This sequence was ALL Romney! Here’s his little Glenn Beck puppet as it neared completion… And here he is showing us the mechanics of the Jihad Jane puppet… And here he is with Jeff working out the scale and the fall of the rainbow flag before Trish went off to sew it… Finally, all of…

Michelle Obama caught a bunch of slack this year for using Air Force Two to take 40 of her friends on a lavish vacation she took to Spain. So how do we illustrate it? Have the first lady dressed like a princess perched atop golden airplane! We went to the toy store and bought a…

There were a lot of high-highs and low-lows this year. To see a bit of both, we decided to include Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ acquisition of The Washington Post (as well as his mentioning of the Amazon flying delivery drone?!?) as well as Paula Dean who probably regrets saying a certain word that cost her…

THis scene had two components. First, there were the puppets doing their business then there was actually giving them something to slide down. Here’s some raw puppet footage… For the plane, Jeff took the fuselage that he had built for the previous scene, added a wing and set it up on some rollers. You’ll notice…

This scene was a ton of fun to produce. First off, we got to see cute, fuzzy puppets getting physically abused which is always good for a laugh! Next, Ian got to make this beautiful little sculpture which we filmed to look 18 feet tall…. And finally, given that we are not really a puppet…

This scene started with some amazing character studies by Justin which were then transformed into three dimensions by Mike with nothing more then foam, plush and a hot glue gun… Notice Rahm’s sunken eyes peering out over Mike’s shoulder… There are also some things we try that don’t always work out the way we’d planned.…

This was an intense sequence that crammed a BOAT load of information (and puppets) into about 2 milliseconds! First up, Russian Spies… As a reminder, the news story was that there was a super cute, red-headed, Russian Spy leading a double life in the US. Justin designed an awesome retro, James Bond-esque throw back which…

In our minds this is the be-all-end-all of all puppets! We joke around the studio that Mike ‘has scale issues’ because he loves to make BIG puppets so what better, bigger character to give him than the Governator himself! The only direction that was given at the start of this scene was to make sure…

Once again, we proudly present… DANCING puppets! In the ‘Making the Cut’ post we talked about how this scene was originally supposed to focus on Bush and Cheney for ‘Inherited Wars’ and Kim Jung Il and Mahmoud Achmedinejad for ‘Nuclear Threats’ but the dancing puppets were just too darn funny to cut. Here’s a clip…

This scene might be a bit more of an obscure reference but we managed to sneak it in anyway. It happened at Fortune Magazine’s “Most Powerful Women Summit” at about 27 seconds into this video. To the President’s credit, he was pretty quick with a good humored response. For us, it was just fun to…

We were about a week and a half away from wrapping up the video when the news hit that President Obama got clocked in the head during a basketball game and had to get 12 stitches to the lip! Once again (and we can’t say this enough) there is nothing funnier than puppets and physical…

So here’s another gag that we filmed that ultimately didn’t make the cut. After Obama got pegged in the head with a basketball in the previous scene we thought it could be funny to cut back and have him holding a bloody rag to his lip for the final dance. It was a mildly clever…

We built puppets. We built sets. And we destroyed our studio.  There’s too much behind the scenes photos  share even more stuff, view our Facebook photo album here!

As is typically the case with a big ‘Behind the Scenes’ effort, we imagine if you made it to the last post that you are most likely a fan of JibJab (Or maybe this year you’re just REALLY into puppets?) In either event we want to say, “Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!” for taking…