Ok.ru | Ogginoggen -1997-
Ogginoggen is a hand-and-rod puppet with a foam latex head that has clearly begun to sweat. His eyes are mismatched: one is a large glass button, the other is a human-looking taxidermy eye. His mouth moves like a collapsing accordion. When he sings the theme song—“ Ogginoggen, Ogginoggen, turning sour feelings to loooove ”—his jaw unhinges slightly too far, revealing a felt tongue stained brown from decades of nicotine and coffee (Hal was a smoker; the puppet smells like an ashtray, as one commenter on ok.ru noted: “Пахнет депрессией 90-х” — “Smells like the depression of the 90s”).
When asked about the unsettling nature of the puppet, Hal laughed. “The grant was only $500. I made the head from a sofa cushion. The eye came from a stuffed deer my dog killed. Kids loved him in the library.”
In the vast, unregulated catacombs of the internet, certain artifacts exist in a state of quantum media limbo. They are not lost, but neither are they truly found. One such artifact is “Ogginoggen,” a 26-minute VHS transfer that has been uploaded to the Russian platform ok.ru (Odnoklassniki) under a plain Cyrillic filename: Оггиногген_1997_полная_версия.avi . ogginoggen -1997- ok.ru
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There is no way to verify this. But it explains why a Russian man in his 40s would preserve a failed Ohio puppet show. In 2022, a journalist for Athens News tracked down Hal Pinsker. He is 78, lives in a retirement home, and has mild dementia. When shown the ok.ru link, he stared at the thumbnail for a long time. Ogginoggen is a hand-and-rod puppet with a foam
And when Ogginoggen turns his glass eye to the camera and whispers, “Do you have a sour feeling, little friend?” — remember that somewhere in Ohio, a foam puppet head is rotting in a landfill, but its digital ghost is dancing on a Siberian server.
The problem was the execution. Watching the ok.ru upload (which buffers perpetually at the 4:32 mark) is a visceral experience. The tape was clearly a third-generation VHS dub, then digitized via a cheap USB converter in 2008, then uploaded to ok.ru in 2016 by a user named Валера_80 (Valera_80). When he sings the theme song—“ Ogginoggen, Ogginoggen,
In the late 2000s, a wave of Western VHS tapes were dumped in Eastern European flea markets. A Ukrainian VHS collector known only as bought a box of unsold stock from a liquidator in Cincinnati. Inside was a master tape labeled OGGINOGGEN - MASTER - DO NOT ERASE .
KinoPytok digitized it and uploaded fragments to YouTube, where it gained a cult following of 200 people. But YouTube’s copyright bots flagged the theme song (a four-note xylophone riff that vaguely resembled a Sesame Street melody) and blocked it globally.
That is the magic of the 1990s. That is the horror of ok.ru.