TV Funhouse

Context & Trivia

The Anipals represent an uncommon hybrid technique in television: hand-operated felt puppets sharing the frame with real animals, producing results that are simultaneously unsettling and absurdly comic. The main cast includes Xabu the dog, Hojo the turtle, Whiskers the cat, Chickie the chicken, and Fogey. Robert Smigel —also the puppeteer and voice behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog— voices several of these characters; the rest of the vocal cast includes Brian Stack, Dino Stamatopoulos, Jon Glaser, Tommy Blacha, and Jackie Hoffman, among others. The visual concept pushed the boundaries of what was feasible for television at the time: an Anipal puppet interacting with real people on the streets of New York, or a cat puppet giving birth to real kittens while screaming obscenities at her husband.

Before the Comedy Central premiere, Fox commissioned a pilot in 1998 —a darker version parodying Bozo's Circus, with Smigel himself playing a half-drunk clown named Prozo. That project was never broadcast. The show-within-a-show conceit —a dog Anipal breaking through the host's image to reveal TV Funhouse— was conceived as a deliberate tribute to the 1960s and 70s animated series Archie's Funhouse.

Filming live animals alongside puppets made every shoot tedious and expensive, and according to Smigel the series went over budget on every single episode. Only eight episodes were produced, airing between December 2000 and January 2001, with no second season. The 2008 DVD release includes outtakes that document those difficulties firsthand —a turtle exposing itself, rabbits bursting through a door— exactly the kind of uncontrollable footage that illustrates why the puppet-live animal hybrid technique was as maddening as it was original.