Posts made in November, 2015
The Muppets 1.06: “The Ex-Factor”
Piggy and Kristin Chenoweth do a duet.
After a few fun but uneven installments, The Muppets was finally back to glorious form in last night’s episode, “The Ex-Factor,” which might very well be my favorite of the series so far. It may not be as all-out hilarious as many of its predecessors but it features a lovely story that cleverly subverts several expectations from previous entries and, perhaps most importantly, helps restore balance to Piggy, who had even just last week been in danger of transforming into a too-cartoonishly-selfish character without Kermit as her anchor to the real world.
In a number of ways, this one features some of the show’s best character writing for Piggy and Kermit up to this point, or at least since the premiere.
Read MoreThe Wizard of Id, Etc.
Today, once more we have a number of shorter Henson clips to look at before returning to the first season of Sesame Street the day after tomorrow. We begin with The Wizard of Id, a brief pilot based on the famous comic strip by Johnny Hart and Brant Parker, which was first launched in 1964 and continues to run to this very day. Although the show never came to be–apparently by the time the creators of Id started to demonstrate interest in the project, Jim already became too busy with Sesame Street and other projects–it’s significant as being the first time that Jim and his team ever designed puppets based on someone else’s work. Here, it was three puppets designed to look like characters from the strip.
One could also see why Jim might have been less interested in it because it wasn’t his own work. The script also isn’t as inspired as those written for his own characters and feels very much like short back-and-forth comic strip scenes brought to life in succession. It’s even entirely possible that they did just use lines from the original strips, but either way it has a rather choppy quality. Now, it’s also possible that that is because this was just a brief 5-minute pilot and they would have broken out of this format had they filmed a full episode or went to series. But as it is, this feels more like a curiosity than a truly intriguing what-might-have-been such as Tales of the Tinkerdee is. It does, however, end on a cute bit in which the Wizard blows up each of the characters, then himself, saying: “Yes, sir, it’s a standard Muppet finale. If you don’t know how to end it, go out with a–” BANG!
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The Cube
The Cube
In 1966, around the time that Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl wrote Tale of Sand, they collaborated on another script called The Cube, which Jim described as an “original surrealistic comedy…[that] dramatizes the complex, baffling problems of reality versus illusion,” a description that could have easily been applied to Tale of Sand, as well. Like that unproduced script, it centers on a single man who finds himself in a strange place with no explanation of how he got there, basically being relentlessly assualted and harassed by a variety of bizarre characters, driven further and further over the edge, and finally, just when he thinks he’s conquered his demons, ending up right where he started again with no end or escape in sight.
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