Bob Baker dies; puppeteer's work appeared in movies, commercials

For years, puppeteer Bob Baker's marionette theater hung on by a thread.

In the end, it outlasted Baker, who died Friday at age 90 after an eight-decade career pulling the strings of his whimsical creations and delighting young and old alike.

Baker died at his home in Los Angeles of age-related causes, said Greg Williams, a friend and puppeteer who worked with Baker for many years.

Baker's theater, which occupies a former cinder-block movie scenery shop west of downtown Los Angeles, is the oldest puppet theater in the United States. When it was opened in 1962 by Baker and business partner Alton Wood, it was an immediate hit with children and their parents.

Thirteen years earlier, Baker and Wood had teamed up to form a touring company that kept busy staging puppet shows at school fairs, women's clubs and churches. They also had a thriving side business workshop where they designed and built puppets for movies and commercials and produced toy Pinocchio puppets sold at Disneyland.

The workshop created promotional windows for Disneyland and animated displays for Knott's Berry Farm. Its puppets appeared in commercials for Bob's Big Boy, McDonald's and Burger King as well as in ads for new cars and drugstores.

Over the years, Baker enjoyed recounting how he had worked as an animation adviser with Disney Studios and walked through Disneyland with Walt Disney at his side the day before the park opened for business in 1955. He also reminisced about birthday parties where he performed his puppetry magic for the children of such Hollywood celebrities as Jack Benny and Danny Kaye.

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He was proud that his puppets had roles in "A Star Is Born," "Star Trek," Disney's "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

But film and TV commercial work dried up when computer-generated imagery came into vogue in Hollywood. Attendance at weekday puppet shows dwindled as schools struggled with budget problems and began cutting back on field trips. A roofing company that rented space on the theater grounds closed because of the recession.

By 2008 Baker had fallen behind on the theater's mortgage payments and the property was listed for sale for $1.5 million. Closure was averted when the Ahmanson Foundation and other donors came to its rescue.

Baker put the property back on the market in 2012 for $2 million as he searched for $150,000 to pay back taxes and for a private investor willing to refinance the mortgage. He made it clear that only the theater site was for sale: He intended to keep his collection of 4,000 puppets intact and hoped to lease back the theater from its new owner. The building was sold last year, but Baker's puppeteers plan to continue staging performances there at least until the lease runs out in March, Williams said Friday.

It's no wonder Baker wanted to hold on to his creations: His marionettes were elaborately designed and carefully crafted, with some taking 350 hours to build by hand and outfit in sumptuous costumes. Others, like dancing cactus plants, were delightfully simple. Many were surprisingly complex: circus figures riding on horseback, monkeys that juggled while walking on stilts, Spanish tango dancers. Some cost as much as $5,000 to create.

The City Council designated Baker's theater a historic-cultural landmark in 2009. He has no immediate survivors.