The actor brought the little wooden host to life in sketches from 1962-1971.
Actor Peppino Mazzullo has passed away at the age of 100 last Wednesday. He died at his home in Santo Stefano di Braga, Italy, not far from his birthplace of Messina.
His greatest creation, Topo Gigio, was a ten inch tall mouse, created by Milan native Maria Perego. The little puppet debuted on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show on December 9, 1962. He returned often, through the iconic program’s conclusion on June 6, 1971.
Ed Sullivan was famously stiff and formal, yet Mazzulo and Topo Gigio got him to loosen up during their famous chats. The mouse closed each of his appearances with the line, “Kiss me goodnight.” While Mazzullo did the voice, Perego controlled the puppet’s legs with her fingers on one hand and operated his mouth using rods with the other. Two other puppeteers operated his arms.
“When he’s on my arm, I actually feel that he’s a living thing and that I’m talking to somebody,” Sullivan said. “I’ve never had that feeling before with any puppet or dummy.”
Joan Rivers created sketches for Topo Gigio in what was her first paying job as a writer.
“I lay on the floor and wrote a sketch about this comic Italian puppet mouse, with a little Italian accent, who had become a semi-fad in America,” she once said. “I had him asking Ed Sullivan to explain football. I put Topo in a little football jersey that said ¼ on the back. Topo Gigio paid my car payments for six months. God bless that little lousy mouse.”
Mazzullo was born June 6, 1926, and began his acting career while still a child, in Santo Stefano, then attended the Academy of Cinematographic Art in Rome, and the Academy of Dramatic Art in Milan. He worked on radio shows as a member of the RAI drama troupe, until one day he got to voice Topo Gigio for the first time.
His identification with puppets began very, very early, according to Mazzullo. As he explains it, when he was two years old, he suddenly woke up and at the foot of my bed and saw a little figure moving. I got scared, I shouted ‘Mom!, but my voice wouldn’t come out. After a while, this ‘figure’ disappeared. My voice came back, my mom arrived, I told her what I had seen, and she reassured me: ‘Don’t worry, it’s a fuddittu, a little sprite, it will bring you luck. Then one day, Maria Perego and her husband, Federico Caldura, thought of a musical number with different characters. One of them looked just like that fuddittu. I got a shiver, it was also a pretty ugly puppet, but I picked it up, I liked it after all. Caldura suggested to me, ‘Try to give it a voice, who knows, maybe a nice character will come out of it.’ And immediately I got Topo Gigio’s voice.”
He and Topo Gigio had their first outing as a performing arts duo in the 1961 adventure film The Magic World of Topo Gigio. He would continue to voice the puppet through 2006. After his retirement from performing, he founded the Piccolissimo Teatro di Messina, where he also taught budding actors.
His funeral is set for Thursday in the church of San Giovanni Battista in Santo Stefano di Briga.
Thanks for all the dreams and memories, Mr. Mazzullo. And please, give the mouse a kiss goodnight for us.
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