Julie on Sesame Street
Julie Andrews and Perry Como visit Sesame Street.
While one might expect an hour of TV starring Julie Andrews called Julie on Sesame Street to be either a PBS production or a special episode of Sesame Street, this actually isn’t the case. It was actually a nighttime network special, one of a series of specials starring Julie produced shortly after ABC canceled her critically acclaimed variety show, The Julie Andrews Hour, due to low ratings, which were largely the result of it having been up against Mary Tyler Moore.
In order to maintain a good relationship with her, ABC agreed to air the specials, which were shot in England and produced by ATV/ITV, a British entertainment company run by Lord Lew Grade, who would later go on to produce The Muppet Show, which might have never happened were it not
Read MoreThe Muppet Musicians of Bremen
The Muppet Musicians of Bremen
In early 1972, Jim Henson filmed another Muppet special in Toronto, The Muppet Musicians of Bremen, the third and final in the Tales from Muppetland series and in some ways the least of the “trilogy,” and similarly based on a Grimm’s fairy tale, albeit an overall lesser-known one. That isn’t to say that the special–which aired on April 26, 1972–doesn’t have its strong points. I actually remember enjoying it a great deal as a child, however, when I rewatched it for this site, I noticed how thin the story was in comparison to the previous outings. Whereas Hey Cinderella! and The Frog Prince seem to effortlessly expand their tales to fit the nearly-hour-long format, Bremen often feels like it’s stretching to fill time.
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The Frog Prince
Princess Melora and Robin sing a duet.
I can’t lie. Ever since I began this project, The Frog Prince is one of the Muppet specials I’ve been most looking forward to revisiting. As a little kid, I actually owned the record (yup, they had those things back then), which I believe had either the audio from the entire show or very close to it, and I would listen to it over and over. Later on, I finally recorded the special when it aired on the Disney Channel and watched that over and over, to the point that even though it’s probably been 25 years now since the last time I’d seen or listened to it, I remembered almost the entire thing vividly. And I don’t just mean situations but lines, entire exchanges, and complete songs, lyrics and all.
The second in the Tales from Muppetland fractured fairy tale trilogy, The
Read MoreThe Great Santa Claus Switch
The Frackles take over the elves’ gig!
All the way back in 1963, one of the scripts that Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl collaborated on was a Christmas special called The Great Santa Claus Switch. Unlike some of their other 1960s scripts, however, they did manage to see this one to fruition, albeit 7 years later. Ed Sullivan was a great supporter and fan of the Muppets, as evidenced by their numerous appearances on his show, and agreed to produce the special in 1970. In June of that year, during the hiatus between Sesame Street‘s 1st and 2nd seasons, filming went underway, and it finally aired on Dec 20th, which was coincidentally the day after Jim and Jane’s fifth and final child, Heather, was born.
Jim had apparently hoped that The Great Santa Claus Switch would
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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