Posts made in December, 2015
Sesame St S3: Assorted Clips
Bob introduces Kermit to a bullfrog.
Today, I watched an assortment of highlights from Sesame Street‘s third season, beginning with an amazing clip that has an even more amazing backstory which I only learned recently, while watching PBS’ In Their Own Words episode on Jim Henson. In most of the Kermit lecture sketches, Kermit would be teaching a lesson to the children at home. This might be the first time that Kermit himself was taught a lesson in one of these scenes! You can watch the clip here.
It starts off with Kermit preparing to give a lecture on “one of the most exciting, wonderful things in the entire world,” namely frogs. And then Bob enters, telling him he has a surprise but to carry on with his speech first.
Read MoreSesame St S3: Songs, Etc.
Today, we’re looking at a bunch of mostly musical highlights from Sesame Street‘s third season, with a few other clips thrown in for good measure. As usual, I found the first batch of clips here on the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 DVD set, beginning with one of the most iconic songs in the entire run of the show, Cookie Monster’s classic “C is for Cookie,” which like Ernie’s “Rubber Duckie,” entered the pop culture zeitgeist, appearing on over 25 separate Sesame Street albums. What’s so wonderful about it is that, on one level, it teaches a very simple concept, which is right there in the title, but like Ernie’s song, it’s also a character-defining and character-driven number. We love Cookie and his cookie obsession which makes the song specific and memorable in a way that a purely educational number wouldn’t be. Joe Raposo’s deliberately simplistic lyrics and tune perfectly capture Cookie’s speech patterns and personality:
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Sesame Street Ep #276
Maria and Big Bird
As Sesame Street‘s third season premiere begins (it originally aired November 8, 1971 and is available on the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 DVD set), the voice of one off-screen child is introducing another one to the street where he lives along with all of its inhabitants, and I have to say that, after being briefly away from Sesame Street myself with Muppet specials for the past few entries, not to mention posting less due to my being away in London at the moment, it feels like a warm welcome home. There’s Ernie and Bert, and there’s Bob, and there’s Susan and Gordon! I missed you guys! Well, some of you, anyway (looking at you, not-the-Gordon-I-grew-up-with!).
But in addition to reuniting us with familiar faces, this opening narration
Read MoreThe Frog Prince
Princess Melora and Robin sing a duet.
I can’t lie. Ever since I began this project, The Frog Prince is one of the Muppet specials I’ve been most looking forward to revisiting. As a little kid, I actually owned the record (yup, they had those things back then), which I believe had either the audio from the entire show or very close to it, and I would listen to it over and over. Later on, I finally recorded the special when it aired on the Disney Channel and watched that over and over, to the point that even though it’s probably been 25 years now since the last time I’d seen or listened to it, I remembered almost the entire thing vividly. And I don’t just mean situations but lines, entire exchanges, and complete songs, lyrics and all.
The second in the Tales from Muppetland fractured fairy tale trilogy, The
Read MoreThe Great Santa Claus Switch
The Frackles take over the elves’ gig!
All the way back in 1963, one of the scripts that Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl collaborated on was a Christmas special called The Great Santa Claus Switch. Unlike some of their other 1960s scripts, however, they did manage to see this one to fruition, albeit 7 years later. Ed Sullivan was a great supporter and fan of the Muppets, as evidenced by their numerous appearances on his show, and agreed to produce the special in 1970. In June of that year, during the hiatus between Sesame Street‘s 1st and 2nd seasons, filming went underway, and it finally aired on Dec 20th, which was coincidentally the day after Jim and Jane’s fifth and final child, Heather, was born.
Jim had apparently hoped that The Great Santa Claus Switch would
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