Who Remembers Duane Ellet And Floppy WHO TV Des Moines

 

If you grew up in Iowa anytime between the late 1950s and the late 1980s, there’s a good chance you knew exactly what time The Floppy Show came on.

From 1957 to 1987, Duane Ellett and Floppy were a huge part of daily life on WHO-TV in Des Moines. For a lot of Iowa kids, Duane and Floppy were as familiar as the kitchen table, the school bus, and snow boots lined up by the back door.

This was back when television wasn’t endless. There were only a few channels. If you missed something, you missed it forever. No rewinding. No watching whenever the spirit moved you. If Floppy was on at a certain time, you got there.

Usually with cereal, in pajamas, and yelling for somebody to stop touching the rabbit ears because the picture was just right.

Duane Ellett had a face people trusted right away. Calm, friendly, never trying too hard. He wasn’t loud or  fake cheerful. He seemed like a decent fellow who had somehow wandered onto television and stayed.

Kids can smell phonies the way dogs smell fear. Ellett wasn’t one.

Before television, he’d worked in broadcasting and radio. He knew when to pause for a laugh. How to keep things moving when something goes wrong, and how to make a room feel less lonely.

That helped because local TV in those days could go sideways in a hurry.

Sets were simple. Budgets were thin. Props failed. Cameras missed cues. Somebody was always one loose cord away from disaster. Half the charm of old television was that it was held together with talent, duct tape, and prayer.

Somewhere along the way, Ellett got interested in puppets.

Puppets were respectable citizens of children’s entertainment. They worked fairs, schools, libraries, birthday parties, and television studios. A puppet could be rude, nosy, sneaky, and lovable all at once.

Ellett learned how to do it right. Voices, timing, movement, reactions. A puppet isn’t alive because it has eyes. Plenty of dead things have eyes. A puppet comes to life when somebody gives it trouble to make.

Then came Floppy.

Floppy wasn’t slick or polished. He was funny-looking, mischievous, and full of personality. Kids loved him because he acted like a child with diplomatic immunity. He could interrupt, sass back, cause trouble, and be forgiven before the commercial break.

The real magic of the show was the back-and-forth between Ellett and Floppy. Duane played it straight. Floppy played it crooked.

Kids at home didn’t care how the trick worked. They weren’t studying hand positions or voice technique. Floppy was real to them. Case closed.

And that’s the whole point of childhood.

Over the years, thousands of Iowa kids sat in that studio audience. If you got to go, it was a major event. You wore decent clothes. Your mother fixed your hair. You tried to behave while secretly hoping the camera would find you for two glorious seconds.

Then you’d talk about it for years, which many people still do.

The show lasted through black-and-white TV, color TV, changing presidents, music, hair, and everything else America likes to change every ten minutes. Kids who watched Floppy in the late ’50s were old enough to have children watching by the late ’70s.

That is a serious run.

And it happened because Duane Ellett understood something simple: kids didn’t need noise, giant effects, or adults trying to be “hip.” They needed someone warm, funny, steady, and real.

That was Duane Ellet.

When The Floppy Show ended in 1987, it was the end of a kind of television that mostly disappeared. Local shows. Local personalities. Somebody from your own state who’d become a part of your childhood.

Now every kid watches something different on a different screen in a different room, often while ignoring three other screens.

Back then, half of Iowa might have been watching the same dog puppet at the same time.

That meant something.

Mention Duane Ellett and Floppy to the right person and their entire face changes. Suddenly they’re seven years old again. They can hear the television warming up, smell toast in the kitchen, and remember snow outside and school coming too soon.

That’s not really about television. It’s about home. And for a lot of Iowans, Duane Ellett and Floppy will always be part of it.

If you’ve ever said “I remember that place”… this blog is for you.

I dig up the stories, the lost stores, the old Iowa you don’t see anymore. No clickbait. No junk. Just real nostalgia.

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