Posts made in November, 2015
The Muppets 1.07: “Pig’s in a Blackout”
Jason Bateman harangues Kermit.
It’s difficult to say without having seen the rest of the season–particuarly whatever will come after the upcoming hiatus, during which The Muppets is apparently going to be retooled, although to what extent isn’t yet apparent–but I’m very tempted to pronounce that, after a few uneven outings, the show is on an upswing.
Last week’s episode wasn’t the show’s funniest overall but it finally gave Piggy the sort of nuance and depth that she’d been largely missing since the pilot and in so doing infused the proceedings with a great deal of warmth, which many have accused this new Muppet show of lacking. This week’s, however, is even better, as not only is it riotously Muppety–the first time arguably since the pilot or the second episode that the show has
Read MoreSesame Street Ep #115
Kermit sings “Bein’ Green”
Today’s episode of Sesame Street aired on April 17, 1970, and is available on Netflix and for sale on iTunes under the name “Kermit Croons Being Green,” which technically isn’t the name of the song (the “g” shouldn’t be there), but what can you do?
This is probably the strangest episode I’ve watched thus far, mainly because it contains at least one landmark moment for the series and some extremely fun sketches but also starts off with a practically interminable sequence that seems to stretch on forever, something not helped by the fact that not a single Muppet appears on camera for the first 12 minutes, which is a lot of time to have to sit through humans on the street acting out virtally plotless tedium. I have to admit that I actually
Read MoreSesame Street Ep #56
Oscar makes a strange request of Mr. Hooper.
Today’s episode of Sesame Street aired on January 26th, 1970, about 2 months after the previous one, and, if you’d like to view it yourself, is available on iTunes and Netflix under the name “An Orange Grouch and a Green Grover”. I thought it would be cool to watch an episode a little further into the run, to see how things developed since the premiere. In some ways, it’s still very much the same show. The plotting and connective tissue is still rudimentary at best, however there are a number of linked sketches which, at least at the start, hold this episode together a bit better than the last, although that falls away as it proceeds.
Unlike the first episode, this one actually opens with a Muppet, Oscar (who is still orange but now has hands!), introducing the hour, and features the Muppets much more prominently than the premiere. We no
Read MoreSesame Street Ep #1
Ernie, Bert, Susan, and Gordon welcome the new kid to the block.
And here we finally are, at the very first episode of Sesame Street, which aired on November 10, 1969, and would prove to be not only an immediate hit–in fact, it was profiled in an article in Life Magazine before its debut and got mostly stellar initial reviews–but go on to be one of the most successful shows in children’s television history, as well as television history, period, currently running 45 seasons and counting. You can watch the episode yourself on the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 DVD set.
Now, there are some immediate differences between the test pilots and the first episode that finally aired, a number of which are immediately apparent when the episode begins. For starters, the longer, Bob McGrath-
Read MoreSesame Street Test Pilot
Ernie and Bert
After the success of the Sesame Street pitch reel, the public television heads of NET (which actually had already become PBS by the time the first episode of the show aired in November 1969) wanted the Children’s Television Workshop to produce a number of test pilots to experiment with the format for the upcoming show, and so the CTW and Jim produced 5 complete trial episodes in June 1969, each with different segments, in order to see how children would respond to them, and–in a truly awesome move–the producers of the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 DVD set decided to include the first one as a bonus feature, which is what allowed me to watch it for this post.
What might be most fascinating as well as strange about it is how overall
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