Sesame Street Ep #115

Posted on Nov 10, 2015 in Henson, Sesame Street, Shows, Television

Kermit sings “Bein’ Green”

Today’s episode of Sesame Street aired on April 17, 1970, and is available on Netflix and for sale on iTunes under the name “Kermit Croons Being Green,” which technically isn’t the name of the song (the “g” shouldn’t be there), but what can you do?

This is probably the strangest episode I’ve watched thus far, mainly because it contains at least one landmark moment for the series and some extremely fun sketches but also starts off with a practically interminable sequence that seems to stretch on forever, something not helped by the fact that not a single Muppet appears on camera for the first 12 minutes, which is a lot of time to have to sit through humans on the street acting out virtally plotless tedium. I have to admit that I actually

Sesame Street Ep #56

Posted on Nov 9, 2015 in Henson, Sesame Street, Shows, Television

Oscar makes a strange request of Mr. Hooper.

Today’s episode of Sesame Street aired on January 26th, 1970, about 2 months after the previous one, and, if you’d like to view it yourself, is available on iTunes and Netflix under the name “An Orange Grouch and a Green Grover”. I thought it would be cool to watch an episode a little further into the run, to see how things developed since the premiere. In some ways, it’s still very much the same show. The plotting and connective tissue is still rudimentary at best, however there are a number of linked sketches which, at least at the start, hold this episode together a bit better than the last, although that falls away as it proceeds.

Unlike the first episode, this one actually opens with a Muppet, Oscar (who is still orange but now has hands!), introducing the hour, and features the Muppets much more prominently than the premiere. We no

Sesame Street Ep #1

Posted on Nov 6, 2015 in Henson, Sesame Street, Shows, Television

Ernie, Bert, Susan, and Gordon welcome the new kid to the block.

And here we finally are, at the very first episode of Sesame Street, which aired on November 10, 1969, and would prove to be not only an immediate hit–in fact, it was profiled in an article in Life Magazine before its debut and got mostly stellar initial reviews–but go on to be one of the most successful shows in children’s television history, as well as television history, period, currently running 45 seasons and counting. You can watch the episode yourself on the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 DVD set.

Now, there are some immediate differences between the test pilots and the first episode that finally aired, a number of which are immediately apparent when the episode begins. For starters, the longer, Bob McGrath-

Sesame Street Test Pilot

Posted on Nov 5, 2015 in Henson, Pilots, Sesame Street, Shows, Television

Ernie and Bert

After the success of the Sesame Street pitch reel, the public television heads of NET (which actually had already become PBS by the time the first episode of the show aired in November 1969) wanted the Children’s Television Workshop to produce a number of test pilots to experiment with the format for the upcoming show, and so the CTW and Jim produced 5 complete trial episodes in June 1969, each with different segments, in order to see how children would respond to them, and–in a truly awesome move–the producers of the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 DVD set decided to include the first one as a bonus feature, which is what allowed me to watch it for this post.

What might be most fascinating as well as strange about it is how overall

The Muppets 1.06: “The Ex-Factor”

Posted on Nov 4, 2015 in Henson, Shows, Television, The Muppets

Piggy and Kristin Chenoweth do a duet.

After a few fun but uneven installments, The Muppets was finally back to glorious form in last night’s episode, “The Ex-Factor,” which might very well be my favorite of the series so far. It may not be as all-out hilarious as many of its predecessors but it features a lovely story that cleverly subverts several expectations from previous entries and, perhaps most importantly, helps restore balance to Piggy, who had even just last week been in danger of transforming into a too-cartoonishly-selfish character without Kermit as her anchor to the real world.

In a number of ways, this one features some of the show’s best character writing for Piggy and Kermit up to this point, or at least since the premiere.

The Wizard of Id, Etc.

Posted on Nov 3, 2015 in Ads, Guest Appearances, Henson, Pilots, Specials, Television

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!

The Cube

Posted on Nov 2, 2015 in Henson, Television, TV Movies

The Cube

In 1966, around the time that Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl wrote Tale of Sand, they collaborated on another script called The Cube, which Jim described as an “original surrealistic comedy…[that] dramatizes the complex, baffling problems of reality versus illusion,” a description that could have easily been applied to Tale of Sand, as well. Like that unproduced script, it centers on a single man who finds himself in a strange place with no explanation of how he got there, basically being relentlessly assualted and harassed by a variety of bizarre characters, driven further and further over the edge, and finally, just when he thinks he’s conquered his demons, ending up right where he started again with no end or escape in sight.