What are people puppets?

What in the world are people puppets? People keep popping up my site when using this search term. I had no idea that ‘people puppets’ exist. To me this just seems like a very ambiguous name for a ‘human puppet‘ - and you all know what I think of that term!

As it turns out, some basic research has turned up a number of Christian ministry puppet sites. Puppets are highly popular for use in churches - they make great ways of teaching to younger kids the lessons in the Bible - and my guess is this is just a marketing term used by the Christian ministry puppet sellers to promote their puppets in a simple and descriptive way. From the looks of it, ‘people puppets’ are either of a muppet-type design or glove puppets, and are generally used to create a sort of brand name by those who produce them. Also, the puppets tend to be of human characters, so a simple way to make the ‘brand’ memorable is to call them something descriptive.

I personally find the term confusing, since human puppets can range from marionettes to rod puppets, from finger puppets to … well, anything really. That and ‘people puppet’ muddies the water between what is an actual puppet type, and what is simply a marketing issue.

So that solves! ‘People’ puppets are really just a way to avoid using the trademarked term ‘muppet’ (see this post for more on that), but still allows predominantly Christian ministry sites to cash in on the mental image people have of those sorts of puppets.

Please, if you’re looking for info on ‘people puppets’, either do another search, or check out my posts on mouth puppets and muppet-type puppets, or glove puppets.