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A honey-colored giant of a bear leans into the camera, sniffs, and announces you smell nice today. Jim Henson Television's gentle giant anchored Playhouse Disney mornings, and ended every episode on the balcony singing goodbye with Luna the moon.
The Henson sitcom in full-body animatronic dinosaur suits — and quietly one of the darkest shows ABC ever aired. Baby Sinclair's "Not the mama!" and "I'm the baby, gotta love me!" were everywhere in the early 90s, right up until the finale ended the series with an actual ice-age extinction.
A puppet show on Nick Jr. where a sorceress-in-training and her band of bumbling friends lived inside a giant's wind-up music-box castle. Dragons tripped over their own tails, a bat crash-landed insisting he meant to do that, and every episode wrapped adventure in giggles. For most 90s kids the real memory is the reruns — a Nick Jr. staple that kept the castle alive well past its original run.
Jim Henson's underground puppet world of Fraggles, Doozers, and Gorgs — a whole ecosystem quietly built to teach peace and interdependence, wrapped in songs. If you were a 90s kid, you caught it in reruns, and "Dance your cares away" is still lodged somewhere in your head.
Shari Lewis's sock-puppet ewe was already thirty-five years old when 90s kids met her on PBS's Lamb Chop's Play-Along. The show gave the decade one of its permanent earworms: "The Song That Doesn't End," which is now playing in your head again. You're welcome.
Icelandic aerobics champion Magnús Scheving created this live-action-and-puppet carnival as an impossibly expensive argument for why kids should move. Sportacus, the flipping mustachioed hero elf, wages an eternal campaign against Robbie Rotten, whose sole mission is engineering town-wide laziness. When it hit Nick Jr. in 2004, its premiere week was Nickelodeon's highest-rated in three years.
Fred Rogers walked in the door singing "Won't You Be My Neighbor?", traded his jacket for a cardigan and his shoes for blue sneakers, and for 33 years told children they were special exactly as they were. The Trolley to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, the fish, the traffic light — it was television slowed to the speed of a child, and nothing else has ever felt quite like it.
A guy in a jumpsuit and two wisecracking robots, silhouetted against the worst movies ever made, talking back to the screen so you didn't have to. Mystery Science Theater 3000 turned bad cinema into appointment comedy — and taught a generation that heckling could be an art form.
Snape, Snape, Severus Snape. If your brain just added the next line, you were on YouTube in 2007. Neil Cicierega's felt-puppet Hogwarts reduced the wizarding world to bickering hand puppets — and produced one of early YouTube's most-watched videos ever.
Nickelodeon's summer host was a popsicle stick with googly eyes and a jelly-bean nose. He wanted you to write to him, and he sang you the address to prove it — which is why a generation can still recite a PO box in Manhattan.
The creaking door, the dolly shot down to the crypt, and then HIM: a rotting puppet sitting up with a shriek of laughter. "Hello, boils and ghouls!" The Cryptkeeper's puns were worse than the murders — and the murders were on HBO, so they were very, very murdery.