31 Minutes

Context & Trivia

Álvaro Díaz and Pedro Peirano, co-founders of production company Aplaplac, are also the show's principal puppeteers and voice performers. Díaz operates and voices Juan Carlos Bodoque —a rabbit who in the unaired pilot was a green frog and who vanished without explanation after recording his 'Green Report' in that same pilot— while both creators share the manipulation and voice of anchorman Tulio Triviño. The hand-puppet cast also includes Patana (a duck and Tulio's niece), Mario Hugo (a chihuahua reporter) and Juanín Juan Harry (a fluffy white creature who produces the newscast). Self-taught in puppetry, Díaz and Peirano chose hand puppets over animation for reasons of cost, speed and the improvisational freedom the technique allowed on set.

Aplaplac works under the conviction that any object can become a puppet through imagination, a principle that gives the show its deliberately handcrafted visual identity. The unaired pilot also featured a pre-plastic-surgery version of Tulio and a wholly different incarnation of Bodoque, making it a rare document of how radically the characters changed before broadcast. Among production curiosities, Díaz has publicly expressed dissatisfaction with the final version of the song 'Mi Muñeca Me Habló', and producer Karla Estrada was unhappy with the finished puppet design for that segment, feeling it did not represent her Afro-Chilean identity as well as an earlier version had.