Mickey and Minnie had lost their luster. They lay inert in a case at the auction house like discarded playthings. Their clothes were tattered, their bodies were marred (Minnie had a chip on her nose), and they were more throwaways than the marionettes they once were.
The auction-house staff knew that, even in this condition, one of us auction-goers would look past the damage and see the two as the iconic characters from many of our childhoods. They knew that someone somewhere would want these marionettes just as they would the Mickey AM radio with headphones still in the box on a nearby shelf.
I didn’t want either, but I was drawn to the two marionettes, which were in a glass display case at the front of the auction house – the ones where you have to ask a staffer to retrieve an item and hand it to you. Who could resist a closer look at Mickey and Minnie in any form?
The marionettes had their cardboard controller with tangled strings attached. I flipped over the controller and saw that they were made by a company called Unitrol, and not by the big name in vintage puppets: Pelham. They appeared to be circa 1950s.
Pelham Puppets was the English company that Walt Disney Productions chose in 1953 to make marionettes of Mickey and its other characters. They were made in England until 1970, and according to the company’s website, were best-sellers, with Pinocchio being produced the most.
The best of the lot of Disney marionettes were made in the 1930s by Hestwood Marionette Studio of California and were sold only at Bullock’s Wilshire department store in Los Angeles. They were made of composition, wood and cloth. Those are said to be the most valuable. Hestwood marionettes were licensed by Disney, and the company presented marionette shows in the store during the 1930s.
At auction once, I picked up a teary-eyed little chalkware girl sitting on a suitcase that also sold at Bullock’s, a luxury department store that catered to the rich and famous. The figure was a coin bank.
Several marionettes have crossed my path at auction. There was a group that the auctioneer said had belonged to a theater company (and were in bad shape) and some Indonesian shadow puppets. I also wrote about a man whose after-hours job was magic and marionettes.
As for Mickey and Minnie, Walt Disney hired a puppeteer named Bob Baker to make marionettes of them and other characters for the new Disneyland in California, which opened in 1955. The 5-inch figures were sold in its Fantasyland Shop. A few years later, Baker opened a marionette theater that has entertained children (and adults) for decades. Baker got his first puppet after seeing a show in a department store as a child. It was a Hestwood marionette.
In 1990, Baker was called on to make larger limited-edition replicas of the Bullock’s Mickey and Minnie marionettes.
