Como and Carson
The Reindeer sing for snow.
I’ve been mentioning the Muppets’ many, many variety show appearances ever since my third post here, and I’m happy to report that we’ve finally come to an era for which I was finally able to get some footage to watch (other than the “Glow Worm” sketch and the stuff from The Jimmy Dean Show, the latter of which feels a bit different, given Rowlf was a weekly fixture)! Both of these first two bits were filmed in December of 1965, and both are awesome, rare finds for Henson fans.
The first is from the 20th and was a sketch filmed for Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall and is easily one of my favorite things I’ve seen so far in this blogging journey. You can watch it here. In
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Before we reach the next major milestone in Jim Henson’s career there are again a bunch of smaller projects to cover. The first one is actually one of the most interesting we’ve seen yet, featuring the robot puppet with moving gears and smoke that we first caught a fuzzy, black-and-white glimpse of in the Food Fair footage from Hamburg, Germany, although in color and with full detail visible, it looks a bit less steampunk than I had first thought.
Anyway, what’s fascinating about this is that AT&T–which was then the Bell Company–actually hired Jim in 1963 to make the following short film as part of a presentation to air at a seminar for business owners on the new subject of Data Communications, the point of the film being to comment on the continual evolution of the relationship between man and machine, and as you can see below, Jim captured the subject with a wicked sense of humor:
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The Birth of Rowlf
Rowlf
Later in June of 1962, at the age of 25, the same month that Jim filmed the Tales of the Tinkerdee pilot, he was named the youngest-ever president of the Puppeteers of America, an amazing indication of how much respect he had already begun to gain for his puppeteering, which was only gaining more and more visibility in the public eye. Over the course of the rest of the year, the Muppets were booked as regular guests on a variety show called Mad, Mad World that unfortunately never made it past a pilot, as well as on NBC’s Today Show.
And then in late 1962, Muppets, Inc. was hired by Purina Dog Chow to make commercials for them, and in response, Jim
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