Best. Animal Shadow Puppets. Ever.

My dad taught me to code in BASIC so that I could make a list of numbers from 1-to-792. As a ten-year-old, why did I need a list of numbers ending at 792, printed dot-matrix on that paper with tear-off perforated sides? Because that’s how many cards there were in the 1986 Topps baseball card complete set. The other day while cleaning out my garage, I found the cards and the list — every number crossed off.

Apparently, somewhere in me is a CPA fighting for expression.

Again, I blame my dad — a prototypical (primordial?) geek dad if ever there was one. We did Games magazine. We watched Jeopardy!, Murder She Wrote, Marty Stouffer’s Wild America, and Carl Sagan‘s Cosmos. He taught me the thumb pulling illusion and how to appear to count 11 fingers on your hands (“one, two, skip these THREE, four,” etc…).

And he taught me how to make animal shadows with my hands.

This is what we do, we geek dads.

And so in honor of all this grandtastic geek nostalgia, I dug up some of the awesomest shadow puppets I could find, in images that themselves ring of nostalgia. Why break the spell, right?

So here they are: the all time best animal-hand shadow puppets, ready for the next generation of geeks.

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