Slapstick, 'janky' puppets and ecology: Made-in-Yukon show finds an audience with its retro appeal

Kelly Milner, showrunner and co-creator of the new made-in-Yukon online puppet show Northern Tails, had no idea what kind of response to expect when the first episode was posted earlier this month. 

The show is hardly a cutting-edge production, with its simple hand puppets, slapstick humour, and light-hearted educational bent. It is, in other words, a sort of nostalgic throwback to the last century, before digital animation and hyper-realistic CGI seemingly took over the world of family entertainment.

But within days, that first episode of Northern Tails had thousands of views, and a little over a week later the show's YouTube channel now has more than 6,000 subscribers.

"You know, we're a small independent production and we released on YouTube with zero subscribers — which is kind of a hard position to be starting from, to be honest," said Milner.

"We found an audience right away, which is pretty exciting," she said.

The show bills itself as "a snackable mash-up of the Muppets and Planet Earth."   

Milner, founder of the Yukon-based production company Shot in the Dark, came up with the original concept for the show years ago along with her late father, Bob Hayes. Hayes, a wildlife biologist in the Yukon, died in 2022 and is credited along with Milner as one of the show's co-creators.

Milner said the idea was to make an educational show about wildlife ecology in the boreal forest, "but in a way that wasn't sort of boring science." 

The result is a mockumentary about a crew of hapless ground squirrels making a Planet Earth-style TV show about their home in the boreal forest and some of their fellow inhabitants there.

Along with squirrel host Scout Perry, we meet Winston the clever and mischievous raven, Isabelle the woodland caribou who's a popular influencer on the social-media platform "ClipClop," and Bruno the "family man" timber wolf who's also a moonlighting musician. Michael Jay, a fox, is the show's roving city correspondent, closing each episode by talking to some real-life people about that episode's featured topic or species.

"So it's very silly and it's slapstick, but underneath all of it is a lot of science, and it's informed by science," Milner said.

The show touches on things such as predator-prey relationships, habitat loss and climate change — big topics, Milner admits — but the inherent goofiness of the puppets keeps the show from lapsing into gloom or preachiness. And when a cute little ground squirrel gets unceremoniously carried off in the talons of an eagle, it's not presented as tragedy or something to get sentimental about. After all, that's just the way it is in the boreal forest.

"We have a lot of ground squirrels that die. But that's their role in the ecosystem! Everything eats them. That's why they're so vigilant. So, you know, it's funny — it's not gory," she said.

"I think that's partially why I really wanted to tell this from a northern perspective ... I wanted to tell it like we see things up here."

'Felt like learning the drums'

The show's six episodes, each around 12 minutes long, were filmed last winter in Whitehorse and are being released online each Friday through this month and into February.  

It was produced with a cast and crew made up entirely of Yukoners, some of whom had to first be trained as puppeteers. 

Moira Sauer — who plays several characters, including Scout Perry, Isabelle the caribou and Jackie the wolverine — was an experienced actor and puppeteer before the show came along, but had never before done this particular sort of hand-puppetry for TV. It was a "totally different beast," she said.

"I've told people often that puppets for TV felt like learning the drums — because you are doing everything upside down and backward, over top of your head," Sauer said.

Holding her arm up in the air for extended periods of time was particularly grueling, Sauer said. Milner even brought a local physiotherapist to the set to work with the puppeteers, and help them cope with the physical challenges. 

"I started falling asleep with my arm over my head, and I would wake up in the morning and my arm would still be over my head," Sauer laughed. "It was worrisome, for a period of time."

Sauer thinks the show's immediate success shows there's a thirst for the relatively low-tech charms of yesteryear. Sauer works at a youth centre in Whitehorse and says she's noticed young people, to some degree, "turning away from a lot of the current AI and smartphones."

"Not fully, but I think there's a desire for those things of 'analog time,'" she said.

"It's like going to a live performance in the theatre.... I think people can can really still appreciate the charm and simplicity of something that's still very human." 

Milner said she's also been hearing that sort of thing from some of the show's new fans.

"Puppets are janky and you can't pretend that they're not, you know, fake ... and I think that makes it really easy for people to relate to, and a little bit more inviting," Milner said.

"People seem to be missing that. That's certainly one of the things that we're getting in our feedback, is people saying, 'thank goodness somebody's doing this again.'"