The friendly and familiar faces emerged from the bags one by one: a buffalo, a dog, a bird, a crocodile and a pink-haired duck. Many Thais who grew up in the 90s will not only recognise these faces, but they will also know their names: Cha-ngon, Hang Dab, Jao Khuntong, Khon Loy and Ped Noi. These are the stars of children's television programme Jao Khuntong.
On the day of Life's interview with the show's creator, Kiatsuda Piromya, these furry anthropomorphised puppets were without their usual costumes. So Kiatsuda had prepared scarves to wrap them up for the photoshoot.
Kiatsuda didn't pull these puppets from any dusty old storage. They didn't have their costumes because they were about to get new ones specially made from waste material for an upcoming sustainability-themed live performance. The eponymous Jao Khuntong looked brand new that day with his jet-black body and wings and bright yellow beak and wattles. Up close, the others had some minor wear and tear. But these characters have never gone into retirement since they first appeared onscreen on Oct 1, 1991.
Neither has its creator. At 70, Kiatsuda is still producing TV programmes and live puppet shows for children. At the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC), she will be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Association of Theater Critics.
If you want a glimpse into Kiatsuda's childhood, Jao Khuntong can reveal a few things. As the youngest of five siblings, Kiatsuda often spent time alone daydreaming. She grew up an avid reader of historical factoids and of fairy tales and fables. Her father would let her run around bookstores for hours. Kiatsuda also grew up in a family of animal lovers. She loved watching Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons. Hence the all-animal cast of Jao Khuntong, always with knowledge to impart and stories to share.
When Channel 7 executive Surang Prempree was looking to develop a children's programme to teach and foster the love of Thai language among children, Kiatsuda presented the idea of a puppet show with animal characters.
"She thought children were becoming indifferent to language and finding it a boring subject in school," Kiatsuda recalled. "So how can we make it fun?"
It wasn't the first time Kiatsuda created animal puppets for children or worked on TV. The artist studied theatre at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Arts, where she took a puppetry class with Onchuma Yuthavong, the children's theatre pioneer. Kiatsuda said she was a lazy student, often skipping class and not submitting assignments. But Onchuma never stopped encouraging her wayward student. And Kiatsuda still considers her one of the most important teachers in her life.
After graduating from university, Kiatsuda found herself without any clear direction. It was her dream to perform in musicals, even though she admitted to not having mastered any relevant skills. She knew she wanted to act but didn't exactly aspire to become a leading lady on TV either.
"I couldn't break into TV. There were so many talented people. And I didn't know anybody. So I decided to go into children's TV."
Puppets from Jao Khuntong.
Prior to Jao Khuntong, she sometimes wrote scripts and directed children's TV shows. Kiatsuda also toured schools with brand-sponsored puppet performances to promote children's products like baby powder, breakfast cereal and cloth nappies.
"At that time, actors from three different teams would arrive at my house in the morning in three different vans with puppets and sets. Sometimes we would tour for a year. It was a fun and chaotic time," Kiatsuda said.
Since Jao Khuntong began as a show to promote learning of Thai language, it was logical to make nok kunthong -- the common hill myna bird which is native to Southeast Asia and a popular pet in Thailand -- the title character and main presenter of the show. Most of the other main characters are also animals commonly found in Thailand. Hang Dab, for example, is designed to look like a typical Thai dog, with pointy ears and a hang dab, or a sword-shaped tail.
But Kiatsuda considers Cha-ngon her greatest creation. The buffalo character, with his sweet drawl and guilless eyes, was popular with women. Kiatsuda would later create an entire family of buffalo characters, something the other main characters don't have.
"I feel a connection to all the characters, but Cha-ngon I'm very proud of because this character is a Thai animal that's been so beneficial to us," she said. "Before this, nobody ever thought of turning a buffalo into a stuffed animal. It was considered a stupid animal. But buffaloes are loyal. That's what is so endearing about them."
People who grew up watching Jao Khuntong in the 90s still come up to Kiatsuda to tell her how the show made them love the Thai language. She met one fan who said he became a Thai teacher because of the show and is even using puppets to teach deaf children.
Jao Khuntong never just remained in front of the camera either. For three months following the 2004 tsunami, Kiatsuda got funding to create a separate team to tour schools and communities and entertain affected children.
The team behind Jao Khuntong has never been big. The puppeteers on the show voice more than one character. Kiatsuda plays Jao Khuntong and Pa Kai, or Auntie Chicken, a kind character who teaches children arts and crafts and who, Kiatsuda feels, is most like her.
Kiatsuda grew up watching the traditional Thai rod puppet hoon krabok, whose mouths don't move. But the artist was never formally trained in a specific type of puppetry. The Jao Khuntong puppets are a combination of hand and rod puppets and Kiatsuda learned to control them mainly from watching Sesame Street.
In the beginning, Kiatsuda cast many khon dancers for their physical and vocal skills. More than 30 years later, some of the original puppeteers still work for the show today.
But since the show began collaborating with The Rainbow Room, a neurodiversity awareness centre, it has also gained two new team members -- a grandmother and a mother of autistic children. These women became acquainted with the Jao Khuntong team through performances and puppetry workshops for neurodiverse children and their parents. They became fascinated with puppet building and performance, so Kiatsuda invited them to train with the show and eventually employed them.
Kiatsuda was always a working mother and brought her three children to the set. Today, her closest collaborator is her eldest son, Phan Piromya. When she had a stroke at the age of 52 and could not work for almost a year, it was her younger son, Peur Piromya, who stepped in to help. But when her husband needed help running his restaurant, Peur moved from the studio into the kitchen and Phan quit his job at Museum Siam to work on the show full-time.
"Oh, it's like when a husband and wife work together," Kiatsuda joked. "We don't always agree. We're from different generations after all. But because we know each other so well, we are frank with each other. It's easy to work alone. But there's nobody to check your work in that case.
"My son is more modern than I am. He knows what music children like, what is fashionable, how they like to dress. He can check the market, the appropriateness of the content and what jokes are no longer acceptable today. So I am comforted by the fact that I have my son to help me."
The show has weathered several changes and setbacks over the decades. In 2017, Channel 7 cancelled the show and Jao Khuntong disappeared from the screen for a few years. Since then, they have had to build their own studio from an old garage at home and work harder to find funding.
But there are always new horizons.
The cast returned as Khuntong Lae Phong Peun (Jao Khuntong & Co) on the Vietnamese streaming platform POPS TV before moving to its current home on Thai PBS' subsidiary ALTV (Active Learning Television). The show is now called Cha-ngon Cha-Ngai Song Kwai Chang Songsai (Cha-ngon And Cha-ngai The Two Curious Buffaloes). But that's not all. The Rainbow Room, together with Kiatsuda and her team, also co-created Ting Ting Natang Sai Roong (Ting Ting The Rainbow Window), with a cast of characters that look like water droplets and storylines that aim to engage neurodiverse children and their parents.
And there's always the stage.
Last year, the team staged a live performance, Jao Khuntong 2099, at the Bangkok Theater Festival. And there are more live shows in the works and new costumes to be made.
And Kiatsuda is still having fun and not thinking about retirement.
"You have to love and have real interest in the work. If you're really interested, you're going to explore and watch and listen to everything, from criticism to new information. And you have to practise your skills. These are the things that will help you improve," she said. "Mass media is not media for yourself. You have to develop to the best of your ability so that others can develop alongside you and children can grow alongside you."
