More Sam and Friends
And now we continue our journey through Jim Henson’s first Muppet show, Sam and Friends, with the remaining episodes I was able to gain access to.
“C’est Si Bon”
“C’est Si Bon”
Another lip-synced song sketch, this time with a lead singer–a crazy-haired Muppet dubbed Moldy Hay–singing a French call-and-response song, with him taking the main parts,
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Jim and Jane and Sam and Friends
For those of you who might not have heard of Sam and Friends, Jim Henson’s very first Muppet TV show, I gave a bit of background for it the other day on my post on Jim’s early years, but, to recap, it was an enormously popular local Maryland show that originally ran daily on weeknights for 5 minutes between the 11 PM evening news and The Tonight Show.
The length of the show, as well as the time slot, changed over the course of its 6 years but it remains fascinating today not only because the relatively few remaining fragments of footage we have allow us a glimpse at the early years of the Muppets as well as their evolution, but also because, as old and crackly as that footage may
Read MoreThe Early Years
Jim and Sam and Friends
James Maury Henson was born 79 years ago today, on September 24, 1936, in Greenville, Mississippi–which, not coincidentally, was also Kermit’s home state–living there with his mother and father, Betty and Paul, and older brother, Paul, until the family finally moved to Hyattsville, Maryland in the late ’40s. He grew up loving the movies, imagination, and play. His beloved grandma on his mother’s side, affectionately called “Dear,” instilled in him a love of all sorts of arts and crafts, from drawing to sewing to making props. Throughout his childhood, Jim would often be in the midst of huge, involved projects from the aforementioned ones to assembling homemade working radios and the like. Meanwhile, for entertainment, his family would gather around the radio and listen to comedy, radio dramas, and puppeteers such as Edgar Bergen (who was a huge radio star, despite
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