Film in Southeast Asia

I remember Victor and Charlee from my teens. I spent those years in Batu Pahat, a fairly large town in Johor, that had the advantage over many other towns in that state for being close enough to Singapore to receive the country’s TV and radio signals. As a result, I knew all the lyrics of televised Singaporean patriotic songs, like Stand Up for Singapore; and I got to know Singaporean entertainers like Brian Richmond, Roger Kool, and the ventriloquist Victor Khoo and his puppet Charlee. Khoo and wooden sidekick were never considered cool by anyone I knew. I did not grow up in Singapore so I don’t know if, had I attended one of his performances, I would have reacted with as much excitement as the children shown screaming in Tan Pin Pin’s short film, Singapore GaGa. In fact, Charlee still looks rather sinister to me, perhaps because I associate him with the “insane ventriloquists” and their practically-possessed dummies (Davis 136) featured in popular culture. Khoo, however, with his mullet and shoulder-padded jacket, seems unbelievably cheesy. Could it be true that Singaporean children really love the duo so much?

The shouts and cheers at the Multiracial Children’s Lantern Festival Party seem genuine enough and director Tan herself says, on her website, that on the way to film the event, she “felt excited, unsure what it would be like to meet after all these years” (Singapore GaGa, website) … almost as if she was on her way to see an old flame.
The signage showing the name of the event makes, I feel, an ironic statement. Look out at the sea of children and they comprise mostly ethnic Chinese. Thus, if Singapore GaGa is Tan’s “statement about multicultural Singapore”, then she is saying that, like the signage, the island state’s multiracial identity is a somewhat false one, the picture skewed.

In a paper published in 2008, Alexius Pereira cited Singapore’s then most recent census figures, in which the Chinese made up ‘seventy-five per cent’ (351) of