SST: Teeny Little Superguy

SESAME STREET TUESDAY

Ladies and gentlemen, the Teeny Little Superguy:



As I watched this again after a dozen years or more, I found myself thinking the whole time, "How did they do this?" How did they combine the animated drawings on the cups with the stop-motion animation of the household objects? Fortunately, the internet is really smart and it found me a really fascinating (in my opinion, at least) commentary from the Teeny Little Superguy's creator, Paul Fierlinger:

What started TLSG was my need to secure a series; I craved steady income. I was told by Dave Connell (CTW’s vice president and Program Director) that there is no chance for a freelancer to get a series simply because it is out of the reach of one guy to produce a steady supply of spots every week. This was way before computer graphics technology became sophisticated enough to handle color and huge memory storage requirements, around 1985.

I focused on figuring out a way to prove Dave wrong and came up with a way to draw entire sets of walking, talking, running, jumping cycles of a little man on animation cels... But instead of cycling them as flat sheets on an animation stand, I could roll them up to look like cups and move them around real, household objects – just the way kids do when they play with ordinary objects. The advantage was that other props didn’t have to be drawn, neither did backgrounds, nor did the character have to be drawn in many sizes from different angles – all that was needed was to rotate the same cups and shoot the sets from different angles.

We ended up cutting the character out of the cels and pasting to the inside of Dixie cups with Scotch spray (it’s transparent) and ran a test, using our house as backgrounds... We all followed Sesame Street’s curriculum of topics and I was given a contract to develop the series. I had a couple of months to create the hundreds of cups that were needed to play out any possible scenario and create the soundtracks.

What's your favorite Teeny Little Superguy episode? The kid learning to ride an eggbeater? The kid who wants to get a pet spoon? Feel free to comment below.