More Sam and Friends
“That Old Black Magic”
“That Old Black Magic”
And yet another lip synced song sketch! This one distinguishes itself in a number of ways, however. Firstly, it’s the only surviving episode of Sam and Friends that actually features Sam in it! Poor guy. Only one clip remaining to provide evidence that he was on his own show! Secondly, it features the nifty meta conceit that Sam and Kermit-in-drag are on a TV that other characters are watching.
In fact, when it starts, Harry is watching the TV, which seems to be on the fritz. The same piece of music keeps skipping and Sam keeps repeating the same action over and over, until Harry hits the “TV” and fixes the issue–another example of Jim’s ahead-of-his-time meta humor, the characters directly acknowledging the TV medium they’re a part of–at which point the camera zooms in on the “TV” to reveal Sam’s song and dance with Kermit to the classic song, “That Old Black Magic,” a song that the Muppets would revisit numerous times over the years. Kermit’s drag–much like Harry’s in Powder-Burn and examples in the Wilkins and Wontkins ads–indicates the broad, abstract nature of the character at this point, as well as the fact that he’s more of a chaotic, trickster figure here, a la Bugs Bunny, unlike the more solid, dependable frog he later becomes.
And at the end of the song, the meta-ness continues, as the sketch dovetails directly into an Esskay ad, with the bird-like Omar appearing on the screen-within-the-screen immediately after Sam and Kermit are done, and attempting to advertise the product, until Professor Madcliffe rushes in from outside the TV and criticizes Omar from within the TV for not doing an exciting enough job talking up the product. Eventually, he hits Guy Smiley-esque levels of enthusiasm, going on and on about Esskay. So we go from Harry simply “watching” a “TV show” to shattering that fourth wall entirely and having the characters inside and outside the screen directly interacting. And we finish on a classically Muppety joke, which is Omar telling Professor Madcliffe that he can’t do any of the things he proposes to get people excited about Esskay because they ran out of time while the Professor was ranting! And even with that, there’s of course another meta level due to the fact that his raving was the actual commercial.
You can view this episode here.
“Singin’ in the Rain”
“Singin’ in the Rain”
The last clip I was able to watch was of a small, blonde, quite-Fraggly-looking and gender-non-specific-but-feminine Muppet lip-syncing to a sped-up-and-therefore-Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks-sounding “Singin’ in the Rain”. As she continues to sing, the downpour of rain coming down upon her gets greater and greater until she’s eventually sneezing out bursts of water from her mouth, and by the end, she’s completely submerged and likely drowns, a twist on Jim’s penchant for having his characters devoured by monsters or blown up at the end of sketches. It also foreshadows the first season Muppet Show characters, Wayne and Wanda’s, failed attempts at musical numbers, each one of which would fall apart due to a lyric from the song actually coming true in an overly literal manner. You can check this clip out here.
Jim finally wrapped up Sam and Friends on December 15, 1961, in extremely, fittingly meta manner with Kermit informing Harry the show was over, and Harry then blowing up the set because it was no longer needed, which unintentionally foreshadows the later (and coincidentally named) character, Crazy Harry, with his love of explosives, and also foreshadows other later Muppet endings, such as the final Land of Gorch sketch on SNL, in which the characters essentially realize they’re puppets and climb into storage boxes to be packed away, and the end of the one-off special, The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show, in which Piggy, thinking she was shooting a new pilot, is informed by a TV exec that it’s only a one night event and she furiously karate chops him and then singlehandedly destroys the entire set!
So there we have Sam and Friends! And please join back here tonight for my review of the second episode of ABC’s new show, The Muppets!