SNL: “The Land of Gorch” #7-11
Scred and Gilda
In my first Land of Gorch post, I explained the circumstances surrounding this Muppet sketch’s recurring appearance in the first season of Saturday Night Live (if you want to see these sketches, the first season of SNL is up on Hulu and Amazon, or you could buy it on DVD) and how the Muppets and their performers never really came to mesh well with the cast and crew of SNL, which was particularly frustrating to Jim Henson, as all of his efforts to get the Muppets their own variety show had failed up to that point. Luckily, however, this unfortunate situation wasn’t to last long. Instead, fate intervened in the form of Lord Lew Grade, a Ukrainian-born British lord who ran a highly successful television production company, ATV, and who seemed to come down from the heavens in order to finally grant Jim his fondest wish: The Muppet Show!
I had hinted in the past that, although Jim’s two Muppet Show pilots and pitch reel failed to directly bring his show to series, they did help in the long run, and this is how: while CBS didn’t pick up the show, Thomas Miller, a CBS executive who was impressed, got in contact with Abe Mandell, the NY president of ITC (Grade’s international company), to convince him to invest in the Muppets. As it so happens, Lord Grade was already a Henson fan, having been impressed with the Muppets’ work on the Julie Andrews specials, which were also ATV/ITC Productions, and if anything, he was actually surprised that they didn’t already have their own show! He wanted Jim and Co. to film the show in London, to be syndicated and distributed internationally, and even promised him a (huge-at-the-time) $3 million budget for the first season. This was partially helped by the fact that a traditional pilot didn’t need to be filmed. The aforementioned pitch reel (which, again, included the best of the first two pilots) was enough! Jim was over the moon.
By mid-October–only about two weeks after SNL and Gorch premiered–the contracts were signed, and Mandell had sold The Muppet Show to CBS, who seemed thrilled to air it now that they didn’t have to fund it themselves. And, as far as SNL, Lorne Michaels, the head of SNL, was more than happy to let them out of their contract, given how unpopular Gorch proved to be. But the sketch did stick around for much of Season 1, regardless, since besides two initial episodes in January, the rest of The Muppet Show‘s first season didn’t begin filming until May of that year.
Although chronologically, this stuff began to be set in motion after only two Gorch sketches aired, I decided not to bring it up until this post, because (a) there was still another season of Sesame Street to get through, amongst other things, before we reached The Muppet Show, and I didn’t want to get to this preliminary stuff and then have to wait for another month of posts till the show actually materialized, and (b) other than the first Lily Tomlin sketch, which we covered in the previous post, the first group of Gorch sketches were fairly straightforward and contained in its own universe. Around this point, however, they start getting increasingly meta, eventually coming to directly reference the fact that they weren’t meshing well with the rest of SNL. As Gorch‘s unpopularity actually becomes the main theme of the impending Gorch sketches, this seemed the best time to introduce their impending departure from the show.
Ploobis and Scred get wasted.
So, without further ado, let’s look at the rest of the Gorch sketches, leading us all the way up to the precipice of that seminal moment in television history–the beginning of The Muppet Show: the first, which aired on December 13, 1975, is a standard Gorch sketch and a not particularly clever one at that. Ploobis gets riproaringly drunk, coerces Scred into doing so, as well, and that’s about it. There’s naturally some fun to be had thanks to the performers. As much as there may have issues backstage, Jim seemed to relish getting to act this sort of adult material with a Muppet, and he plays drunk Ploobis to the hilt. Ditto for Jerry Nelson’s Scred, who gets a few good digs in: Ploobis opines that he drinks because he hates himself, and Scred agrees that that must be why he drinks–he hates Ploobis, too! Overall, though, the sketch has very little to offer other than puppets getting drunk. Even the end seems to just peter out. The two go to the Mighty Flavog, as an inebriated lark rather than for advice, and after they piss him off for a few seconds, Flavog shoots them full of lightning for the crime of taking his name in vain. And the scene just stops there, with no real punchline or much of a point.
The next one–from December 20th–is where the meta really starts to kick into full gear, as the entire sketch revolves around the fact that none of the other SNL cast members have shown up to Ploobis and Peuta’s Christmas party, having all opted to attend the Killer Bees’ (a much more popular SNL sketch) holiday shindig instead. The entire scene is a self-referential gag on the fact that the Land of Gorch isn’t fitting well with the rest of the show. By the end, not only have Wisss and Vazh arrived and then abandoned the Gorch party to return to the Bees’, but Peuta has followed along with them, leaving just Ploobis and Scred to watch over this sad affair. Shortly afterwards, host Candice Bergen (who would go on to appear on The Muppet Show, as well) arrives and, to make them feel better, assures them that she likes intimate parties. Soon, she starts singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” with them, and while it’s not quite as lovely as Lily Tomlin’s duet with Scred, it’s sweet nonetheless. Bergen, of course, has spent a great deal of her life around puppets, being the daughter of Edgar Bergen, the famous ventriloquist who was one of Jim’s idols growing up, making her a great choice to be one of the guest hosts to actually interact with them.
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