The Muppet Show 1.15: ‘Candice Bergen’...
With Candice Bergen, The Muppet Show had a perfect opportunity to concoct a classic episode. After all, it was rare for them to find a guest so comfortable with puppets. In fact, she had likely spent most of her younger years surrounded by them, given that her father was the great Edgar Bergen, one of America’s foremost puppeteers...
The Muppet Show 1.14: “Sandy Duncan”...
After at least a handful of uneven episodes–sometimes due to not utilizing a great guest star to their best advantage and other times due to a middling performance by a guest star dragging the proceedings down a bit–The Muppet Show finally finds its footing again with the Sandy Duncan episode, which benefits from a delightful...
The Muppet Show 1.13: “Bruce Forsyth”...
With the Bruce Forsyth episode, we have yet another mostly lackluster celebrity appearance. This isn’t helped by the fact that, despite Kermit extolling his virtues and calling him a “one-man variety show,” his singing, dancing, and comedic stylings fail to impress–or at least fail to impress a modern eye. I...
The Muppet Show 1.12: “Peter Ustinov”...
The Peter Ustinov episode of The Muppet Show is a perfect example of how, no matter how iconic and storied the guest star, whenever the Muppets failed to incorporate them into any musical numbers, the show usually suffered, particularly in the first season, when the writers made up for non-singing guests’ lack of singing by featuring...
The Muppet Show 1.11: “Lena Horne”...
Growing up, my only real point of reference for Lena Horne was that she was a celebrity who appeared on Sesame Street, but in her relatively brief scenes, she exuded a warm, gentle glow that, even at a young age, made me sense that she was one of those people who really got the Muppets. She and they seemed to fit together so naturally that I...
The Muppet Show 1.09: ‘Charles Aznavour̵...
In previous posts, I spoke of how, in the first season, before The Muppet Show became a massive hit and celebrity guest stars were banging down the doors to appear, the show paid host to a number of lower-tier stars who were friends of the producers, doing them favors. Well, given that the singer, Charles Aznavour, who Kermit calls an...
The Muppet Show 1.08: “Paul Williams”...
Remarkably, the Paul Williams episode of The Muppet Show received an Emmy nomination for Best Writing on a Variety Show. Unfortunately, the reason I find it remarkable is that it is easily the most poorly written episode up to this point with a higher-than-usual number of jokes that completely fail to land–for example, the Newsman...
The 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
Read MoreThe Muppets 1.01: “Pig Girls Don’t Cry”
Kermit and Piggy
As you might have guessed by this point, I am an enormous Muppets fan. In fact, I can say without any hesitation that I would be a very different person without them, and as a devoted fan, I will will pounce on any new Muppets project with the same level of enthusiasm I did when I was tiny. At the same time, as any obsessive Muppet fan will tell you, any post-Jim-Henson production also brings with it a feeling of trepidation. Without him around to guide these unique characters, will this newest iteration be able to capture his spirit and heart, and his sense of “gentle anarchy,” as Frank Oz has referred to it?
And the post-Jim track record has been a bit spotty. In most cases, I feel like they have gotten the heart right. The Muppet Christmas
Read MoreWhat is Henson Blog?
Kermit and Jim
When I was 3 years old, Jim Henson and the Muppets marked me for life. Well, due to Sesame Street, they had actually marked me earlier in a–for lack of a better word, perhaps–spiritual sense, but this was the year that they marked me physically, as well. There was basically nothing I loved more in the world than Kermit the Frog. My earliest memories involve watching The Muppet Show or Sesame Street with my mom and grandparents, playing with my Kermit doll (which I took with me everywhere), and going to see The Muppets Take Manhattan in the theatre (I still remember my mom crying at Kermit and Piggy’s wedding).
I would get so excited whenever I got a chance to see him on TV (this was slightly before VHS) that the mere mention of
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