Plushie Confidential #1: Big Start, Small Finish
Puppets weren’t enough.
If you missed the repeated memos (it’s fine; we would have missed them, too), we’ve divided the Spiral blog into five parts. This one, Plushie Confidential, is the first. In it, we’ll be giving candid, monthly looks into the bitcoin plushie business, from when and how we decided this was an idea worth pursuing to every bright orange pitfall along the way.
But our plushie didn’t actually begin as a plushie. It began as a puppeteer in a giant orange bitcoin suit that made an already tall, athletically built, difficult-to-miss dude bright orange and seven feet tall. We called this character “Bitty,” and he would go on to star in an educational video about how misunderstood bitcoin is and was by people who only saw it as an investment vehicle that might make them rich instead of as the fairest, most transparent form of money ever to exist. Not everyone would have created a wildly expensive puppet suit to communicate these points. Some might have hit the podcast circuit, written a book, or posted on Twitter until they lost all their followers, but these are not the kind of jobs our creative team has. No, what we have are low IQ jobs. And, by god, we do them to the dumbest of our ability.
Of course, creating a giant, foam bitcoin with a range of props (false arms, trick gloves, a cleverly concealed viewport, and cool shoes that resell for $7,000 on StockX), a functioning mouth, and a mechanism that adjusts its colossal eyebrows with the pull of an invisible lever isn’t something that you can make happen by hiring an agency and telling them to go nuts. Well, you could do this, but you’d likely end up with the kind of forgettable puppet you see once in a commercial for a new and experimental steroidal nasal spray before it’s confined to the puppet dungeon of whatever brand created it. No, we wanted to make something for bitcoin that could be used repeatedly, from on the street to gifs, short films, conferences, and beyond.
Not long ago, we created a kind of motto for Spiral’s creative work that spelled out its mission: to make bitcoin friendlier, funnier, and more accessible. It’s not hard to see how a puppet could check all three of these boxes without breaking a sweat (our puppeteer, on the other hand, wrapped up in 40 pounds of foam, sweated a truly grotesque amount). So we hired Furry Puppet Studios, arguably New York’s best shop for custom puppets large and small, and got to “work.”
One of the most controversial decisions we made during that process was to make Bitty look just a little grumpy. Not everyone got this, but it was highly deliberate on our part. If you asked 100 bitcoiners to draw how they thought a bitcoin puppet should look, 99 would have put a big smile on his face, happy eyes, and so on. In other words, a happy bitcoin would have been expected. If you’re going to spend roughly a bajillion Sats, to our surprise, whether we’re talking puppet or plushie, his frowny face registers with children far more than adults. There is some precedent for this. Grumpy puppets have a considerable history within huge franchises like The Muppets and Sesame Street. Think of Sweetums, Statler and Waldorf, Oscar the Grouch, and Sam the Eagle. Grumpiness is ubiquitous within the puppet ecosystem.
But these aren’t the only reasons we decided to go with a physical puppet. Our chalice overflows with reasons. A big one is that CG animation has been done to death. It’s everywhere. It’s in more places than it isn’t. Whereas CG graphics used to be the exception to the rule, they’re now the default. To borrow a popular marketing phrase, we didn’t want to zig when everyone else was zigging, so we zagged. Then there’s the other thing: when you work in 3D or animation, there are no surprises. You control everything that happens within your character’s world. But when you have a freestanding puppet who can easily march or dance from PubKey to Washington Square Park, you have no idea what will happen along the way or at your destination.
The video that Bitty was created for was pretty successful, ultimately earning over half a million views across Twitter embeds and YouTube. Odds are good that if you’re in the bitcoin space, you’ve already seen Bitty. Since his initial launch, he’s been requested to appear at dozens of conferences, which we would have loved to have accommodated if not because Bitty is the size of a bulldozer’s tire. This is where the idea of a plushie came into existence: We can’t always bring Bitty to you, but we could if we shrunk him down.
