Kermit Visits Flip Wilson
Kermit meets Diahann Carroll.
On November 11, 1971, the Muppets visited The Flip Wilson Show again. This time, however, rather than Carroll Spinney’s Sesame Street characters, Jim Henson and Frank Oz themselves appeared, Jim first playing Kermit and then the two of them taking on the roles of initially faceless Anything Muppets, which Flip helps transform into characters, like Gordon did on Sesame Street and Jim and his team did in The Muppets on Puppets.
But let’s begin with the Kermit scene, which is hands-down the best Muppets-on-Flip-Wilson sketch I’ve seen thus far, mostly because it combines two sometimes-underused elements of Kermit’s character, particularly in the post-Jim years–his mischievous streak and his sex
Read More1969-1970 Variety Show Appearances
The original “Mahna Mahna”.
Before proceeding on with Sesame Street‘s second season, today I took a look at a number of variety show appearances that Jim Henson and his Muppets team continued to do, both during Sesame Street‘s opening season and afterwards, during the summer hiatus.
The first is an extremely significant moment in Muppet history, being the debut of one of their most iconic songs and sketches, “Mahna Mahna”! Well, technically it was the second time the Muppets had used it. The first was in a 1969 Sesame Street sketch, which you can watch here, and which feels practically primitive today because, rather than the pink, furry, snoutish, round-mouthed Snowths, who have become indelibly linked to the song, the back-up singers are simply two nondescript Anything
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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Our Place, Ads, & More
Rowlf on “Our Place”
In the summer of 1967, Rowlf was enlisted by Ed Sullivan (again underlining in what high esteem Sullivan held Jim and the Muppets) for yet his next big assignment, as the emcee to a new variety show produced by Sullivan’s production company to air just that one summer–from July 2nd till September 3rd–while most of the rest of TV was on hiatus/in reruns. Along with Rowlf, Our Place also featured an adorably square musical group, The Doodletown Pipers–who would sing overly earnest covers of pop hits–along with the comedy team of Burns and Schreiber, namely Jack Burns and Avery Schreiber, the first of whom would go on to be the head writer on the first season of The Muppet Show, and the second of whom would appear in an episode that first year.
Read MoreThe Hollywood Palace, Etc.
“Music Hath Charms”
Today, I have a whole bunch of Muppet variety show appearances from 1966-1967 to make up for my lack of this sort of footage for the previous decade, each of them fantastic in their own right, most of them musical, and two of them ending with Kermit being devoured by a monster (well, technically three, but as it turns out, one of these sketches was a recycling of a previous one), one of Jim’s signature sketch-ending touches.
We start out at The Hollywood Palace, a weekly show that was broadcast from the ABC Palace Theatre in Hollywood on Saturday nights. The Muppets appeared on the show twice, and I was lucky enough to be able to get both clips. The first was filmed on March 19,
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