Hey Cinderella!
The Fairy Godmother and Kermit
Hey Cinderella! is an hour-long fractured fairy tale that was the Muppets’ first network television special and the first entry in a thematic trilogy dubbed Tales from Muppetland. Although it didn’t air until April 1970, about 5 months after Sesame Street‘s first season debuted, it was actually filmed in 1968 in Toronto, and its history reaches back further than that.
In 1965, TV writers Jon Stone (who we saw in Ripples) and Tom Whedon (father of Joss Whedon) wrote a pilot script for CBS for a show that was meant to be centered on Snow White, co-starring the Muppets. CBS passed on the script before a pilot was even shot, but ABC thought the idea had potential, as long as it was about a different fairy tale, for
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Rowlf and Jim
In June 1968, Henson Associates filmed a special for public television (which at the time was called National Education Television) at Hershey, Pennsylvania’s WITF-TV, making it the first-ever Muppet special to air, although unlike most of the others, it wasn’t a narrative but rather a behind-the-scenes look at the Muppets, hosted by Jim, called The Muppets on Puppets–a rarely seen program today that won the NET Award for Best Educational Television Show of 1968, and which, thankfully, Disney included as a bonus feature on the third season of The Muppet Show DVD set. And for a Muppet and Henson devotee, it is a treasure trove.
For one, after watching so much of Jim’s creative output but with he
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“The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow”
In 1968, Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl began collaborating on another project that was not meant to be but, if it had been filmed, would have been the first full-length Muppet special, as well as the first time a full Muppet production would be shot on location rather than in a studio. It was meant to be a Thanksgiving show with a cast made up of humans and Muppets. And Jim and Jerry got fairly far into the process. Jim and Don Sahlin built the puppets and even took photographs of them outside in the trees by Jim’s house in Connecticut, to see how they’d look in natural, outdoor lighting, right where he had shot Run, Run with his daughters.
And he enlisted his daughters here again to stand in for the child actors
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