Muppet Show (and movies) -- Search and Destroy

Search above all: that incredible opening song/scene.

It contains the best version of For What it's Worth done by anyone and the versions of Time in a Bottle and New York State of Mind are utterly superb.

(xpost!)

Has Paul Williams written any formidable songs since TMM?

"Catch a falling star, and put it in your pocket-"

*Star falls, set collapses & catches fire, curtain drops, cut to next scene*

I have to admit, I don't know. Jason Marsalis?

Search: "...a bear in his natural habitat...a Studebaker"

Search: "What color are their hands now?"

Search: The scene in the show hosted by Rich Little where Gonzo's chickens, strewn across a lovely gazebo, sang Chanson D'Amour and each time they got to "Ra-ta-ta-ta-tah" Crazy Harry would come out and blow one of them up. Exploding French Chickens, the very essence of comedy.

God I miss the Muppet Show.

PS: You owe me $2

UNFAIR. (Translation: why not me TOO dammit.)

xp on this show

things i did not like

- the brightly-lit humans in the audience
- the whizzy camera movements on transitions
- the canned laughter. nothing wrong with canned laughter per se but it felt off. tinny, weird
- the hyper-saturation of colour
- gonzo's recurring bit was just not funny
- throughline of miss piggy's number getting cut simply dropped

THAT SAID they fucking nailed it. the essential tone of the muppet show was there. putting on a show, backstage shenanigans, kermit getting humiliated, miss piggy being imperious. they really did it. pepe showing up backstage in a black turtleneck and gold chain - i was DYING

my 14-year-old was AGHAST that i wanted to watch this but i just bulldozed him into it and 5 minutes into it he was laughing along

Enjoyed this but the jokes could've been sharper. My memory of the original show is that everything devolves into total chaos, and this felt a bit cool and collected to me, except for the great Beaker/Maya Rudolph bit.

In summary, yes do more but funnier and more CHAOS

well you do have cloned beaker eyeballs falling on everyone’s heads and into a saxophone, you have the chickens’ feathers being blown off by a fan operated by a maniacal stagehand.. But I do think you’re onto something texturally.. Modern TV making is a very controlled process

Yes, I wanted to see more chaos during that chicken hurricane scene -- clouds of feathers, muppets blowing across screen at high speeds, etc.

So do we think this is a test run to gauge interest in a full reboot? I hope so! They certainly alluded to this in the show.

going to leave my account logged in and streaming classic Muppet Show 24/7 to pump up those numbers

That would be - dare I say it - Muppetational.

"So do we think this is a test run to gauge interest in a full reboot? I hope so! They certainly alluded to this in the show."

There's something slightly bitter-sweet about the Muppets. On the one hand some of the attempts to reboot them have almost-but-not succeeded without taking properly, e.g the movie from a few years ago was popular but the series was killed off by the sequel, which flopped. But on the other hand the characters are too memorable to truly die, so the franchise is in a perpetual semi-alive, semi-dead state. They exist in our hearts and minds.

It's like Mickey Mouse. I was puzzled by Mickey Mouse as a kid because he was iconic, widely-known, but he wasn't in any actual media. There were no Mickey Mouse films, no Mickey Mouse franchise, no transforming Mickey Mouse toys. Donald Duck is far more active. Even Goofy has a higher workload than Mickey, the slacker. Probably the most recent famous thing Mickey was in was Fantasia, and that came out eighty years ago. And yet he lives on.

the premature death of Jim Henson was the official end of my childhood— one spent watching Sesame Street and the Muppet Show right at the important single digit ages

the series was killed off by the sequel, which flopped

I was reading (in Wikipedia) last week about this, which is insane: Muppets Most Wanted is ten times better than the first one, but it got a lot of "Well, the original spark isn't there" reviews. There's parts of the previous movie where you have to care about the Jason Segel / Amy Adams romance - any caring about humans that you do in Most Wanted is entirely on your own time. And The Muppets' main new muppet is a) somehow not the felt homunculus of Segel's character that the poster demands and b) the world's first 100% boring muppet.

The Muppets was lovely and the dynamic between Segel and his muppet brother was really sweet. It was a great way to bring them back. I didn't get round to the sequel for a while. Ricky Gervais's meanness and shitty acting put me off. TBF, he plays a shitty character, but the other human guests wipe the floor with them, not least Ray Liotta, who is clearly having a ball. Most Wanted is a lot of fun, and the best bits are properly daft and chaotic, but it feels more like a bunch of sketches than a well-plotted story with heart. I actually like the mockumentary series they did, not least cos it had a lot of Pepe, and the Electric Mayhem spin off was good fun, if inessential.

I loved Most Wanted - maybe my favorite muppet movie actually. Evil Kermit/Konstantin was genius

I was the biggest fan of “the muppets.”— I need to rewatch before getting more into it but I just loved it and was surprised to learn recently that I was generally bad and hated

Well, I was surprised to hear that it wasn't, so there!

Wow that’s a typo for the ol journal

(i totally missed the typo!)

"I just loved it and was surprised to learn recently that I was generally bad and hated"

I was surprised as well. Earlier in the year I spent a couple of weeks in Seoul, and on the train from the airport to the city centre one of the screens was playing a propaganda film. It was about some islands that had been annexed by Japan. I didn't get the whole meaning on account of the language barrier, but the screen kept flashing up the message HISTORY KNOWS THE TRUTH and RON ZERTNERT KNOWS THE TRUTH and 160,000 DEAD and RON ZERTNERT with stock footage of Japanese soldiers and things exploding.

I remember trying to strike up a conversation with my landlady. "What do you think of Ron Zertnert from Ilxor", I asked her, at which point she slapped me in the face and told me that the entire nation of Korea would not rest until that man was brought before the international criminal court. She then proceeded to make a slashing motion across her throat. She did this four times.

You know Europa, the moon of Jupiter? NASA recently discovered a plaque embedded in the ice. ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, it says, in English, EXCEPT FOR RON ZERTNERT BECAUSE HE IS BAD.

Ron Zertnert is the reason why no-one on Ilxor is legally allowed to visit Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt. Many years ago I said "good morning" to one of my work colleagues. He laughed at me and told me that it was four minutes past midday, and that it wasn't morning any more, and that I was stupid. His name? Ron Zertnert.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExN3RhNDBrd3ZvZm45YTNnenJiNWtid2t0eDF3NWt3Z3JnNmJrb2UyYyZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/8mJT8sQxpaQdKubpOi/giphy.gif

watching the new one's intro I realize that one of the things that has sort of always been in subconscious my entire life pushing me to make particular choices artistically and otherwise has been the visual of all the muppets under arches that get smaller as they stack up towards the ceiling of the theater

i had a realisation too - that watching the Muppet Show at such a young age seeded the idea of "putting on a show" and "being backstage" as fun, chaotic things that some grownups seemed to get to do and i wanted to be part of that world somehow

I've been thinking about that, partly due to the podcast Sentimental Garbage speaking about musical theater as a metaphor or a utopian analogy.

The interlocking parts of show business, the way people have tp work together to do a collaborative, creative production; if somebody doesn't do their part - build the set, light the lights, etc. - the whole thing can be derailed. So people (and puppets) roll up their sleeves because the show must go on.

When I was younger I was susceptible to probably glib thought - that things would be better if we just put on a show together. There are costumes in the attic and my daddy's got a barn. Not sure I would say that now.