Sifl and Olly

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The Sifl and Olly Show is a puppet show that used sock puppets and animation. Musicians Liam Lynch and Matt Crocco, friends since childhood, created and performed the series. The show's first episode aired on MTV in 1997 and was cancelled in 1999. Marked by cheap production and bizarre humor, the series only aired two seasons, but became a cult favorite.

Image:Sifl and Olly.jpg

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History

The Sifl & Olly Show started when Crocco and Lynch were kids taping funny conversations with tape recorders. Throughout the years, they would play the tapes for family and friends. In the early 1990s, while attending college in London, Lynch found some of their old tapes again. He videotaped himself acting out the tapes with sock puppets he named Sifl and Olly. He sent some of the tapes to Crocco as a Christmas present, but also sent copies to MTV and MTV Europe.

Although MTV America rejected them, MTV Europe liked them. In 1996, MTV-UK began airing Sifl & Olly clips between music videos as "idents." The popularity of the clips led to MTV America offering a half-hour format called The Sifl & Olly Show in July 1998. The show aired late at night, but later on they were moved to the evenings.

In the first season, clips of Sifl and Olly were mixed with music videos. Whenever the show was aired again, the music videos would be removed, leaving only the comedy clips. The show gained a cult following, but was cancelled after the second season. A third season was recorded and MTV promised to release the episodes on the Internet, but never did. The lost episodes were eventually released on DVD.

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Premise

The two main characters were a green sock puppet named Sifl and a white sock puppet named Olly. Sifl was the more calm leader of the show while Olly was more excitable and often broke into crazed furies. Their assistant, Chester (made out of an inverted mould for a buddha statue combined with a sleeve), was a mumbling, often nonsensical character who still claimed to be great at everything. No real living people or animals ever appeared on the show, only puppets.

The show was always very simple and low-budget. Most of the show had the main characters hunched over a microphone with weird images projected in the background. The show had an unscripted feel with the characters talking to each other in realistic, often meandering styles. Sifl and Olly would sing both original and classic songs throughout the show with an original song at the end. Though it featured puppets, the series was not intended for children. The humor, while always good natured, often featured profanity, sexual references, crude humor, bodily functions, and violence.

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Regular segments

Often preceded by familiar intro screen and a short theme song, the segments included:

  • Precious Roy's Home Shopping Network - a parody of the Home Shopping Network with bizarre products like Civil War Corpses and CAT Scan Glasses. The network was run by Precious Roy, who would yell unrelated lines, ending with "suckers!". The slogan of Precious Roy was "making lots of suckers out of girls and boys." Sifl and Olly were employed as salesmen for the Network, and Olly inexplicably seemed to go progressively insane during these segments, often yelling crazed accusations at callers.
  • Calls From the Public - Sifl and Olly would take calls supposedly from "the public", but they were just random and often bizarre characters (usually sock puppets) who would call with problems or complaints. The most common calls coming from the pair's landlord, who would complain about one or more of their antics, often involving monkeys.
  • Rock Facts - At commercial breaks, the Rock Facts question would be asked and answered when they returned. The answers were always lies and often involved the singer Björk. This segment was dropped by the second season.
  • Interview Time - Guests interviewed included Death, an atom, and the G-spot. Sometimes they would announce a famous person that was going to be interviewed, but it would always turn out that the guest couldn't make it.
  • Sifl & Olly News - Sifl and Olly would pretend to report on the (generally surreal) news. Often Olly would sing nonsensical lyrics to accompany the lead in music (much to the chagrin of Sifl). Sifl, however, would break his professionalism during the segment to refer to his girlfriend, Serena Altschul, either by sending her a message or by praising her.
  • A Word with Chester - Sifl and Olly would take a break from other show activities to speak with their friend Chester, who misinterpreted their questions and in general had difficulty focusing on any one subject for any extended period of time. Olly took point in these segments, because Croco, who provided the voice for Sifl, also provided the voice of Chester. In the second season, a new segment called "Letters to Chester" was added, which was essentially the same premise (including using the same theme music), with the addition of Olly reading a letter addressed to Chester at the start of the segment.
  • And Now... ROCK - A song is performed by one or more of the characters
  • It's Almost the End of the Show - Every episode ends with a song performed by Sifl and/or Olly, occasionally with vocal assistance by other characters.
  • Kickin' it Old School - Introduced in the second season, a song from the "And Now... ROCK" or "It's Almost the End of the Show" segments is simply re-aired, occasionally with the pre-song banter cut out.
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Characters

