Credit: Dangerous Minds / Gerard Damiano

The thing about making boundary-pushing pieces of art is that you kinda have to take it on faith that you’re not making a huge mistake.

That’s the whole point of being boundary pushing, right? That you’re flying in the face of accepted logic and accepted taste in a way that you can pull off through sheer force of talent and creativity. That no matter how bad or tasteless or straight-up wrong it sounds, there’s an audience for your brand of weird that, if you’re just given one chance, you can prove it to the world. No matter what paradigm-shifting piece of art you’re talking about, from Ulysses to Flower Boy, there was always a period of time where it sounded like as bad an idea as Let My Puppets Come.

What’s that? You haven’t heard of Let My Puppets Come? Yeah, I thought as much.

To go through this particular cinematic trainwreck, we’ll first start with the career of Gerard Damiano, its notorious director and a man who, actually, is a perfect example of the point I raised earlier. That all art that turns its genre on its head began life as a risky gamble on an idea that most thought was insane at best and vulgar at worst. You see, Damiano was the man who made porn mainstream.

In 1972, Damiano directed Deep Throat, a lovely little picture that features Linda Lovelace playing a character who discovers her clitoris is in her throat (yes), and her quest to perfect a blowjob technique that can bring her to orgasm (yes). Considering that’s a pretty gross and shocking thing for a film to be about today, you can imagine how up in arms people were about it in the early 1970s.

Yet, Damiano laughed all the way to the bank as Deep Throat was a genuine box office sensation. This gave him a level of clout in the industry that few could match, and in 1976, he put that clout to the test with Let My Puppets Come.

A film whose title is agonizingly literal.

Puppets?! Really?!

Yup, Damiano put together a picture whose plot is a very thinly veiled excuse for a bunch of puppets to do the nasty with each other and, as if to prove that there really isn’t anything a young actor won’t do for a break, some humans too. Yes, this really happened, and I’m sure in some long-forgotten warehouse there are the fuzzy hard-ons to prove it.

So, what exactly could have convinced Damiano that this was a good idea?

Well, the mid-1970s were a period where the mid-1960s idea of hippy free love (if you’ll excuse the pun) came of age. Deep Throat was a box office smash, but a picture like Last Tango in Paris was released the same year and their depictions of unsimulated sex lead to multiple Academy Award nominations. The title is a reference not to the Book of Exodus quote but to a similarly raunchy 1974 stage musical, Let My People Come, that was a big enough deal to secure a Grammy nomination for its soundtrack. The fucking of it all is probably not the part that makes the picture stand out, though.

Sex sells, what else is new? However, and I mean this in the most literal way possible, what the fuck were all the puppets doing there?! Well, for that you’ve got to thank The Muppets. Kermit and the gang had just debuted, with their second pilot episode literally called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence. It was a ratings smash, and so Damiano’s bright idea was to take that first part of its subtitle and make it agonisingly literal. Not every daring idea has to be good, though, and Let My Puppets Come isn’t even the funny kind of bad, just gross and off-putting at every level.

However, even an idea as bad as puppets doing the nasty can work in the right context. After all, three decades after Let My Puppets Come, another project would become one of the most celebrated examples of its medium on the back of puppet sex. Fittingly enough, considering what inspired Damiano’s disaster, it was a stage musical. Crucially, there’s a lot more that this show has to offer than the sight of puppets bumping uglies, but if you’re anything like me, you were thinking of Avenue Q for this entire article.

Proof, if any is needed, that there’s no such thing as a terrible idea, just terrible execution.