hollywood stars paved the way for American films to flood European cinemas; behind them […] came—oblivious to the general public—powerful Wall Street bankers whose loans fuelled the international operations of the US military. Behind them came the soldiers’ (Kino, 349).
This scepticism and suspicion did not extend to Chaplin, who became an enduring and immensely popular figure to Czech cinemagoers. Examining the role of Chaplin’s filmography in Czech Communist propaganda of the late 1940s and 1950s, Jindřiška Bláhová argues that ‘Chaplin was, without exaggeration, the favourite Hollywood star of Czechoslovak Communists after the Second World War’ (Bláhová, 321). After the nationalisation of the Czech film industry in August 1945, the distribution rights for Chaplin’s satire The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1945) was acquired for a staggering $50,000 dollars, at least five times the average individual film price of $3000-$10,000 (NAČR, 1948). In 1947, after the theatrical release of The Great Dictator in Czech cinemas, the film industry went on to purchase six of Chaplin’s comedy shorts, which were screened at the Charlie Chaplin Festival (NAČR, 1947).
Bláhová continues: ‘Chaplin was presented to the Czechoslovak public as an outcast and a progressive artist and that these two main tropes served as a platform upon which general tensions between capitalism and socialism could be articulated and various anti-American narratives could be constructed’ (Bláhová, 323). With this in mind, the association of this object with Chaplin’s film The Tramp (Chaplin, 1915) can be problematised as the puppet also shares similarities to his 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin, 1947); the puppet’s top hat, cane, and pinstriped trousers arguably bear a closer likeness to the latter than the former. Monsieur Verdoux was critically successful upon its general release in Czechoslovakia in 1948, receiving ‘more press attention and initiating more discussion than any other movie that was shown in the country in the second half of the 1940s’ (Bláhová, 322), standing in stark contrast to the film’s critical failure in the United States.
With all of this in mind, the puppet’s lack of association with a publisher or company can be contextualised as part of the dominant anti-capitalist ideologies at play in Czechoslovakia at the time. Equally, the enduring popularity of Chaplin puppets created by contemporary Czech companies (such as Richi) points directly to other Chaplin artefacts that can provide additional context for this one. As a result, I would suggest that this puppet was likely produced in Czechoslovakia in the 1940s or 1950s, perhaps in conjunction with the theatrical release of Monsieur Verdoux.
Regardless of the puppet’s origins, which cannot be definitively stated, this artefact nonetheless speaks to the enduring popularity of Charlie Chaplin iconography in film merchandising, as well as the appeal of puppet toys to children and adults alike. Indeed, puppets are perhaps unique among other toys of their kind due to their complex social element: Stengelin et al argue that, in developmental science, ‘puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions’ (Stengelin et al, 1). As a result, this artefact undermines the perceived binary of toys for children versus collector’s items for adults, problematising this distinction and revealing it to be hierarchical. Overall, whether used in pedagogy, treated as a collector’s item, or perhaps handmade by a Czechoslovakian cinemagoer, this artefact remains a fascinating example of the wide-ranging and complex role of toys in film and television merchandising.
Works Cited
The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. ‘Charlie Chaplin Puppet.’ Item No. 68326, https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/explore/item/68326/, Accessed 11th November 2024.
Bilton, Alan. ‘Accelerated Bodies and Jumping Jacks: Automata, Mannequins, and Toys in the Films of Charlie Chaplin.’ Silent Film Comedy and American Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 78-110.
Bláhová, Jindřiška. ‘No Place for Peace-Mongers: Charlie Chaplin, Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Czechoslovak Communist Propaganda.’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2009, pp. 321-342.
Bogatyrev, Pyotr. ‘Czech Puppet Theatre and Russian Folk Theatre.’ TDR, Vol. 43, No. 3, fall 1999. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Gale Literature Resource Centre.
Chaplin, Charlie. The Tramp. General Film Company, 1915.
Chaplin, Charlie. Monsieur Verdoux. United Artists, 1947.
Jones, Siân E., et al. ‘No strings attached: Using 2D paper dolls and 3D toy puppets to promote young children’s positive responses towards immigrants.’ The Psychology of Education Review (Online), vol. 44, no. 2, 2020, pp. 12–21, https://doi.org/10.53841/bpsper.2020.44.2.12.
Karaolis, Olivia. ‘Not Just a Toy: Puppets for Autistic Teenagers.’ Youth, vol. 3, no. 4, 2023, pp. 1174–82, https://doi.org/10.3390/youth3040074.
Knight, Laurence. ‘A brief history of plastics, natural and synthetic.’ BBC News, 17th May 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27442625.
National Archives of the Czech Republic (NAČR). ‘Distrubuce v roce 1948.’ NAČR, Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party Archive, 19/7, Archival Unit 660, 1, 43-4.
National Archives of the Czech Republic (NAČR). ‘Stary Chaplin stale živy.’ Filmové noviny, 31st May 1947. Department of State Files, Record Group 59, National Archives, College Park, MD, Decimal File 1955-59. 811.452/2-2555.
Region of Peel Archives, ‘How Do Archivists Describe Collections?’ Peeling the Past, 29th February 2016.
Stengelin, et al. 'Children over-imitate adults and peers more than puppets.' Developmental Science, Vol. 26, No. 2, March 2023.
Source
The Tramp (Chaplin, 1915), Monsieur Verdoux (Chaplin, 1947)
Contributor
Charlie Chaplin
Relation
Dancing Charlie
Format
Puppet
Language
N/A
Type
Toy
Identifier
BDCM 68326
Coverage
Silent Cinema, Charlie Chaplin, Puppetry
Files
Collection
Citation
“Charlie Chaplin Puppet,” Archival Encounters: Digital Exhibitions form the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, accessed January 22, 2025, https://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/archivalencounters/items/show/51.