taxidermist in The Sign of the Four is adapted to a female pupil who loves animals and speaks like a boy. She cooperates with Holmes in his investigations. Production Development Following the broadcast of The Three Musketeers from 2009 to 2010, Kōki Mitani planned to adapt The Brothers Karamazov to a puppetry. Despite his love for the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Mitani was reluctant to adapt the series into puppetry due to the difficulty in describing the details of investigations through the operation of puppets. He also worried that it was too late to produce a Sherlock Holmes series as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes gained popularity and the modern adaptation Sherlock had already received a reputation. Then he planned to make a puppet with the spitting image of Sherlock Holmes drawn by Sidney Paget but abandoned the idea as tall puppets are difficult for puppeteers to operate. Mitani then decided to make it a show set in a fictional boarding school called "Beeton School" with Sherlock Holmes as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. Though many incidents occur in the school, there are no murders and the same puppets appear many times. According to Mitani, as the story progresses it will be revealed to viewers the full picture of why the show is set in a school. All four novels of the canon – A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear – are dramatised in the puppetry, which Mitani says may be the first case among screen adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's work. At a March 2014 press conference for the show, Mitani said that only real Sherlockians can enjoy the show. Though the comment aroused criticism, he stated that what he wanted to say is that real Sherlockians should have the playfulness of mind to accept and enjoy any adaption of the series of Sherlock Holmes and that the material is worth creating derivative work. He also said that the presence of John Watson as a storyteller is very important and a splendid invention of Arthur Conan Doyle. He describes Watson as having warmth and passion that Holmes lacks and appreciates Martin Freeman who plays Watson with good nature in Sherlock. In 2007, Freeman appeared in the play The Last Laugh, based on University of Laughs (Warai no daigaku, ) written by Mitani. Puppets and sets Mitani has said