Little things we've noticed

[LittleJerry92]

@minor muppetz Pretty much all of season 2 but “MAD!” were pre-cursor hippie skits (Mad marked what the band would become even if they didn’t have a band name yet until the record came about). “Proud” was taped in season 4 (I used to think it was three myself) and “Sad” was taped in season 5.

 

[minor muppetz]

The first time Little Jerry and the Monotones were referred to by name was in a season two episode where somebody buys a Little Jerry and the Monotones album. I don't think the wiki has images from that episode yet, who knows if a cover image is shown or if it's a different Little Jerry and the Monotones pictured.

With them primarily only being used in musical numbers, they were not referred to directly by name on the show until season 19, before which the name was in album credits (and they introduce themselves in the album-only "Four"). Wait, I think Big Jeffie does refer to Little Jerry by name in "Sad", but the group name isn't mentioned. I wonder how long it took before Chris and the Alphabeats were referred to by name in dialogue on the show.

Hmm, now I feel like Little Jerry and Little Chrissy would have been good interview subjects for Leslie Mostly. Hipsters versus a square.

 

[LittleJerry92]

I doubt it shows the puppet band on the record, but there’s no way of finding out until we get images for that episode one day (at most I imagine it probably just being a generic record).

 

[minor muppetz]

I doubt it shows the puppet band on the record, but there’s no way of finding out until we get images for that episode one day (at most I imagine it probably just being a generic record).

Yeah, at first I didn't think they'd show a record image, then I heard some people bring up the possibility somewhere.

Now I wonder if they were named in the script for the first appearance of Mad (assuming the first script doesn't just list the song title with no scripted info, which I've heard was the case with some Muppet bits).

 

[minor muppetz]

One thing that’s hit me: Little Jerry never appeared without the group (even if it’s less members and some are different), while The Monotones (the regular, classic members) appeared without him once, and Big Jeffie made many solo appearances (and therefore, Big Jeffie has made more appearances than Little Jerry has).

 

[LittleJerry92]

To be honest I kind of wish Jerry had appeared with the Monotones in “Mary Had a Bicycle” (especially given his performer was one of the back-up vocals anyway), but I can understand why having a quartet of back-up singers might have been too much in one shot.

 

[minor muppetz]

To be honest I kind of wish Jerry had appeared with the Monotones in “Mary Had a Bicycle” (especially given his performer was one of the back-up vocals anyway), but I can understand why having a quartet of back-up singers might have been too much in one shot.

Maybe he could have been there in place of the lavender member. Don't know why I'm thinking that one should be absent if any should have.

In one group page, somebody pointed out that the wiki page for season 10 mentions that among the new characters that seasons is a physically disabled Muppet. I wonder who this character was. Somebody in comments said they went through all the guides and found nothing on such a character. Could the character have been dropped before filming? I also wonder if maybe the source for that was referring to Two-Headed Monster. I never think of his two heads as him being disabled, but some might.

 

[CoolGuy1013]

Getting older is realizing that the writing for this cartoon:

Is very similar to Cheech and Chong’s infamous “Dave’s Not Here” routine.

 

[minor muppetz]

There are a lot of rare segments that the only reason images came to Muppet Wiki in the first place (at least before the arrival of trusted sources) is because somebody had a foreign dub copy of the segment. For years I was thinking many of these rarities - including segments with such characters as Professor Hastings, Leslie Mostly, Deena and Pearl, and Michael Earl's Forgetful Jones (man, quite a few of these were rare season 12 characters) - were still frequently airing internationally.

But now it hits me that maybe they weren't shown so often after the characters were dropped from the English show. It's possible those were just shown overseas during the year that the characters were active over here, maybe a year later, and fans just happened to have copies of foreign episodes with those characters (though the wiki page for Professor Hastings says that, at least at the time, segments with him continued to air frequently in Europe). I haven't really paid full attention to the foreign show guides like I do with domestic Sesame Street guides, and I think it took a few years before the wiki even started creating guides for international episodes.

And maybe I was right all along, maybe rare characters like Leslie Mostly or Deena and Pearl continue to air in international dubs to this day, or maybe they were just shown internationally around 1980-1981 like they were here and somebody was just lucky enough to tape the episodes.

 

[minor muppetz]

I kind of feel like the first rendition of The People in Your Neighborhood, with a fireman and a postman, is the signature, definitive, "go to" version of the segment, and yet at the same time, it seems like it's not.

It is the version they often take clips from when representing it in a retrospective, and it is the version used on the many albums (even if it's completely rerecorded). But then again, the full clip doesn't get a lot of exposure. It's only been released on home video once, while many of the other versions have officially been uploaded online (I won't get into how often episodes with it or others have been available). The rendition of the song in the 50th anniversary special also reflected a different version, the one with the grocer and doctor, even having the same opening dialogue.

But yet as I've checked "what links here" on the wiki, the first version has aired in more episodes than any of the others, with 18 appearances, though that's not too much more than the second-most-aired one (which I think aired in 16 episodes, I forget which one it is). Many People in Your Neighborhood segments from about the first three seasons aired in around 15 episodes each, while many of the segments from the late-1970s and early-1980s only aired around five or six times (there is one that I saw aired in only two episodes, I forget which one).

Of the four from the first season, the one with the dentist and bus driver aired in the least amount of episodes (I think five or six), while the rest aired in more than ten episodes each. And yet the dentist/bus driver remake from the 1980s is the '80s People in Your Neighborhood segment to appear in the most episodes for the '80s (I forget how many episodes, but it's the only one from the 1980s to air in a double digit number of episodes). That was the second to last classic insert of the segment, I wonder if the fact that they remade one with the same two jobs is what led them to stop doing new versions of the song (though the previous ones were hardly shown after), or if they were considering remaking older ones to avoid showing the adults when they were younger (which they obviously didn't, though this one aired until season 25).