Y’all ever think about how we only got Learning New Things About Ourselves almost through pure luck?
Like thinking about how this video actually came to be is just wild. It’s one of my favorite episodes but the more I think about how it actually was put together the more I realized how lucky they were that things worked out the way they did.
Like at first they wanted to do something with the Sides as animals, and they couldn’t figure out how that would work so they decided to do puppets because that would probably be easier.
Well it wasn’t. Like they were really gonna try and make the puppets themselves, only having Logan’s puppet commissioned, and then it just so happens that the guy they got to do the one puppet preferred to make all the puppets that would be used in a project and so asked if he could and they were just like, “Sure okay!”
Which how funny would that have been if you had Logan, the one guy who was against the puppet idea from the beginning, be the one to have the professionally made puppet while everyone else’s was handmade. I imagine they could have done something funny with that bit but I adore how the puppets came out so I’m glad we got what we got.
But then it came down to trying to figure out how to puppet these puppets, and they had Thomas practicing with just a regular hand puppet while he and Joan were also taking online classes from a professional puppeteer. Then they try to actually go and film the puppets and it’s a disaster. Like, if y’all saw that behind the scenes video they did for this episode you saw how exhausted and frustrated they looked.
It really makes one appreciate the art of puppeteering huh? Like, those people have skills.
So now they’re at a point where they’re not sure if this video is ever gonna be made, but then it just so happens that Nate Begle (the guy who was teaching them how to puppet the puppets) just so happens to be working close enough to where they can reach out and ask for help making this video and guess what? The dude knocks out all the puppet scenes in one day.
Like how flipping lucky can ya get?
If he hadn’t been around to do the puppeteering in that episode I wonder what would have happened?
Would they have tried doing it themselves anyway and just going with the best footage they got? Find someone else in the area that they could have hired to do the puppet bits? Would they have just abandoned the puppet idea altogether and just reworked the episode to be done with the Sides as themselves (or even just have the Sides using their puppets) or scrapped the entire video altogether?
So yeah, they really got lucky on this one and I do wonder what their plan would have been if things hadn’t worked out with Nate.