BEFORE: Still recovering from my summer cold, but at least I went to work today. Took a hot shower this morning, which seems counter-productive in the summer, but I just really needed to clear my stuffed-up head. Still not sleeping well, which is a problem because I need to go back to the theater early Saturday morning, so maybe no caffeine and no movie on Friday night. If I make it through Saturday at the NY Asian Film Festival, then, OK, come home and watch a movie and have a couple beers maybe.
So, this may count as the last documentary for the week - if that puts me behind, so be it, but I just have to get some sleep tonight. Morley Safer (and a couple others) carries over from "Mike Wallace Is Here".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street" (Movie #4,220)
THE PLOT: This documentary features interviews with family and co-workers of Jim Henson, interspersed with footage from his TV shows and movies, including commercials that were previously thought lost.
AFTER: Looking back on it, I think I followed up Pride Week with Workaholics Week - what else do David Bowie, Charlie Chaplin, Stan Lee, Mike Wallace and Jim Henson have in common? They all worked hard, sure, and they all seem to have put work ahead of family, as only one stayed married for a long time - and that was Stan Lee. Jim Henson only had one marriage, but there was some kind of separation from his wife a few years before he died. Bowie married twice and then I think for Chaplin and Mike Wallace it was four times each. Well, I don't know exactly what to make of all that but it feels like they had their eyes on the prize and being famous and being married don't always go together.
I had dinner tonight with a friend who bumped into Jim Henson on the streets of NYC years ago - which is only odd because I once bumped into Frank Oz on 40th St. (I did not get an autograph then, just a photo. Got the autograph a few days later.) My friend says Henson was with a girlfriend, obviously he never married again, that's how you hold on to your Muppet money, I guess. It seems there was enough money to go around when Jim and Jane Henson split, but then again, it also seems that Jane's portion got split up among their kids, who all have jobs in the entertainment industry now, total Muppet Nepo Babies. I mean, come on, having somebody like Jim Henson or George Lucas as your dad is like being born on third base and just waiting to steal home, right? I had dinner one time, years ago, with a group of people that included a Henson daughter, Heather, I think.
Anyway, this documentary details the early years before the Muppets really took off, when Jim and Jane Henson were doing late-night puppet shows on TV in the Washington, DC area. They seem very surreal, and surprisingly violent by today's standards, lots of explosions and puppets eating each other, maybe not so much for kids, but then again, it was a different time. From there it was on to performing on the early episodes of "Saturday Night Live", again maintaining a sort of adult sensibility, but the scripts were being written by the SNL staff, and some of them resented working with puppets.
But NBC's loss was PBS's gain when the Children's Television Workshop started to put "Sesame Street" together, and they called in Henson and his associates to make some puppet-based skits that were also educational - and JIm Henson also got the opportunity to make some experimental films for the same shows, because it turns out he was more than just a puppeteer, he also identified as a filmmaker. Sure, why not - and his Muppets were only supposed to appear in pre-taped segments, however it turned out that the NYC street set seemed rather dull by comparison to the animated and puppeteered segments, so a few Muppets were cast to work in the live-action segments - thus the creation of Big Bird, Oscar, Bert and Ernie.
Bert and Ernie had an apartment, and they were - what, roommates? A take on the "Odd Couple", or was there a more romantic element to their relationship? Meanwhile Big Bird lived in a nest on the Street and Oscar lived in a trash can. Well, to each his own. Initially Jim Henson was going to be the puppeteer voicing Bert and Frank Oz was going to be Ernie, but they tried this out and it just didn't work. Henson was clearly the fun-loving, joking Alpha in real life and Oz was the more prudent, worrisome Beta, so they soon switched puppets and well, it just felt right. We've seen this formula before, right? Ernie is Mick Jagger to Bert's Brian Jones. Ernie is Stan Lee to Bert's Jack Kirby. Ernie is, umm, George Michael to Bert's Andrew Ridgeley. Too far?
Anyway, "Sesame Street" was a big hit and a very useful creative use of puppets in education, but Jim Henson didn't just want to play to the preschool audience, he wanted the adult audience as well, that was his vision. So with investment money from the U.K., the whole puppet show relocated to London to make the first season of what would become "The Muppet Show". Suddenly Henson was in the U.K. for half the year, and NY the other half (this is part of what was non-conducive to being a present husband and father). But it worked, darn it, the Muppet Show was a big hit, even if the guest hosts were mostly British actors and singers at first, like Twiggy, Peter Ustinov, Julie Andrews and Elton John. You know, I never noticed that before - but there were also American hosts that were flown in to London, or maybe happened to be in London.
