I have said this before, and I avoid saying it too much, but man, the JHH .... that show really hit me hard as a kid, I just saw it as being really abnormally unnecessarily amazing. Having seen it again recently, I have to concur that as a kid I was totally right. There's just something about having Jim introduce each episode with that amazing lion, and show you one of his puppets at the end of every episode ... just a perfect host, friendly, warm-hearted, and full of surprises.
I felt that despite the lack of a lot of great classic Muppets (especially the Electric Mayhem ... who might have returned had the show continued, since Zoot and I think Animal did make an appearance), this show was the direction the Muppets needed to go in, and haven't done since ... we should be technologically amazed by what the JHC has come up with now. There should be great songs, great edgy comedy (often courtesy of Chris Langham), and, yes, creature shop stuff. In the JHH, the Muppets and the creature shop became one. You could tell that the Muppet designs were becoming cooler all the time ... you wouldn't see a Muppet like, say, Leon or Digit today. Leon looks like something out of Dinosaurs and has a polished look to him ... since Henson's passing, new Muppets tend to look rather uninspired and VERY Sesame Street. Not to dis the Sesame Street designs, but that was the first Muppet show, the design style is very simple and appealing to the kid in us, and a Muppet show for all ages just needs to have more "advanced" Muppets in it ... Henson understood this, and you can see that sort of evolution in the Muppets created for the Muppet show ... A puppet like Waldorf is much more complex in sculpture than a "Sesame Street" like design like Johnny Fiama or the Elvis muppets. In the JHH, there was a conscious desire to do all types of Muppets .... I feel the JHH nevertheless had a much more consistent style of puppet than MT, and certainly a better quality of puppet.
And yes, I love the characters. Dave Goelz is a very funny man and Digit is one of his classic characters, one of those Muppets that you can really say that everything he says and does is funny. Bean Bunny also came into his own, he's treated as this famous cute character who everyone hates but who they can't do the show without because he's commercial ... and Bean lords his cuteness over them ... and you get the sense that Bean is sort of a jerk. The combination is just quite funny. Leon and Gonzo made a nice team, since Leon was a perpetual bachelor with a real interest in women but who apparently shared (or didn't mind) Gonzo's love for chickens. There is something really strange about that. Irma seemed like a generic character, but I really took to her .... she had a Scooter like quality working behind the scenes but you knew she worked hard and was sort of in charge, and that the show was in good hands with her and Kermit. I liked Lindbergh a lot, he's basically a replacement for Beauregard, and could have been developed more. A human tends to be ignored on such shows too, but the very funny Chris Langham can't be ignored. The guest stars were also often ignored and abused, and sometimes used very minimally, only to the extent that they would be entertaining, and leave before their welcome wore out. We always got exactly as much of the guest star as we would want. I felt that the song numbers were of a generally higher quality (look at "The Music Keeps Rolling Along" and "Sweet Vacation" -- very catchy stuff), the special effects were excellently used, and the whole enterprise had a feel of quality and experimentation.
What was important about the JHH was that it DIDN'T look backward. It looked forward, presenting a vision of the Muppets as waaaay ahead of their time and at the top of technology ... as indeed the Henson company was at that time. It was not an anachronism, but the tops in Hollywood creature effects, doing the biggest movies.
With the JHH, a lot of people were really tuning in for the second half ... hoping to see another installment of The Storyteller. To enter that amazing fantasy world Henson had created. Of course you're blown away by the first half too, seeing that the Muppets had, at that point, aged incredibly well and maintained that cutting-edge quality.
The Muppets always changed with the times .... they were a side act for Ed Sullivan and Jimmy Dean, and worked well as that .... then became the main event without forgetting that their job was to provide cutting-edge entertainment .... let's face it, what's more visually striking and entertaining ... the ordinary Sonny and Cher variety shows of the 70s, or the Muppet Show? Adults watched the show with their kids, sure, but they couldn't believe what they were seeing either some episodes.
There are uses of today's technology in the VMMCM, but not 1/1000000th of what we would see if Henson were still alive I feel ..... the JHC is not innovating in any way, just trying not to sully the reputation of some beloved characters. They have done very little in recent Muppet projects that is innovative ... and if they did, they might be criticized for it, sure, but this is the problem.
With Jim's passing, the day of puppets being cutting edge special effects died too. And the warmth that had previously gone into puppeteering, the love, died. Today's Muppets are an embattled species, and no amount of merchandising and passable Holiday specials can change that.
People like a character like Pepe because he's fresh and genuinely funny. He's not based on the past of anything, he's just a puppet that Bill is enjoying puppeteering. There was a time when all the Muppets were like that.
Yes, I would rather see Steve Whitmire do Bean Bunny than do Kermit. I'm sorry. I think it's important that someone do Kermit, but not at the expense of characters that he created himself and can do whatever the **** he wants with. (Although I could care less if he did, say, Flash again.) Dave Goelz' Gonzo has changed a LOT over time, and the top-of-his-form Gonzo in MCC is different from the excited, easily entertained, and slightly oblivious Gonzo of JHH, who is VERY different from the shy, depressive, ambitious but self-loathing and very quiet Gonzo of the original Muppet Shows .... a wisp of a weirdo who eventually got enough confidence to become the eccentric geek we know and love today.
Maybe I'm fooled by Eric Jacobson as Fozzie and Piggy because he feels unrestrained and having fun .... Of course, the Fozzie and Piggy Muppets are showcase Muppets, well-designed classic complex characters that stand the test of time.
Sure, nostalgia is good, but my problem with something like VMMCM is that in context of the Muppet Show Muppets I find that nostalgia doesn't last long at all. It seems to do almost nothing actually. Because maybe for me the Muppets are about seeing something you don't see anywhere else. And that's different from seeing something you don't see anywhere else, but that you've seen before.
Writing solves a lot of this, and I feel the writing in something like Muppet Treasure Island was leaps and bounds ahead of most of VMMCM. For purposes of humor anyway. As for visual style, MCC probably came a lot closer to what Henson would have done with the material, with different kinds of Muppets presented in different ways.
Farscape was the last recourse for the fantasy worlds I love so much, and that's going going gone now .... may something else of quality come along.
People dis Crank Yankers a lot on this forum, and sure it's a bad show, but the main reason it's so easy to dis it is because the puppets suck.
I hope to see an original and consistent style develop in the next Muppet tv series, with characters from all stages of the Muppets' history, and new characters who can come into the foreground, are well designed and original and don't look like any other Muppet, and are FUNNY, played by funny people.
We shall see.
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