The Puppetoon Movie

Name: The Puppetoon Movie
Duration: 1 h 19 min

1hr 19m

3.4/5 (104)

1hr 19m
3.4/5 (104)

The Puppetoon Movie is a tribute to the genius of special-effects maven George Pal. Long before assembling such dynamite feature films as The War of the… More Details »

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Release Date:

Jun 12, 1987

Runtime:

1hr 19m

Synopsis

The Puppetoon Movie is a tribute to the genius of special-effects maven George Pal. Long before assembling such dynamite feature films as The War of the Worlds, tom thumb and The Time Machine, Pal was top man in the field of stop-motion photography. Utilizing as many a five thousand separate wooden figures for each of his short subjects (variously titled Puppetoons and Merry Madcaps), Pal turned out such gems as Tubby the Tuba and John Henry and the Inky Poo. This compilation contains nine shorts, some produced while Pal was still working in the Netherlands (he barely escaped Hitler's deadly wrath after producing a potent anti-Nazi parable), others while he was releasing his films through the facilities of Paramount Pictures in the 1940s. The Puppetoon Movie is hosted by a star who can truly say that he owes his very existence to the standards set by George Pal: Art Clokey's whimsical eraser boy Gumby.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Letterboxd User Reviews

3.4

RATINGS 0 FANS

3.4

Jul 7, 2025

Put this on for your least favorite kid for a fun evening of trauma they'll never be able to explain or find again

56 Likes

coneyzz

Aug 20, 2021

Kind of funny to imagine a kid in 1987, accustomed to Star Wars, Transformers, and Pee-wee Herman, watching this and being alternately bored and puzzled. But for fans of stop-motion animation it's a pretty cool little compendium of early work by George Pal. The Puppetoons…

25 Likes

Joe

Apr 14, 2023

Loose plot summary: a T-Rex explains to Gumby about why he went vegan.

21 Likes

colossus5
Aug 17, 2021

Funny to think of this being released in theaters in 1987, since it's just a compilation of George Pal shorts—the kind of thing you'd now watch as a playlist on youtube. But today, for whatever (legal?) reason, this "movie" is easier to find than the original shorts a la…

15 Likes

bwolo

Feb 7, 2023

how does one give a star rating to a film that is essentially a collection of shorts stuck together with a silly little framing device thats barely enough to call it a movie? once u figure that out, what if some of them are 5 star miracles of stop motion and others are…

10 Likes

emma

May 8, 2021

As a historical reference point for stop-motion animation, THE PUPPETOON MOVIE fosters a suitably broad appreciation for the voluminous level of creative effort expended by filmmaker George Pal’s imaginative features and most certainly where he got his start, in short…

9 Likes

Russ Davies
Dec 28, 2025

Gumby was in this and he was a director!!! I don't know if this counts as a spoiler or not but the movie--which is really just a compilation of seven of George Pal's claymated shorts that he made in the early to mid 40s---but it ends with all these commercial icons coming…

10 Likes

mattstechel

May 24, 2021

Saccharine and surreal at the same time- George Pal's stop-motion Puppetoons are indeed wonderfully creative and imaginative. And it's a shame they aren't as well known as the Warner Brothers cartoons or Walt Disney movies that were being made around the same time. That…

9 Likes

drmorbius79

Apr 9, 2026

A package film that features George Pal's very peculiar shorts from primarily the 1940s. Both his character designs and his subjects are an acquired taste, some of which I enjoyed but many of which left me baffled. There's also not much reason to watch this indelicately…

4 Likes

Michael Shawn