Filming The Muppet Show Theme song

[muppetlover123]

how did they film the theme i know i might be asking a dumb question but anyone?

 

[Pinkflower7783]

Do we really want all the secrets revealed? Lol! I'm just teasing by the way.

 

[David French]

It all depends on which section/s you mean; with regards to the arches, they were all taped separately and then matted together.

 

[dwmckim]

how did they film the theme i know i might be asking a dumb question but anyone?

With cameras.

 

[Pinkflower7783]

I don't think that's what he meant.

 

[muppetlover123]

yeah i meant the final part when theres like 30 or more muppet in the arches

 

[dwmckim]

Same way they filmed the original television show.

 

[muppetlover123]

soo they like green screened it and had one puppeteer do two puppets and someone lift the hands up?

 

[muppetperson]

soo they like green screened it and had one puppeteer do two puppets and someone lift the hands up?

That is a really interesting question about the hands going up that I didnt think about till I saw the book cover, that one puppeteer worked two puppets and there is no one working rods to raise the arms.My guess would be that they had a long horizontal stick and had all the arms attatched with fishing line and someone lifted it from above.

 

[Mo Frackle]

soo they like green screened it and had one puppeteer do two puppets and someone lift the hands up?

Back then, no, green screen wasn't around yet. It was shot in front of a 'normal' wall, with the lighting adjusted to give the color effect in the background. On another note, as you said, basically it was shot with somebody doing two puppets at once. Don't know exactly how the arms moved, but they were probably radio controlled. Naturally, this had to be shot several times in order for all the puppets to make it into that one shot. Even on the cover of the OF MUPPETS AND MEN book, we're not seeing an entire row being shot. The final shot of several rows on top of each other required some special post production editing, which probably wasn't as easy to accomplish back then as it is now, but still not too much of a challenge.

As for the remade opening in "The Muppets", somehow i doubt that one performer was doing two characters at once. Rather, it appears that one puppet was shot individually, and all of the arches were edited together in post. You can usually tell when two characters are being performed by one puppeteer, because then the puppets tend to move with exact same actions.