  • Sifl - Voiced by Matt Crocco. His body is a green sock with yellow, reptillian eyes and what appear to be green leaves protruding from the top of his head. Sifl is often portrayed as the calm leader of the show. He is skilled at picking up women and is something of a technological wiz, capable of building and programming robots and somehow performing maintenance on a spacebound satellite without leaving the studio. Although childhood friends with Olly, he is subtly manipulative and often deceives Olly or uses him as a scapegoat. He is often shown to have wasted the show's budget on mysterious ventures that are never described on screen, resulting in everything from guests cancelling to mafia threats. An episode in the second season implies that he was once married to Olly's mom and is, in fact, Olly's father (despite also being childhood friends with Olly).
  • Olly - Voice by Liam Lynch. His body is a white sock with large, brown eyes and a dog-like nose. He wears a sweater, or more specifically a sweater sleeve. Olly is emotional and prone to fits of violence. He is easily deceived and has difficulty with women. He has difficulty holding back his laughter at times, especially when he's talking with Chester. Olly originally performs My United States of Whatever, one of the most successful songs from Lynch's Fake Songs CD. The song was performed in response to Sifl bringing several of Olly's ex-girlfriends to the show so they could make fun of Olly.
  • Chester - Voiced by Matt Crocco. His body is an inverted mould for a buddha figurine for a head, while a sweater sleeve composes most of his body. This gives him a distinct shape, resulting in a vacant smile and the appearance of innards in his mouth. His eyes are the same as Olly's, with the addition of large, petal-like eyebrows. Chester announces the beginning of the show, though he is not skilled at the task, occasionally referring to Sifl & Olly by the wrong names (such as Starsky and Hutch), or simply refusing to perform the announcement. Chester considers himself a Don Juan, though the other characters imply that Chester has never been with a woman. He is very forgetful, often forgetting that he lives in the studio, that he is on a television show, or that the fans in the "Letters to Chester" segments aren't in the studio. He is obsessed with cereal, and it is implied that he eats it constantly, though he is rarely seen doing so on screen. He collects water, which he proudly proclaims to possess the entire set of (in the form of ice, steam, and regular water). He occasionally wanders into other skits, usually while eating a sandwich, and often doesn't realize that the skits aren't real (such as thinking that he thought he had wandered into space while entering the set of a Star Wars parody). He is occasionally sold or traded by Olly, such as being sold to a freak show for $20 or used to pay Sifl's debt to the mafia.
  • Precious Roy - Also voiced by Crocco. His body is a green sock with enormous eyes (pointing in different directions) and a pair of wire glasses. The puppeteer has their hand positioned awkwardly within the sock, adding to Precious' bizarre persona. He is the owner of the "Precious Roy Home Shopping Network," which Sifl & Olly are spokesmen for. He speaks in non sequiturs, and seems unaware of what his products actually are.
  • Stealth - A violent degenerate with a grudge against Olly. Sifl and Olly eventually defeat him by singing Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It", which somehow ejects Stealth from Earth's atmosphere.
  • Zafo - A rock musician who speaks in electric guitar distortions. He is idolized by Sifl and Olly.
  • Peto and Flekk - The main characters of Sifl and Olly's favorite show from their childhood. Peto is portrayed as being rude and vulgar, while Flekk can only speak by saying the sound "guh-guh-guh-guh".
  • Jimmy - Sifl & Olly's camera man, his dialogue cannot be heard clearly and he never appears on screen.
  • The Landlord - The landlord for Sifl & Olly's apartment (some episodes, however, imply that the duo actually live in their studio. It is possible that they simply tape their show in their apartment, but some segments clearly imply that the two are "not home" during taping). He is made out of an opaque brown stocking with grey yarn hair and eyebrows. He also has a tattered white sleeve covering most of his body, giving him a dishevelled appearance. This is enhanced by the puppeteer positioning their knuckles prominently in the puppet, increasing its aggressive appearance. The Landlord frequently calls during the "Calls to the Public" segments to yell at Sifl and Olly about something they're doing on his property, such as breeding monkeys or building a water slide. He threatens to kick them out regularly, but the duo have already built a moat around their apartment guarded by archer monkeys.
  • Champs 1 Team - A group of students, lead by "John from Ohio University," who won the "Sifl & Olly: Free Access to the Moon" contest, in which they were launched in a space ship to the moon for a three year mission. However, they weren't given any tasks to perform during their mission, and Sifl & Olly assumed the team would simply enjoy the freedom of being on the moon, such as the fact that there are no police on the moon. Before long all of the crew has died but one member, who eventually launches himself into sun after pushing a wrong button.
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Popularity

Fans of the show call themselves "sockheads." There is a lively group online trading videos and petitioning MTV to release the entire series on DVD. One group even recorded a tribute CD recreating some of their favorite songs called Banging on Some Pots and Pans. They also organized a convention in Nashville called Socks 2001.

Also, as the show's only "celebrity guest", skateboarder Tony Hawk made a guest appearance on the show in Season 3, providing his own voice to accompany a puppet made to resemble him.

Cartoonist Aaron McGruder is also a fan of the show. On one episode of his TV show The Boondocks, Huey exlaims to his Grandfather's girlfriend that he is doing "prostitute laundry", which could be a direct refrence to Sifl & Olly's song of the same name.

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External links

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