Weinerville
Marc Weiner's head on a tiny puppet body, a mayor named Dottie, a dinosaur skeleton who wanted kids to leave him aloney, and two audience members per episode shoved into the Weinerizer. Nickelodeon's strangest afternoon show of 1993.
Marc Weiner was a street performer and club comic in the late 1970s and a writer and occasional performer on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, and somewhere along the way he invented the head puppet: a small puppet body with a hole on top for a human head, so a performer could be a whole cast without ever leaving the stage. He built the bit for nightclubs, where he wanted to switch puppets without making the audience wait. "I was coming up with all these head puppet ideas and getting them on many different TV shows," he later said, "and a producer suggested that I could actually have my own show." A game-show pilot he made for Comedy Central in 1991, "That's Not Fair," tested as better suited to children, and Nickelodeon turned it into Weinerville.
The show premiered on July 11, 1993, inside a two-hour Sunday block, and by that November it had moved to weekday afternoons. It was taped at Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando on a giant puppet stage built to look like a town. Weiner played the host as himself and, with his own head on pre-taped puppet bodies, most of the town: Mayor Dottie, Baby Jeffrey, Cocktail Frank and his house band, Captain Bob in yellow rain gear, and Boney, a sneaker-wearing dinosaur skeleton and open parody of Barney whose sign-off was "I'm Boney, I'm Boney, leave me aloney!" Old Mr. Magoo and Batfink cartoons ran between the sketches. Every episode ended with two audience members being "Weinerized": heads through a hole above a miniature puppet body, then a Playland stunt contest for the Golden Hot Dog, with a scoop of green slime for the winner as the "Special Topping."
A forty-episode second season premiered in March 1994 and aired on weekday afternoons, and the Weinerville puppets also hosted Nickelodeon's New Year's Eve countdowns in 1993 and 1994. Only 68 regular episodes were made, followed by a handful of specials that ran through a 1996 election special. Weiner never really left the network: from 2000 on, kids who had watched Weinerville heard his voice again as the Map and Swiper the fox on Dora the Explorer.
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