The show is always very simple and low-budget, showing only the characters and background images or animation. Only puppets appear on the show, except during Precious Roy's hamster sale. Their assistant Chester is shy and often incoherent, and claims to be great at everything. Sifl is the calmer (though less responsible) leader of the show, while Olly is excitable and often breaks into crazed furies. The two main characters are a black sock puppet named Sifl and a white sock puppet named Olly. The first episode aired in 1997, and the show was canceled in 1999. Created and performed by musicians Liam Lynch and Matt Crocco, friends since childhood. “We’re still just doing it for each other.The Sifl and Olly Show was a comedy show on MTV with sock puppets, animation, and music. “We still have no idea we’re really on TV,” Crocco said. For Sifl and Olly, it means they go into a black hole and meet Ben Kenobi.” “The edge in terms of ‘South Park,’ or some movie, they’re usually using a shocking topic you shouldn’t talk about, or bad words. “Our edge is a little different edge,” Lynch said. There’s a traceable line of bad behavior from “Ren and Stimpy” to “Beavis and Butt-head” and then “South Park.” The zeitgeist-defining animated shows that “Sifl & Olly” follow had to out-antic the one before. Indeed, there’s almost a refreshing innocence and lack of guile to the show. When Chester says something weird, and you know he’s weird but didn’t think he would ever say that.” The more you learn about these characters, the more fun it is when they do something unpredictable that’s just slightly out of step. “When people watch for the first time, they’re not sure if they like it. “It’s like Monty Python, in that either you don’t get it at all, or you totally get it and start quoting it all the time,” Crocco said. Their sense of humor is irreverently dry, and “Sifl & Olly” live in a world drenched in random events, oddball characters and unpredictable statements that are funny because they’re so outrageously incongruous. The coolest part is they obviously never go anywhere, but places come to them,” Lynch said. “I always picture them like they have their own little snow globe. It might be the most low-tech show on a major cable network - just a cast of more than 150 sock puppets against psychedelic backdrops that look like a ’60s acid flashback. The show ran there for 18 months before MTV decided to put it on here as well. Lynch sent the tape to MTV Europe, which immediately commissioned more episodes. It would never have lasted as many episodes as it has.” “Originally, Sifl was going to be a cardboard box. The easiest way was with puppets,” he said. “I would have done a stop-action film, but I had no means of doing it. So he decided to make a short film for Crocco as a Christmas gift. They swapped tapes across the Atlantic.Ĭrocco came up with the names Sifl and Olly, and Lynch decided those would be perfect names for puppets. Lynch went to Liverpool, England, to attend the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, founded by Paul McCartney. Their pretend radio broadcasts evolved into the current TV show when Lynch and Crocco went away to school to study music. “But the exact same sense of humor,” Crocco said. Matt would say, ‘Is the caller there?’ and I’d have to keep doing personalities. We were doing ‘Calls From the Public’ even then. “I still have tapes of shows we did when we were 10 and went on a camping trip. “We’d make up songs, put on fake English accents and interview each other and act stupid,” Lynch said. “Matt and I have made up random shows ever since we were little kids bored in Ohio,” added Lynch, 28, the puppeteer for both Sifl and Olly, and the voice of Olly.
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