late to this particular party

[dwenius]

A birthday gift I got tonight was the complete first season of the Muppet Show.

Episode one starts with "Manah Manah", and goes directly into a really warped interpretive dance with guest star Juliet Prowse and a bunch of lime green gazelle like puppets with no faces. No real intro material...Episode one looks like a mid-season, "we've been doing this for a while" show.

Episode two is a regular music cornucopia, featuring Kermit singing "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" (!!! and then getting belted by Miss Piggy for ogling Lydia, also a pig. I now wonder if there are other Marx Brothers references in the Muppet's oeuvre, or if this was just a nod to the vaudeville variety shows upon which TMS is based?), Connie Stevens singing "Teenager in Love" and "Close to You", Floyd from the Electric Mayhem singing Ain't Misbehavin', Gonzo growing a killer tomato plant to the strains of the 1812 overture, and a cameo by Bert singing "Some Enchanted Evening."

It was, in fact, fun for the whole family :) Is it deathless comedy? No. Will the episodes get better when The Evil Mouse People finally get around to releasing season's 2 and 3? Yes. Is it still funny for children and adults, for completely different reasons? Hell yes!

Comments

[anavolena.livejournal.com]

ah, the muppet show. when it was originally on, it was our "family show" that we all loved watching together, kids and parents.

[sequentialscott.livejournal.com]

Weirdly, we finished watching those two episodes, plus the Joel Gray episode, about an hour before I read your post. I got them for Christmas, but we just got around to watching them today. Kayla and I have been saying "mahnah mahna" to each other all day and have plans to call up my mom and torture her with it. When I was a kid I could always put it in her head for a couple of days by walking up to her and just saying it once.

Kayla is now a fan too.

[dr-strych9.livejournal.com]

We've been watching these at our house. They make me weepy. Honestly.

[wisn.livejournal.com]

> Is it deathless comedy? No.

Beg to disagree. Not many of the guests are famous any more and the format is based on vaudeville and variety television -- one genre was dying when my parents were born, the other died while I was in short pants. Sure, it was made when hippies were still relevant, and that informs not just some of the jokes and minor characters but the music, color schemes and design motifs. But that only places it in its period, in the same way rattletrap cars, jokes about speakeasies and rag sellers informs Marx Brothers comedies.

It's as timeless as you can expect from a comedy. More of the jokes will lose their point with time, but it will become funny and novel in other ways to generations of people for whom the notion of professional dancers, Japanese puppet masters, Swiss mimes, aged British comics, and Broadway singers meriting star turns on prime time American television is unheard-of.

[kmhoofnagle.livejournal.com]

We bought this disk set when we needed to do a cross country drive with the girls and we've since netflixed later seasons.

Though I love Lydia in season one, in season two bonus materials, there's a Miss Piggy solo taken from the episode with John Cleese that must be seen to be believed. It was cut from US release (I think it actually came out in the UK) because it's one of those old Vaudeville arch things about how she's is jilted at the altar and she's pregnant by someone who has taken all her money, said he'd marry her but then backed out because -- oops! he was married already.

Fun fun fun!