So you may have noticed that a white-fur bunny puppet wearing a faded Phillies jersey has basically become the mascot of not just my Twitch channel (twitch.tv/fredcasden) but also my Twitter (twitter.com/fredcasden) and the story of how that came about is all because of Twitch Sings and remembering how the former host of The Late Late Show, TV's Craig Ferguson often did musical numbers with puppets for occasional cold opens. So I figured I'd use some old-school stuff animals I still had from when I was a baby (a blue bunny and a brown squirrel) to spice things up with them randomly appearing from time to time on duets, but framing things properly to make sure my hands weren't seen proved to be a problem
So in September of 2019, I went on Amazon and started looking for a puppet, and settled on a long-sleeved White Rabbit puppet, primarily because it meant that my left forearm would be covered and the full body of the rabbit could be seen. In addition, my pinky and thumbs could move its arms while my other three fingers would move the head. Now I'm not sure which stream exactly the bunny debuted on, but the first duet it was featured on was with BreakEvenx3 on California Dreamin' on September 10, 2019
Nothing fancy, just the bunny moving to the music and general doing its own thing as I sang and completed the duet in question. One thing I quickly discovered is that just having the bunny being just all fur really wasn't cool looking, and I took a Phillies Jersey off of an old Philly Phanatic plush I had since the 90s, and placed it on the puppet. The jersey may have yellowed with age, but it provided a nice contrast in cases if the Twitch Sings chroma key proved to be difficult to tweak on any given night (which is more often than not a real pain in the ass, but that's a difficult topic all together). The bunny first rocked the Phillies Jersey on September 11, 2019 as I completed a duet with MarvelMaven performing I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honeybunch)
But the real test was of course letting the bunny take center stage, letting him sing... but there was a problem. I haven't figured out a voice for him yet, sure I could do a few silly voices when ready dialog in games that had no voice acting involved, but those were more like place holder things until I could figure out something. So on September 27, which is the the first time the bunny is the 'star' is when he performs with BluVelvet on Ballroom Blitz, the voice is just my own.
Needless to say, that wasn't going to last long and so I started looking into the different voice filters, the next day (September 28 for those keeping track), I used the Supernatural filter for the Bunny... and on a duet of Walk with BlueHwyaden... the Bunny's voice for the next several months was established.
Now for the most part, the bunny doing duets was done off-stream, because I use OBS to stream, which means a live audience would only hear my actual voice instead of the filtered one in Twitch Sings. It didn't bother me to much for several reasons, the biggest being the fact that I have a couch instead of a chair, which means getting down to the floor to where I can see the lyrics and project my voice to the mic was always a pain in the ass. Now of course, the bunny would become a bigger part of my channel, as I commissioned a set of emotes to be made by Daemonsw0lf (https://www.darkwolfcreative.com/) in November of 2020, with some more added in the following months
But eventually, on March 21 2020 I finally figured out the Bunny's voice on that night's live stream, a Mickey Mouse inspired voice, which meant going forward from time to time I could use the bunny on stream to complete a duet. The first duet to feature this voice was with Kalenal on the song Sleeping Sun
And that basically is the story of the bunny. The funny thing is though I never really given him a name, as he's often called Philly because of the Phillies Jersey.
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