You may not have any idea what Frankie Cordero looks like but you have probably heard the voices of the beloved characters he has brought to life, including Rudy Monster, Purple Panda, Spike and Wembley Fraggle.
A graduate of Oak Park River Forest High School, the Emmy-nominated Cordero has worked nationally and internationally as a puppeteer for Sesame Street, Jim Henson Company and Fred Rogers Productions. His characters have appeared on television shows including The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show and Good Morning America.
Cordero’s lifelong interest in puppets was sparked at the age of three, when his father brought home a frog puppet that he had bought at a flea market. While in kindergarten and early elementary school, Cordero woke up every day at 5 a.m. to watch The Muppet Show before catching the bus to school.
“I would gather up my toys and puppeteer them and lip sync to the show,” Cordero said. “Eventually, I started creating my own characters and presenting puppet shows with kids in the neighborhood. Puppetry gave me the opportunity to play any role I wanted, regardless of who I was or who I appeared to be.”
Cordero’s nascent talents were supported by his father, who was pursuing his own interests in magic and clowning. After searching the Yellow Pages for a magician for his daughter’s birthday party, and finding them to be too expensive, Cordero’s father bought some basic tricks and costumes at a local magic store and performed himself. He became a popular performer for private parties, with Cordero and his sister often serving as magician’s assistants.
After watching a television special about Jim Henson shortly after his death in 1990, Cordero visited his local library in search of “Of Muppets and Men,” a behind-the-scenes look at the making of The Muppet Show. Serendipitously, the librarian he consulted was a member of the Chicagoland Puppetry Guild who told him the group met monthly at the venerable Magic, Inc. on Chicago’s northside.
The shop was the next best thing to heaven for the young Cordero.
“The backroom was super cool, filled with vintage magic tricks and 8 by 10 glossies of magicians and vaudeville era performers,” Cordero said.
In 1993, when he was just 11, Cordero received a scholarship to attend a Puppeteers of America festival in San Francisco, where he caught a presentation by Frank Oz, the renowned puppeteer with Sesame Street, The Muppet Show and Star Wars. He was mesmerized when Oz dragged on stage a huge trunk filled with many of his famous characters, including Miss Piggy, Yoda, Bert, Grover, Cookie Monster and Lefty, the shady salesman who routinely opened his trench coat and whispered to passersby, “Hey, you wanna buy a letter O?”
He also met at the festival a quartet of puppeteer buskers, the Crowtations, who lip-synched to Motown hits and performed regularly in Central Park.
“I was captivated watching them perform in full view, dressed in black, with puppets above their heads. I was so focused on their process and how spot-on their lip synching was that eventually I didn’t even notice the performers,” he said.
One of the buskers, Glenngo King, approached Cordero and mentioned that he hadn’t met many puppeteers of color, especially one so young. King became a mentor and, for decades, periodically sent Cordero articles about puppetry to encourage him to pursue his dream.
Cordero has been blessed with many mentors throughout his career, including Ellen Boyer, his OPRF drama teacher, who encouraged him to use his interest in puppets to create characters for a high school production. He later learned that two other students launched professional careers sparked by their roles in that show.
He also credits notable Chicago puppeteers Dave Herzog, who gave Cordero an apprenticeship at AnimART, a storefront puppet theater where Cordero spent weekends learning how to produce shows; and Bill Eubank, who urged Cordero to create his own puppets and gave him a set of basic puppet patterns.
“Bill built ornate rod puppets of all the characters from The Wizard of Oz, including the guards of the Emerald City. He had a huge collection of Oz memorabilia. His studio was jammed with the best sort of clutter I’ve ever seen,” Cordero said.
While majoring in puppetry at the University of Connecticut, Cordero juggled academics with bus trips to New York City to work on shows including Curious Buddies, a production of Spiffy Pictures for Nick Jr., and a music video, We Are Family, created in response to the 9/11 attack and featuring more than 100 children’s TV actors, puppets and animated characters.
Over the past decade, Cordero has voiced a wide range of characters including Spike, whose head of wild curly hair mimicked the look Cordero sported at OPRF, on Julie’s (Andrews) Greenroom (Netflix); and Wembley on Fraggle Rock: Rock On, which was produced by the Jim Henson Company during the early months of pandemic. Cordero shot material for the show from his living room while Zooming with the other characters.
Perhaps Cordero is best known (although not recognized) as the voices of Rudy on Sesame Street and Purple Panda on PBS Kids’ Donkey Hodie. Three-year-old Rudy is the stepbrother of Abby Cadabby and was developed specifically to depict a blended family. Purple Panda is a regular character on Donkey Hodie, a modern spin-off of the original Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood program.
Cordero was working on Donkey Hodie in 2022 when he learned, following a routine dental exam, that he had chordoma, a rare type of cancer that affects one in a million people annually worldwide. He underwent a 14-hour surgery but resumed his work schedule, even participating in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade while receiving proton therapy treatment. He now serves on the community advisory board of the Chordoma Foundation and is working with his wife, Marea, a freelance visual artist, to plan fundraising events for the organization. He also hopes to create a puppet character to help children through their cancer journey.
“Puppets allow you to be transported back to a place and time when you were emotionally open to pretending. They make you believe they are living and breathing with you. Digital characters on a screen can never provide the same connection that puppetry does. It is an art form that will never die,” Cordero said.
