The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence
The Electric Mayhem’s grand debut!
But, as I was saying before, Sex and Violence also introduces a great deal that does become part of The Muppet Show world, including a slew of new characters. Though it may be difficult to believe–since they have always felt such an indelible part of the Muppets as long as I can remember, and because even before this episode, Muppet rock bands appeared on various variety shows and on Sesame Street–the Electric Mayhem actually make their debut here. That’s right, Dr. Teeth, Floyd, Janice, Zoot, and Animal didn’t appear in Muppet canon before Sex and Violence! Dr. Teeth was designed by Henson designer Michael Frith, and his look was actually inspired by a famous jazz musician, Dr. John, with additional flamboyant performance flourishes coming from people such as Elton John. In fact, his full name on Frith’s original sketch was “Leon Doctor Eltonjohn Don’t Shoot (The Piano Player),” a riff on Elton John’s album, Don’t Shoot the Piano Player.
What’s pretty remarkable about Dr. Teeth and the rest of the Mayhem is how overall consistent they have been over the years. Their first-ever performance here–a Joe Raposo original called “Love Ya to Death”–could easily be one of their later psychedelic Muppet Show numbers, and, in both his look and Jim’s performance of him, Dr. Teeth is Dr. Teeth right from the start. Janice, conversely, has her look but not her spacey voice/personality yet. Here, she’s played by Fran Brill (whose best-known characters, as I’ve mentioned in the past, are Sesame Street‘s Prairie Dawn and Zoey) rather than Richard Hunt. Meanwhile, Floyd’s voice is pretty accurate, including his sardonic sense of humor, but he’s less laidback, talking much more than he would in ensuing years, actually overwhelming Nigel. His eyes also seem a bit different, and he’s wearing a red suit, reminiscent of the Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, from whence he got his name.
And the Electric Mayhem aren’t the only “new” characters here. Funnily enough, Sex and Violence also introduces Sam the Eagle, who you think would be horrified to make his first appearance in a special with that name! And Sam…is basically Sam. Frank Oz hasn’t gotten his voice down quite yet, but it’s not far off, and his scandalized responses to “indecency” are pretty spot-on. As with Floyd, the only truly jarring aspect is how talkative Sam is here, and the fact that, at one point, he and Floyd are playing chess and then Scrabble. Later on, Sam wouldn’t even want to be sitting so close to this hippy, let alone playing a game with him (though Sam will develop a crush on Janice on The Muppets)!
Nigel, Sam, and Floyd in the control room.
Speaking of duos, Sex and Violence also marks the unveiling of the legendary comedy team of Statler and Waldorf, whose cantankerous personalities and senses of humor are here but whose format hasn’t been perfected yet. Rather than sitting in a box, interacting with and mocking the Muppets on stage, they’re simply two old guys sitting in armchairs in a fancy living room, cracking jokes at each other. Again, the ingredients are there but the magic isn’t quite yet. The reason the Statler and Waldorf we know are funny isn’t because they’re cranky old men. They’re funny because they invite us to laugh at the Muppets along with them and in the process sometimes end up as the unwitting butts of their own jokes. Without that dynamic to play off of, there’s not much there other than some rather lame jokes about being old. And they’re not just old here. They sound ancient, with no zest for life.
It’s actually quite fascinating that Jim and Co. were able to later see the potential in using Statler and Waldorf in a different way because, really, as they are here, they don’t significantly stand out from any of the other senior citizen Muppets introduced in Valentine and nearly all of whom were gone by the end of The Muppet Show‘s first season. My guess is that they were able to see there was some chemistry in these two old codgers’ interplay with one another, and the next logical step was to see how they’d do when teamed up against others.
Finally, Sex and Violence also brings back two Muppets who appeared beforehand in slightly different forms. All the way back in 1961, Jim had debuted a crazy German chef dicing up food at the US Food Fair in Hamburg, Germany, and now 14 years later, that character evolved into the Swedish Chef! Some may be surprised to know that he originally actually had a name, Jarnvagskorsning, which means “railway crossing” in Swedish, but was eventually dropped due to being too difficult for English-speakers to pronounce. But anyway, the Swedish Chef looks and sounds pretty much exactly like the Swedish Chef we know and love today (according to Brian Henson, Jim would actually practice and perfect his mock-Swedish for hours and hours while commuting).
“Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs”
While his sketch here is split up into smaller bits and contains the absurdist flourish of having Chinese subtitles at the bottom of the screen to translate his mock-Swedish, it’s otherwise remarkably similar to later Swedish Chef sketches, from “Børk! Børk! Børk!” all the way to its dip into the surreal, when the lettuce leaves of the sub sandwich he is making turn into wings and the sub begins to fly away, until he shoots it down with a gun, pieces of lettuce showering down upon him.
And then we also have another appearance from the proto-Miss-Piggy who first appeared on the Herb Alpert special (though, with dark, beady eyes, that make her look even less developed here). And while she isn’t yet truly Miss Piggy, she has a certain regal quality in common with her–in a particularly funny moment, sitting at dinner, she tells her butler, in an English accent, “We’ll have the old fish heads, the black banana peel, and the cold, burned coffee with the cigarette butt floating in it”–along with the fact that she appears in a sci-fi film parody, Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs, foreshadowing The Muppet Show‘s legendary Pigs in Space! Speaking of which, Dr. Julian Strangepork also appears in the sketch, albeit called Dr. Nauga, and while Link Hogthrob doesn’t make an appearance, his voice does in the form of the character voice Jim uses for the human male hero of the film, a riff on Charles Heston’s role in Planet of the Apes.