I also never realized before that "The Muppet Show" really stole the format from "SNL", with a cast of regulars with a new guest host each week, and hmm, the Muppets had been regulars on SNL just a couple years before. Very interesting. And Gilda Radner was a host in season 3 - you know, I have not gone back and watched those "Muppet Show" episodes since I was a kid, it might be time for a re-watch, now that I have an adult's POV on the world, I may view them in a completely different way.
The film sees the Muppets progress past their TV variety show and into their first movie, "The Muppet Movie", but then for some reason it kind of leaves the Muppets there and follows Henson's other projects - so nothing here about "The Great Muppet Caper" or "The Muppets Take Manhattan" - you know what, maybe it's for the best. I remember not being a big fan of "Dark Crystal" but then the opposite was true of "Labyrinth", I was really really into it, David Bowie was a big reason, he was so cool that he made up for how corny all the puppets were.
But I never watched "Fraggle Rock", by then I was too old, and in fact I passed on many of the later Muppet movies like "Muppet Treasure Island" and "A Muppet Christmas Carol" until I started my blog in 2009 and began playing catch-up. But I was out of college in 1990 when Jim Henson died, and around the same time I was working for a little company that was making music videos for Sesame Street, and once in a while there were Muppets on our set. One video was called "Adventure" and starred En Vogue, with cameos from Super Grover and The Count. That shoot was a lot of fun because the whole video was designed to look like a comic book, and I remember loaning some of my comics to the director so she could zoom in close on them and steal their backgrounds. I got paid extra for renting out my comic books.
Henson was in negotiations to sell his entire company to Disney, like George Lucas later did, but negotiations broke down when he made the terrible business move of dying from a cold. OK, lesson learned, no big cash pay-out when your chief creative officer kicks the bucket. Frank Oz suggested that it was really the stress of negotiating with Disney that killed Jim Henson. So the Sesame Workshop and Jim Henson's Creature Shop had to find ways to survive, but Disney did eventually acquire what they wanted, the (non-Sesame St.) Muppets as an intellectual property, in 2004 for $75 million. I guess they finally saw some value or some opportunities for more Muppet movies and shows? I say, Disney's going to own everything eventually, so why wait? Sell it all to them as soon as you can.
Also starring Frank Oz (last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"), Fran Brill (ditto), Lisa Henson (ditto), Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Top Gun: Maverick"), Bonnie Erickson, Michael Frith, Dave Goelz (last heard in "Muppets Haunted Mansion"), Brian Henson (ditto), Cheryl Henson, Heather Henson, Rita Moreno (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Alex Rockwell,
with archive footage of Jim Henson, Jane Henson, Northern Calloway, Joan Ganz Cooney, Emilio Delgado, Richard Hunt, Jerry Juhl, Will Lee, Loretta Long, Sonia Manzano, Bob McGrath, Jerry Nelson, Matt Robinson, Caroll Spinney, Jon Stone (all last seen in "Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street"),
Julie Andrews (last seen in "Being Mary Tyler Moore"), Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Harry Belafonte (ditto), Diana Ross (ditto), Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Blended"), David Bowie (last seen in "Moonage Daydream"), Bernie Brillstein, Maury Brown, Johnny Carson (also carrying over from "Mike Wallace Is Here"), Dick Cavett (ditto), Richard Nixon (ditto), Alice Cooper (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Jimmy Dean (last seen in "Diamonds Are Forever"), Michael Eisner (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), James Frawley, Dave Garroway, Charles Gibson (last seen in "Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time"), Lew Grade, Arsenio Hall (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Mark Hamill (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing), George Lucas (ditto), Betty Henson, John Henson, Paul Henson Sr., Paul Henson Jr., Bob Hope (last seen in "The Beach Boys"), Ed Sullivan (ditto), Elton John (last seen in "Wham!"), Stevie Wonder (ditto), Rollin Krewson, David Lazer, Liza Minnelli (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Roger Moore (ditto), Dudley Moore (last seen in "Arthur 2: On the Rocks"), Mike Oznowicz, Queen Elizabeth II (last seen in "Weird; The Al Yankovic Story"), Gilda Radner (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Norman Seeff, Raquel Welch (last seen in "Belfast"), Orson Welles (last seen in "Stan Lee"),
John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Steve Martin, Laraine Newman, Michael O'Donoghue, Gene Shalit (all last seen in "Belushi"),
RATING: 6 out of 10 commercials for Claussen's bread
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