Inner Tube

minor muppetz

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This Jim Henson Hour pilot was recently uploaded on You Tube, and I thought I'd post a thread here to see what others think about it.

It is rather interesting. The characters are cool, though I'm glad that better new characters were chosen for The Jim Henson Hour. It seems hard to tell if this is meant to be a variety show. Most segments seem to continue throughout the pilot, and there don't seem to be any segments that are shown over the course of just one scene, with the exception being the musical number at the end. There are three seperate scenes revolving around Kermit giving a report on what Inner Tube is, which includes short clips from ficticious programs (including an informmercial and Miss Piggy giving a workout video), and the plot seems to just revovle around Henry and Jake chasing after both Crasher, who runs through programs, and Glitch, who changes the channel and invades programs. And their chase seems to go nowhere.

If the band from this special ended up being the shows band, then we may not have gotten Clifford, and Mupets Tonight would have gotten a different host. It's hard to tell if any of the monitor images were shot for the pilot or used elsewhere. One of the monitors includes the Java number, but I'm not sure if thatw as refilmed for this or if it was an existing java clip (the big creature was white, so it wasn't from The Muppet Show). It was cool to see Rowlf on one of the monitors, even though he doesn't have a featured part.

I think that Henry and Jake could have been good characters on The Jim Henson Hour, being repair men. I wonder if Digit was originally meant to be a robot. In this pilot he sounds more like a robot (and he sounds the way I expected him to sound), but I don't think there was any mention of him being a robot there. There was one part where Digit puts something in his mouth and seems to be electricuted. Could that have been a drug reference?

I wonder who performed Digit in this. I thought he sounded like a Steve Whitmire character, but Whitmire performed the band's guitar player, and it would have been weird for him to have performed two characters in the same band. David Rudman was credited, but I can't tell if he sounded like any David Rudman characters. OPther performers included Rick Lyon (and I don't know what his voices sound like) and John Henson (and I don't know what his non-Sweetums voices sound like).

And this seemed to have more of a 1980s feel to it than the show that ended up being produced.

One thing I wonder is how fans were able to get a copy of this in the first place. Fans have been able to trade copies for years, despite it not being aired on TV or released commercialy. Did somebody at Henson or NBC give a copy to a fan or something?
 
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