The Subject: The Muppet Show. Aired 1976-1981.

Plot in Two Sentences: Frog hosts variety show. Hilarity ensues.

I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve been planning on looking at The Muppet Show ever since I first had the idea for this column. But yet, when I actually got around to doing it, I found myself at a bit of a loss as to how to start. So I decided to pull out the “perspective” card and I asked my mom about her recollections of my feelings for the show:

You loved the show from the very first time we watched it. We ALWAYS watched the show and you were not happy if we had to go somewhere and missed it. Since I loved the show almost as much as you, I tried to keep the schedule clear.

Your MOST favorite characters were Miss Piggy and Kermit. Fozzie, Animal, Beaker, Gonzo, Scooter and [The] Swedish Chef were right up there too. Both of us enjoyed the different guests, like John Denver.

I remember watching the show, laughing at all the outright humor and the subtle stuff (that I usually had to explain to you...because you ALWAYS asked "What's so funny?"). I remember laughing with you and laughing at you with delight when you lapsed into uncontrolled belly laughs and rolled on the floor. You would laugh so hard that your face turned red and sometimes you would get all sweaty from the exertion. Good times, my son. It makes me happy inside just remembering.

I would get all sweaty from the exertion of laughing? Damn, I don’t even know what to say about that, I thought I was a pretty fit kid. Putting it like that makes me sound like I was some sort of chunk or possibly my friend D.J. Kirkbride, who has been known to sweat profusely simply while trying to decide what to eat for breakfast. Although this could ultimately explain why I generally don’t laugh out loud much these days, instead restraining myself to chuckling or the perhaps occasional guffaw – it’s all for the sake of personal hygiene.

To prepare for this piece, I watched the first two seasons of The Muppet Show in their entirety along with random “best of” episodes from later seasons that appear on DVD – which is a hell of a lot of muppets, even when diluted out over the course of several months. Honestly, the first season was a bit of a challenge in that it was clearly a lower-budget affair than the later episodes, the writing hadn’t quite hit its stride, and the guest stars for this strange new show weren’t necessarily the biggest marquee stars of the day -- certainly not names that have transcended the last thirty years. But you can see something building there, though, something that really comes into being with the second season. And looking back at that second season as an adult is… well, really fantastic.

When you think about it, based on my mother’s comments above, the real question in this case wasn’t going to be “does this have the ability to appeal to adults,” because we know that it did. (And coincidentally, mom was roughly the same age then that I am now.) So the real measure of this project isn’t so much that aspect so much as the “how well did it age?” question.

Well. Very well, in fact.

There’s really a sort of timeless quality about the nature of the muppets, mostly because it’s impossible to date them according to their look. The “street” wardrobe of the guest stars? Yeah, that’s another story entirely, but other than that the overall feel of the show doesn’t make you want to go “Oh my God, this is sooooo late-seventies/early eighties.”

One odd thing about it is that the writers give you so much material that you really couldn’t get away with in your wildest dreams in modern “children’s” programming. Rowlf the Dog makes a fair amount of references to drinking, for example. There are more than a few instances of muppets that smoke onscreen, including a rendition of a song called “Cigarettes and Whiskey” by Dr. Strangepork. Beyond that, watching as an adult does bring to light a whole new level of subtle humor -- references to things that only adults would get, some entendre – that adds a lot of depth to the show.

There is a kind of “which came first” question at play here as well – did I develop a lot of my comedic sensibilities from watching The Muppet Show or did I find it appealing because I was already predisposed to their kind of writing? The muppet writers loved, oh so dearly loved, a good pun. On occasions where my wife would sit and watch an episode with me, there were several times when I would get cracked up by a joke and she would make her token “that’s really dumb" noise and kind of roll her eyes.

This is a reaction that I see a lot during the course of my daily life, you see.

The form of the show itself is another interesting aspect – the basic premise of The Muppet Show is that Kermit the Frog acts as the manager / emcee of a weekly variety show that takes place in a sort of dilapidated theatre, always struggling to pay the bills. Into this come a wide variety of famous folk who interact with the muppet cast not only in material produced for “the stage” but also behind the scenes in the theatre. By setting up the format like this, Jim Henson and company managed to give themselves a product that was adaptable for any kind of star with any number of talents, and really there was no limit to what creative channels they wanted to pursue in the “staged” numbers.

Often times, I found myself really taken in with some of the numbers that were crafted for a guest star with dancing talents and a cadre of creatively designed muppets. I can’t imagine that these would’ve held my attention that well as a kid, but as an adult, there’s a lot to be appreciated in terms of not only artistic beauty, but the incredible imagination that went into thinking up the artistry itself -- why else build a seven-foot tall set of birds that move just so? The musical numbers are slightly more hit-and-miss with modern me though, even the ones with stars who were singers. I found myself wanting to advance past a lot of these the further I got into my run of shows – more often than not, the opening musical act didn’t feature the star and while some songs held me with creative musical interpretation (which is another interesting thing to mention in that a lot of the songs featured were actually covers of contemporary and not-much-older popular and folk music), there were more than a few that I found outright annoying. Although points should be given for the ethnic and cultural diversity of the music, even if the end product made me want to skip forward to the next track.

It’s interesting to see how my taste in muppet characters has changed over time. Sure, Kermit’s always a great go-to character in anyone’s book so I can’t say my affection for him has changed much (and frankly, I think I relate to his character a lot personally). But if I had to pick another muppet at this point in my life that I enjoy more than others, it’d have to be the multi-talented Rowlf the Dog. Hey plays piano, sings, and can tell a deadpan joke as well as lay down a good string of puns. Other characters like Scooter, Miss Piggy and Gonzo the Great feel much more like bit players, the people there to fuel the drama and humor, which I don’t find as appealing as much as the characters who seem to embody the show’s “heart” like Kermit, Rowlf, and Fozzie. Although it’s fair to make two additional points in that Gonzo DOES get his heart broken by Madeline Kahn and it’s sort of a tender moment, and also The Swedish Chef isn’t exactly the heart of the show, but oh my God still cracks me up more than anything else.

Bork bork bork.

To sort of wrap it up, I think that The Muppet Show is a great investment for anyone with kids – be they the spawned variety or just an inner child. You can generally bank on how good an episode’s going to be based on the caliber of the star -- Don Knotts? Oh yes. Broadway star Kaye Ballard? Ummm… sort of worth skipping. Then again, maybe it's not fair to compare Don Knotts to Kaye Ballard. On a number of levels.

So as far as these blasts from the past go, I'd say that we've found the strongest performer yet. And final evidence that The Muppet Show legacy continues even in modern times? They did a music video with Weezer. Rock it, frog.