Today, we'll be meeting John the Depressed Truck Driver. The idea of John is pretty vague to me by now, all I remember is that he was kind of inspired by two different people: first of all, my dad, who has spent the better part of the last twenty-some-odd years as a truck driver (and not necessarily by choice), and this horrible bus driver I had in the morning during Grade 7 in school who constantly kept the radio tuned in to the all-"Man of Constant Sorrow" station. And actually, the puppet was named after him. The bus driver, that is.
I had the thought in my mind that perhaps John the Depressed Truck Driver could possibly have been used for commercials for such entities as Budget, or U-Haul, or other truck-renting companies out there, and that's really all I thought about doing with him, I never really considered using him for anything else other than that.
But, eventually, I never even built an actual puppet of John the Depressed Truck Driver (who was the first specifically glove puppet I ever designed), and the idea just sort of got pushed aside in the long run... or, should that be long haul? And, as fate would have it, shortly after the idea of John the Depressed Truck Driver, Cartoon Network (which I had mostly stopped watching by then since they officially murdered and assassinated the network a year earlier in 2004) introduced three puppet characters as part of its idiotic Cartoon's Network's Fridays programming block (which had replaced the perfectly fine Cartoon Cartoon Fridays programming beforehand), one of which was some kind of weird, flannel shirt-wearing bear or dog-like creature thingy... and he was a truck driver. That kind of thing seems to happen to me an awful lot.
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