As most ventriloquists know, ventriloquism has not always been so closely intertwined with puppetry. For many years, ventriloquists masqueraded as priests making the statues in the temple speak, providing voices from the air, and often faking the prophetic voices. Be that as it may, today it is hard to imagine a ventriloquist without his partner.
The earliest ventriloquist figure on record (written in 1757 at the Bayreuth Court, in Germany) belonged to Baron Von Mengen, Lieutenant Colonel, of Horde, residing in the Palace of his Highness, Monsignor The Prince of Lichtenstein. When asked to demonstrate his abilities as a ventriloquist he took from his pocket a small doll and carried on a dialogue with it. An Irish officer thought it was an animal trained to perform and tried to squeeze it when placed back in the pocket. The little figure began to scream as if being squeezed so tightly that it was suffocating. The Baron then allowed the officer to take it out of his pocket himself only to find a little figure in a coat and under the coat only wood.
We do not claim to have all the answers when it comes to building a ventriloquist figure, but hopefully these pages will help some aspiring figure maker along the way. Who knows... maybe in 20 year we'll see where the worlds greatest figure maker got his start as a teenager from reading some tips, sketches, or advice contributed to this page.
If anyone has anything to add or contribute on the design of figures, please email me at gkoepke@bellsouth.net.
Conrad Hartz contributed these dimensions for a classical boy character to the list awhile back and agreed to let me include them here. Thanks, Conrad!
These measurements are for a 38" to 40" figure, but are proportional so you can adjust them to the size figure you are building.
Something that I have found helpful in designing figures is to use a sheet of paper that is divided into one inch grid for the heavy lines and each inch is divided into tenths. They are available at drafting/engineering supply places. The reason I like them is that if you're calculating with a calculator you won't come up with fractions, but decimals. This grid configuration makes that simple to convert to your drawing... that is you don't have to remember that a decimal of .25 is the same as 1/4"... just plot it 2 and a half small squares on the paper. If the measurement is 2.25", just move two big squares and 2 and a half small squares on the paper. If you still like working in fractions, you can buy grid paper at the same supply places that are designed for architectural purposes. These will have the inches divided by 4 or 8 as in 1/4" or 1/8".
