Six String Orchestra continuity

[minor muppetz]

I recently noticed something about the song Six String Orchestra. During the song, at the beginning and end, Scooter is in his bedroom, in his normal clothes. Floyd, Janice, Zoot, and Animal appear in ghost images, in their regular clothes. Eventually, it cuts to another area, with Scooter and the band in flashier clothing.

I wonder if Scooter was fantasizing that happening, or if it was really supposed to be happening (in the Muppets reality). There never seems to be any television monitors on the Muppets stage, so it's not like it was part filmed, but in real life, I don't think somebody can change their clothes that fast on-stage, and I don't think the stage setting could change so quickly, either.

It would make sense if it was just in Scooter's imagination, but afte rthe song, Scooter, Janice, Floyd, and Zoot can be seen leaving the stage in their flashier outfits. It's a bit strange that Scooter wouldn't be wearing his regular clothes afterwards, since he wore his regular clothes at the end of the number.

A strange oddity, indeed.

 

[ZootyCutie]

I noticed it too. Plus, if you look pretty close at Floyd during the big scene, you can see that he has three legs!

 

[UncleMatt'sBack]

Also...was Jim Henson performing Janice during that number, seeing as how Dr. Teeth wasn't around?

 

[Beauregard]

Here's how I figure it happened: Scooter in his bedroom was pre-filmed and projected against net curtains in front of white curtains on the front of the stage. When the white curtains moved aside, we could see the band, etc through the nets, and then when the white curtains moved back, we saw Scooter in his room.

It could have worked that way.

 

[minor muppetz]

Here's how I figure it happened: Scooter in his bedroom was pre-filmed and projected against net curtains in front of white curtains on the front of the stage. When the white curtains moved aside, we could see the band, etc through the nets, and then when the white curtains moved back, we saw Scooter in his room.

It could have worked that way.

Yes, it could have worked that way, though Kermit was in front of the curtain before it raised, and it didn't look like the camera was moving up quickly before raising, so that would have had to have been one big monitor.

There have been a lot of times when Kermit introduced a skit, and instead of the curtain being raised before the skit, there is some sort of scene transition leading to the next skit. Sometimes, an image would zoom out to the audience. Sometimes the screen might slide to the next scene. Sometimes there might be a quick split in the middle. Too bad it wasn't done this way for Six String Orchestra.

 

[minor muppetz]

It seems like The Muppet Show has had a lot of sketches done that would be difficult to have been done on a stage, unless there were monitors. And there is no known camera crew on the show. But some examples of sketches that would normally be hard to perform live on-stage include:
*The beginning of the Alice in Wonderland play. I'm referring to the "I'm Falling" number, where Brooke Shields and others fall for a long period of time. It can be assumed that the characters have wires, keeping their balance, but the lenght of time it took for the characters to fall was a bit long, and the set seemed a bit too tall for the whole thing to be seen by the audience, unless the Mupept Theater didn't have an actual ceilling. And before that Alice was on a set before falling (unless that was meant to be a monitor image).
*Various underwater numbers, like Octopuses Garden and Friendship (the later of which features sceens that take place above and below water). Of course, I guess it's possible that the Mupets could get a life-size fish tank onto the stage.

Of course, in the Melissa Manchester episode, before the Tumbling Tumbleweed number Kermit acknowledges that it's done thanks to costly special effects (and the skiers still manage to get hurt).

 

[minor muppetz]

Also...was Jim Henson performing Janice during that number, seeing as how Dr. Teeth wasn't around?

I'm guessing that the song was written before The Mupet Show, and if that's true, Dr. Teeth's absense was probably a result of there being no lines about having a keyboard player in the six string orchestra. I know that more musiciasn were there after the setting switched. But anybody could have performed Janice then. I wonder if it might have been Steve Whitmire, since he liked to perform characters who played instruments (though he also could have performed one of the generic background musicians, or Nigel). Richard Hunt probably did perform the "ghost" image of Janice, since the "ghost" images had to have been filmed seperately from when Scooter was filmed.

 

[peyjenk]

I've often wondered about the continuity of it all. I mean, the audience routinely laughs at things going on backstage or in the star's dressing room, and there are times when there doesn't appear to be anything going on onstage at all. Not to mention when various guest stars burst out into song-and-dance numbers backstage.

Maybe The Muppet Show was a before-its-time documentary, a la The Office. Camera crews captured everything onstage and everything backstage and spliced it all together for television viewers to get a behind-the-scenes look of a live show.

 

[minor muppetz]

I've read that one epsiode features a quote by Waldorf, pointing out that there are moments where there is nothing on-stage. Of course, there have also been times when acts were mentioned but not seen by us, the TV audience. Sometimes Muppets would enter the stage, and then leave a few secodns later, without us seeing their act.

 

[CensoredAlso]

Right, well there's two sort of universes going on. There's the Muppet show the fictional theater audience is watching, and then there's the entire show, back stage included, that the real life TV audience (that's us) gets to see.

Like in the Steve Martin episode; in their fictional universe, there was no show that night, no audience. But at the end, Kermit looks at the screen saying, "And if you're still watching, we'll see you next time on The Muppet Show!" which is obviously directed to the real life TV audience.

Another interesting point, in the TV special The Fantastic Miss Piggy show, there is a live theater audience watching Piggy's acts. But there's also the control room antics that the TV audience gets to see. Kermit comes out to the stage at one point saying he knows how interesting it must be to see what's going on backstage. So in that case, it seems both the theater AND the TV audience are watching backstage. Lol