Let My Puppets Come: The Forgotten Puppet Porno

In 1972, the pornagraphic film Deep Throat took over the box office, a major landmark in the Golden Age of Porn. The movie garnered around $30 million to $50 million in the U.S., according to the Los Angeles Times, and is perhaps the best-known release from the porno chic era—thanks in no small part to the Watergate informant adopting the title as his pseudonym. However, just four years later, writer and director of Deep Throat Gerard Damiano released another film that has all but left the public consciousness: Let My Puppets Come.

The idea of puppet porn may conjure up that one scene from Team America: World Police, or Anomalisa, or The Happytime Murders, but they all owe a debt to Let My Puppets Come. The movie, released in 1976, runs at a brisk 75 minutes and is much more softcore than Damiano’s most famous work. 

The very, very, very thin plot follows the three brothers who make up Creative Concepts Systems and Procedures Brothers Unlimited Inc., who are in debt to a mobster and need to make some quick cash to pay him back. The best way to do that? Make a porno! The brothers enlist a finicky cameraman named Lash, puppetmaster Geppetto, and plenty of actors to fill out their production. In the end, the brothers make enough money with The Last Porno Flick to pay back the mob and even end up winning the Oscar for Best Picture. 

In many ways, Let My Puppets Come is as delightfully silly as you’d hope. The cast is introduced at the start with an extended credits sequence, in which each of the puppets are given punny stage names like “Connie Lingus” and “Roberto Vaselini.” There are quite a few musical numbers—one might say too many—including a song starring a mustachioed phallus. The movie comes across as a series of sketches strung together more than anything else. Being pretty slapdash narratively is true to form for the pornography genre; nevertheless, Let My Puppets Come is jam-packed with goofy moments. It bears saying, too, that there are many grim reminders that this is a film made in 1976. The only Black puppet is merely named “Black Girl,” and there are jokes made about carceral rape and at the expense of trans people. This is definitely a movie of its time.   

Let My Puppets Come goes hard (no pun intended) with the first sex scene, which is between a puppet woman and her puppet dog. Yes, you read that correctly. This is also the only scene showing penetrative sex between puppets, which makes sense once you think about the fact that it would be difficult for the puppeteers to aim one puppet’s genitalia into the other’s. The rest of the scenes feature a lot of puppet blow jobs and, with the puppets’ mouths shaped the way they are, this ends up involving hilarious chomping motions on felt penises. Even when live action female performers are introduced, they’re given unusual tasks, like the one woman (Penny Nicholls) who throws grapes at a puppet to satisfy his kink. In short, the sex in Let My Puppets Come is intended to be uproarious rather than titillating.  

Setting the bestiality scene aside, there’s something joyous in the film’s view of sex as a laughable, strange pursuit, rather than the overly reverent lens favored by the public these days. There’s been much said about how Gen Z are sex-negative when it comes to the portrayal of physical intimacy in entertainment. Most recently, that’s become apparent in the criticism of Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman’s sex scene in the 2024 film Miller’s Girl, in which the pair play a student and teacher, respectively. There’s a 31 year age gap between the actors, which perturbed some viewers during the scene, but these people forget that Ortega and Freeman are colleagues given many forms of protection thanks to the work of the production’s intimacy coordinator.

I’m not claiming to know anything about the conditions on the set of Let My Puppets Come. Rather, I’m saying that a movie approaching sex with a sense of playfulness feels like a breath of fresh air, something I wasn’t expecting from a film made nearly 50 years ago. Human bodies are weird and funny, and so is the act of bringing them together—a hilarity that’s exponentially increased when you get puppets involved.