Sam and Friends
“Huntley and Brinkley”
“Huntley and Brinkley”
The first sketch I watched is a really neat mixture of live performance and lip sync, with a slightly-more-cross-eyed-Kermit-than-we’re-used-to (one of Henson’s puppet innovations was to give them slightly crossed eyes, which gives the illusion of greater expressiveness, however it’s much subtler now!) taking on the reporter role he would often do later on Sesame Street, here interviewing two famous newsmen of the time, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, played by two of the other Sam and Friends characters, twins called Hank and Frank.
Kermit’s goal in the interview is to show these newsmen as they “really” are off-camera, hoping to demonstrate what they’re like when they let their hair down, so to speak. However, the gag is that when each of them speaks, they’re only able to lip sync short sentences recorded from the opening line of their nightly broadcasts. They effectively only each say their name and TV station, the two-layered joke being (a) that, as Kermit discovers, they actually are that boring when they’re not on the air and (b) the more sophisticated meta level that requires the audience to put together for themselves that the other two puppets can only parrot back the same recorded lines. Kermit even eventually says, “I bet some of the smart alecks in the audience have already guessed what you’re going to say when I talk to you, but never mind that, just relax and be yourself…”
There are also a number of really clever, unexpected uses of the recorded words, such as when Chet Huntley, who reported from New York, answers Kermit’s query that his favorite Sam and Friends’ character is the skull-shaped, purple guy, Yorick, which is actually just a sample of Huntley saying the “York” from “New York,” and when Brinkley, from DC, answers that he believes the winner of the 1964 presidential race will be “Washington”! Later, the two then have an argument over which of their cities is better, with the audio jumping back and forth between “New York!” “Washington!” “New York!” “Washington!” and you can see how this all foreshadows the chaotic nature of the later Muppets, as well as Kermit being the calm figure trying on some level to control the madness, which is also interesting, because at this point, Kermit himself was often one of the crazy characters, only simply playing a more controlled character here, closer to the frog we know (Additionally, as I mentioned above, it’s also neat to hear his voice, which is similar to the Kermit voice we’re used to today but with slightly more of a Southern drawl.). And again, Henson’s use of meta humor and media is simple yet also surprisingly sophisticated for the era and format, which is, again, a local 5-minute late-night puppet show.
The sketch is followed by an ad for Esskay, the meat brand that sponsored the show, and in it, we get to see Harry the Hipster, a hep character who, in personality, is basically a proto-Rowlf/Dr. Teeth–physically, he’s a brown, furry figure who has no facial characteristics other than sunglasses, which actually causes our brains to mentally fill in a face, much like the later Boober Fraggle, who has a hat and hair covering where his eyes should be–along with the know-it-all Professor Madcliffe, who very Muppetily screams his excitement about Esskay’s new pork-and-bacon sausages (which sound and look really gross), while Harry basically tells him to chill out, another trope Muppet fans will recognize from later work.
You can watch this Sam and Friends episode for yourself here.
“Powder-Burn”
“Powder-Burn”
The next episode I watched is a parody of Western films–a genre that Jim used to love to watch at the local movie theatre when he was a kid–and again sets off a tradition that would often recur on Sesame Street, and some Muppet Show episodes, as well, of a pun-filled scene set in the Old West or even on the set of a Western. Specifically, it’s a parody of Gunsmoke that, by the end, is revealed to go by the alternate name of Punsmoke! It’s also one of the Sam and Friends sketches that doesn’t use any lip syncing from other peoples’ work, however the various performers are lip syncing to Jim’s voice itself, as he actually provided the voice for every character in the episode, which is impressive given that there are 5 characters in it, the most we’ve seen in a single sketch so far. It’s even composed of 3 separate scenes, the length and ambition of which shows Jim’s further development and continued pushing of the boundaries of his modest set-up.