As television became widely available throughout Italy in the late 1950s, puppet theaters lost their traditional audience and ceased offering nightly performances. This crisis is captured in the film segment Gli ultimi pupari (1967) in which, despite his best efforts, the last remaining puppeteer cannot attract audience members beyond a single (and overly demanding) habitual spectator, a leftover from the golden days when the public knew the stories as well as the maestro. The two protagonists, played by the Italian comic actors Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, invert the roles of puppeteer and spectator amidst disagreements and infelicitous results, until not only does the puppet theater close, but one of them appears to be dead.