now, chances are Chicago Dave, and maybe ol' Michael Andretti, who grew up out by Wrigley, are gonna know what I'm talking about, but its a good story............this was a kiddie show in Chicagoland I'm sure there were more than a few of us 'kiddies' who kept watching it LONG after we were the target-demographic, 'cause as its been said, TV is "the box they burried vaudeville in" on this show the host (Frazier Thomas) would deal with all these puppets, none of which talked, per say. Star puppet Garfield made a clappity-clap noise with his beak, which Frazier understodd, & repeated back to the audience at home, all the others seemed to whisper in his ear..........in later years, in a retro Chicago-TV special, this behaviour was explained as a result of the shows limited budget, the voice-actors union insisted on union-actors for the puppets, WGN couldn't afford it, and so Frazier did all the heavy-lifting. As he had a great comic timing, I think the show only worked because of this limitation, to have corny little squeaky voices for the characters would have made it just as stupid as the REST of the puppet shows on the toob..........
..........which brings me back to the original point of why didn't they edit out the dead-time?? it probably has to be done by another department, which would have added to the cost of the production. I went this route in the second decade of my TV show, drag races can be 6 to 12 seconds, SNOWMOBILE races were 6 to 12 MINUTES, and thats how a drag racing show started running snowmobile races, it was a HELL of a lot easy to fill out a broadcast with those events