The Muppet Show: Season One
What you can find unbelievable now, looking back at the success of The Muppets, is that it isn’t until about halfway through the second season that they really get people coming on that want to be guest stars, so much as they have people coming on as favors to them because they happen to know them for some other reason within showbiz. This is most obvious when someone like Paul Williams gets to host an entire show, as he did the music for The Muppet Movie (and appeared on screen in a cameo) and little else that I can remember.
A lot of these guest star names are what older people will tell you “are lost on the youth of today”, but I honestly just believe that some of them just flat out did not live out the test of time. Sure, they may have been popular back then but I doubt they had any real staying power and thus have been forgotten by most today.
Stand outs for guest hosts include Vincent Price (of course), Mummanshanz (SPELL CHECK), Twiggy and Florence Henderson.
In the third episode of this season, Scooter introduces himself to Kermit as being the nephew of the theater owner. Yet, we are introduced to Scooter before that with some sort of angle about his dog wanting to be in the show. What’s going on there?
You can still get to hear a lot of music, even with the band going on strike, and Jim Henson is also a Muppet as part of one of the bands that plays in a few episodes. They also do the song “I’m My Own Grandpa”, which I know nothing about other than it being sung by Tom Arnold in the movie “The Stupids” (And apparently it was older than this show, since they used it here and a lot of The Muppet Show music was not original)
I really did enjoy this season because not caring about most of the guest stars made it feel really special when someone I did care about was the guest host and it also gave me a chance to focus more on the Muppets themselves. If you don’t like this season, don’t worry—season two gets better.
<Cross-posted on eeveet and Not Quite A Mop>
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