Posts made in October, 2015
Sesame Street Pitch Reel
Rowlf explains the show to Kermit.
“I think there was a kind of collective genius about the core group that created Sesame Street, but there was only one real genius in our midst, and that was Jim.”–Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder of Children’s Television Workshop
And now, we finally come to the origins of one of the most seminal programs not only in Jim Henson’s career but television history, period: Sesame Street, a show that debuted near the end of 1969 and to this very day continues to educate pre-school children, while entertaining both them and their parents with warmth and intelligent humor, managing to make learning feel not didactic but fun and endlessly imaginative.
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NBC White Paper Credits
A little later today, we are finally going to explore the origins of one of Jim’s most famous, enduring projects, Sesame Street, but firstly, a brief bit of non-Muppets footage. Earlier in 1968, NBC had been extremely impressed with Jim’s Youth 68 documentary and so hired him to create a credits sequence for a three-part documentary series called Ordeal of the American City, which was itself part of an NBC news series called NBC White Paper. And here is the footage, which follows Jim’s penchant for juxtaposing quick shots to create an overlapping collage effect. Here, the images are all urban in nature, the images being used to underline the fraught tensions underlying city life:
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Hey Cinderella!
The Fairy Godmother and Kermit
Hey Cinderella! is an hour-long fractured fairy tale that was the Muppets’ first network television special and the first entry in a thematic trilogy dubbed Tales from Muppetland. Although it didn’t air until April 1970, about 5 months after Sesame Street‘s first season debuted, it was actually filmed in 1968 in Toronto, and its history reaches back further than that.
In 1965, TV writers Jon Stone (who we saw in Ripples) and Tom Whedon (father of Joss Whedon) wrote a pilot script for CBS for a show that was meant to be centered on Snow White, co-starring the Muppets. CBS passed on the script before a pilot was even shot, but ABC thought the idea had potential, as long as it was about a different fairy tale, for
Read MoreThe Muppets 1.05: “Walk the Swine”
Reese Witherspoon visits Piggy on “Up Late”.
I had been eagerly anticipating Reese Witherspoon’s visit to The Muppets for quite a while. As a small, plucky, determined, blonde Hollywood star with an unexpected edge (and documented diva behavior, at times), she seemed the perfect foe for Piggy, and while it would be nice to eventually see Piggy cross paths with another female star who she doesn’t harbor jealousy or resentment towards, Piggy never has been the plays-well-with-others-who-seem-like-they-might-try-to-hog-her-spotlight type.
Particularly in this case, for, as we learn in this episode, Piggy was also up for the role of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line but lost out to Reese who–to add insult to injury–then had the gall to win an Oscar for it. Kermit
Read MoreThe Muppets on Puppets
Rowlf and Jim
In June 1968, Henson Associates filmed a special for public television (which at the time was called National Education Television) at Hershey, Pennsylvania’s WITF-TV, making it the first-ever Muppet special to air, although unlike most of the others, it wasn’t a narrative but rather a behind-the-scenes look at the Muppets, hosted by Jim, called The Muppets on Puppets–a rarely seen program today that won the NET Award for Best Educational Television Show of 1968, and which, thankfully, Disney included as a bonus feature on the third season of The Muppet Show DVD set. And for a Muppet and Henson devotee, it is a treasure trove.
For one, after watching so much of Jim’s creative output but with he
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