Ogginoggen -1997- Ok.ru -

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 .

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”). ogginoggen -1997- ok.ru

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). In the late 2000s, a wave of Western

The premise is deceptively simple: is a creature who lives inside a hollowed-out pumpkin. He is neither a goblin nor a troll, but something Hal called a “Stomach-ache Sprite.” When children feel “sour feelings” (jealousy, fear, gas), Ogginoggen appears to “digest” the feeling into a song. Ogginoggen is a hand-and-rod puppet with a foam

“Oh,” he said. “The tummy-troll. He was supposed to help.”

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.